The Men of The Nineties

eriod, but also to the man whose creative power was probably the greatest factor of the period, to the boy who changed, as has been said, t

son why it is so convenient to begin with him is that he and not Oscar Wilde was in reality the great creative genius of the age. Besides his black-and-white work all the world knows, in which, as Father Gray says, 'His imaginative gifts never showed a sign of fatigue or exhaustion,'2 Beardsley practised in other arts. While a youngster at Brighton he promised to become a musical prodigy, and in later days Symons describes him at a Wagner concert gripping the seat with nervous intensity. He wrote some charming poetry, and as picturesque a fairy tale for grown-ups as has ever been written in Under the Hill. In an interview he states, probably slyly, he was at work in 1895 on a modern novel3; while in 1897 he said, 'Cazotte has inspire

rdsley, with an Introduction

tch, Apri

, an architect's office in London, and then, the next year, the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Office, where his fatal illness unfortunately first began to reveal its presence. Then came his seed-time up till 1891, when he did little but amateur theatricals. But at length Beardsley discovered himself. Many gentlemen have subsequently stated that they discovered him. It may be that they discovered him for themselves, but it was Beardsley and Beardsley alone who found himself. He certainly received, however, a large amount of appreciative sympathy when he started to draw a series of illustrations in his spare time for Congreve's Way of the World, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine. He was without art training in the usual sense, though he went of nights in 1892 to Professor Brown's night school at Westminster, but still kept to the

s are generally critical decorations, although it must never be forgotten he did attempt on more than one occasion a series of illustration pure and simple in, for example, his early scenes for Manon Lescaut, La Dame aux Camélias, and Madame Bovary, which are not altogether successful. He is perhaps at his best as the illustrating critic, which he is somewhat scornfully in Salomé, very happily in Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and triumphantly in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. It can be said of his work, rather sweepingly no doubt, but still truthfully, he began by decorating books with his Le Morte d'Arthur; he then tried illustrating them; but wound

le stippled lines in the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us the colour20 of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong; but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what knowledge went to their compositio

y, by Robert Ross

Nineties, by W. G. Blai

y of Sighs, at the Avenue Theatre, a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink dress22 standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its sc

first cover done by him. And all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of crowd

y in the least.23 He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy doomed to d

miss a "Wagner night" at Covent Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind.... He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.' In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was at home and happy. 'I am really happy,' he writes, 'in Paris.' And it was Be

th to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897), and A Second Book of Fifty Drawings (1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all25 the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, 'The Ascension of St. Rose of Lima'; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature Le Morte d'Arthu

'How Queen Guenever made her a Nun.' These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first26 invented by the artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause of muc

Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté

don, Bayros, and Rassenfosse-the type known as la loupeuse insatiable et cupide

ng Aristophanes and not Donnay's French version of the same. And never was he more cynical or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect; never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity. He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists Rowlandson28 and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil dying wanted to destroy his ?neids, and Beardsley in articulo mortis wrote 'to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bawdy drawings.' Yet he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his Erotische Kunst has to sa

fresh impetus and stimulate his method of expression' about the Salomé time was 'a series of visits

obably it implies some similar reflection to the statement that a dandy is over-dressed. I cannot, however, discover any such affectation in, for example, that charming poem, The Three Musicians, which recounts how the sop

nd, Picks out the strings and wood and wind Of an imaginary ban

chateau's roof that hotly shines Amid the dusky summer trees, And fan

; His fears soon melt in noonday heat. The tourist gives a furious glan

d verse. How Carrousel, the barber of Meridian Street, who could 'curl wit into

cunning quite, His ivor

ley can sketch a scene or character, as he used the fewest of lines in31 his drawings. This is even better

d walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn lightly over t

Abbé Fanfreluche at the p

iling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in particular, terrible little Pierrot

e Maupin or Le Roi Pausole are enchanting books. In its rococo style it surpasses the best rhythms of Wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of beautiful things, while Aubrey Beardsley suggests more than he says in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties. Indeed, the purple patches of Beardsley are as rich in fine phrases as any paragraphs of the period-as faisandée as any French writer has written. Elizabethan euphuists, Restoration conceit-makers, later Latins with all the rich byzantium flor? of brains like Apuleius, can make as finely-soundin

ed they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bu

s of Max Beerbohm's 'Toilet of Sabina' in The Perversion

elarde, Blanchemains, and Loureyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate fla?ons and frail cassolettes, and34 held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by Chateline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair, and Sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin. Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender glo

ke his black-and-white, though the embodiment of the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither of these things disturbed or changed th

, by G. Turquet-Milnes, pp. 277–280 (1913), there is a