He had considerable intellectual vanity, but it never relapsed into common conceit. He was generous in recognizing the talent and genius of others, but was singularly perverse in some of his utterances. He said once that only four of his contemporaries interested him. He bore with extraordinary patience the assertions of foolish persons who calmly asserted that both in America and England other artists had anticipated the peculiarities of his style and methods. I have seen the works of these Lambert Simnels and Perkin Warbecks, and they proved, one and all, crows in peacocks' feathers. Beardsley's style, nevertheless, influenced (unfortunately, I think) many excellent artists both younger and older than himself. In France his work was accepted without question: he was always gratified by the cordiality which greeted him in a country where he was more generally understood than in his own. He has illustrious precedents in Constable and Bonnington. Italy, Austria, and Germany recognized in him a master some time before his death. At Berlin his picture of Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress, is now in a place of honour in the Museum. A portrait study of himself is in the British Museum Print Room; a few examples are at South Kensington; but all his important work is in private collections; much of it is in America and Germany. In England, putting aside the notoriety and sensation caused by his posters and the Yellow Book, appreciation of his work has been confined rather to the few. He enjoyed, however, the friendship and intimacy of great numbers of people, shewing that his amiable qualities, no less than his art, received due recognition. His conversation was vehement and witty rather than humorous. He had a remarkable talent for mimicking, very rarely exercised. He loved argument, and supported theories for the sake of argument in the most convincing manner, leaving strangers with a totally wrong impression about himself, a deception to which he was much addicted. He possessed what is called an artificial manner, cultivated to an extent that might be mistaken for affectation. He never could sit still for very long, and he made use of gesture for emphasis. His peculiar gait has been very happily rendered in a portrait of him by Mr Walter Sickert; he also sat to M. Blanche, the well-known French portrait painter; the portrait by himself is tinged with caricature.
To estimate the art of Aubrey Beardsley is not difficult. That his drawings must excite discussion at all times is only a proof of their lasting worth. They can never be dismissed with unkindly comment, nor shelved into the limbo of art criticism which waits for many blameless and depressing productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among artists and men of letters no less than with that great inartistic body, "the art-loving public," Aubrey Beardsley's name will always call forth wonder, admiration, speculation, and contempt. It should be conceded, however, that his work cannot appeal to everyone; and that many who have the highest perception of the beautiful see only the repulsive and unwholesome in the troubled, exotic expression of his genius. Fortunately, no reputation in art or letters rests on the verdict of majorities—it is the opinion of the few which finally triumphs. Artists and critics have already dwelt on the beauty of Aubrey Beardsley's line, which in his early work too often resolved itself into mere caligraphy; but the mature and perfect illustrations to "Salomé" and "The Rape of the Lock" evince a mastery unsurpassed by any artist in any age or country. No one ever carried a simple line to its inevitable end with such sureness and firmness of purpose. And this is one of the lessons which even an accomplished draughtsman may learn from his drawings, in any age when scraggy execution masquerades under impressionism. Aubrey Beardsley did not shirk a difficulty by leaving lines to the imagination of critics, who might enlarge on the reticence of his medium. Art cant and studio jargon do not explain his work. It is really only the presence or absence of beauty in his drawing, and his wonderful powers of technique which need trouble his admirers or detractors. Nor are we confronted with any conjecture as to what Aubrey Beardsley might have done—he has left a series of achievements. While his early death caused deep sorrow among his personal friends, there need be no sorrow for an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." Old age is no more a necessary complement to the realization of genius than premature death. Within six years, after passing through all the imitative stages of probation, he produced masterpieces he might have repeated but never surpassed. His style would have changed. He was too receptive and too restless to acquiesce in a single convention.
This is hardly the place to dwell on the great strides which black and white art made in the nineteenth century. It has been called the most modern of the arts; for the most finished drawings of the old masters were done with a view to serve as studies or designs to be transferred to canvas, metal, and wood, not for frames at an expensive dealer's. Vittore Pisano and Gentile Bellini would hardly have dared to mount their delightful studies and offer them as pictures to the critics and patrons of their day. At all events it were safer to say, that appreciation of a drawing for itself, without relation to the book or page it was intended to adorn or destroy, is comparatively modern. It is necessary to keep this in mind, because the suitability of Beardsley's work to the books he embellished was often accidental. His designs must be judged independently, as they were conceived, without any view of interpreting or even illustrating a particular author. He was too subjective to be a mere illustrator. Profoundly interested in literature for the purposes of his art, he only extracted from it whatever was suggestive as pattern; he never professed to interpret for dull people, unable to understand what they read, any more than the mediæval illuminator and carver of grotesques attempted to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith on the borders of missals and breviaries or the miserere seats of the choir. His art was, of course, intensely literary, to use the word hated of modern critics, but his expression of it was the legitimate literature of the artist, not the art peculiar to literature. He did not attempt, or certainly never succeeded in giving, pictorial revision to a work of literature in the sense that Blake has done for the book of Job, and Botticelli for the "Divine Comedy." While hardly satisfying those for whom any work of art guilty of "subject" becomes worthless, this immunity from the conventions of the illustrator will secure for Beardsley a larger share of esteem among artists pure and simple than has ever fallen to William Blake, who appeals more to men of letters than to the artist or virtuoso. The uncritical profess to find many terrible meanings in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings; and he will probably never be freed from the charge of symbolism. However morbid the sentiment in some of his work, and often there was a macabre, an unholy insistence on the less beautiful side of human things, the cabala of the symbolists was a sealed book to him. Such things were entirely foreign to his lucid and vigorous intelligence. There is hardly a drawing of his that does not explain itself; the commentator will search in vain for any hieroglyphic or symbolic intention. The hieratic archaism of his early work misled many people, for whom pre-Raphaelitism means presupposition. Of mysticism, that stumbling-block, he had none at all. "The Initiation of a Neophyte into the Black Art" would seem to contradict such a statement. The fantasy and grotesqueness of that lurid and haunting composition have nothing in common with the symbolism of black magic, the ritual of freemasonry, or all the fascinating magic to be found in the works of Eliphaz Levi. The sumptuous accessories in which he revelled had no other than a decorative intention, giving sometimes balance to a drawing, or conveying a literary suggestion necessary for its interpretation.
Artists are blamed for what they have not tried to do; or for the absence of qualities distinguishing the work of an entirely different order of intellect; for their indifference to the observations of others. As who should ask from Reynolds a faithful reproduction of textile fabrics; and from Carlo Crivelli the natural phenomena of nature we expect from Turner and Constable? For nature as it should be, in the works of Corot and Turner; for nature made easy, in modern English landscape; for nature without tears, in the impressionist fashion, or as popularly viewed through the camera, Aubrey Beardsley had no feeling. He was frankly indifferent to picturesque peasants, the beauties of "lovely spots," either in England or France. A devout Catholic, the ringing of the Angelus did not lure him to present fields of mangel-wurzels in an evening haze. The treatment of nature in the larger and truer sense of the word had little attraction for him; he never tried, therefore, to represent air, atmosphere, and light, as many clever modern artists have done in black and white! Though Claude, that master of light and shadow, was a landscape painter who really interested him. Beardsley's landscape, therefore, is formal, primitive, conventional; a breath of air hardly shakes the delicate leaves of the straight poplars and willows that grow by his serpentine streams. The great cliffs, leaning down in promontories to the sea, have that unreal, architectural appearance so remarkable in the West of Cornwall, a place he had never visited. Yet his love and observation of flowers, trees, and gardens are very striking in the drawings for the "Morte d'Arthur" and the Savoy Magazine, but it is the nature of the landscape gardener, not the landscape painter. There is some truth in the half-playful, half-unfriendly criticism, that his pictures were a form of romantic map-making. Future experts, however, may be trusted to deal with absence of chiaroscuro, values, tones, and the rest. In only one of his drawings, conceived, curiously enough, in the manner of Burne-Jones (an unlikely model), is there anything approaching what is usually termed atmosphere. Eliminating, therefore, all that must not be expected from his art—mere illustration, realism, symbolism and naturalism—in what, may be asked, does his supreme achievement consist? He has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before; whether hung on the wall, reproduced in a book, or concealed in a museum, they remain among the most precious and exquisite works in the art of the nineteenth century, resembling the designs of William Blake only—in that they must be hated, misunderstood, and neglected, ere they are recognized as works of a master. With more simple materials than those employed by the fathers of black and white art, Beardsley has left memorials no less wonderful than those of the Greek vase-painters, so highly prized by artists and archæologists alike, but no less difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate and understand.