Aubrey Beardsley
AUBREY BEARDSLEY died fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-six. He was already a legendary figure before his death, and the amazing success' with which his drawings epitomised the 'nineties has ensured the perpetuation of his legend. Mr. R. A. Walker, the editor, of the present volume, has done much in the intervening period to provide a solid background for it. He has been indefatigable in his publica- tion of hitherto unpublished drawings and in the unearthing of hitherto buried facts. His greatest' single contribution has no doubt been the extremely important volume of Beardsley's Letters to Smithers, which he published in 1937. And now, for the fiftieth anniversary of Beardsley's death, he has compiled and intro- duced a handsome book of almost 15o reproductions, covering (with the exception of juvenilia and the Morte d'Arthur drawings) practi- cally the whole of Beardsley's oeuvre. The series opens with a selection of the illustrations for Wilde's Salome including some which were suppressed, or altered- in publication ; it includes a generous quantity of individual drawings from The Yellow Book and The Savoy and the majority of the illustrations to The Rape of the Lock and Volpone ; as well as these there is a large number of book- plates, cover-designs, chapter-headings and other more fugitive pieces. Superficially Beardsley's art offers few mysteries. His quality of line and the immensely skilful disposition of his masses have always been admired, though Roger Fry (in an article which acts as a healthy corrective to some of the more exaggerated praises by his adulators) criticised the former for an essential meanness, a mesquinerie. And there seems to be some truth in this criticism. It is in fact the combination of an extreme of elegance in performance with the eroticism or even depravity of his subject-matter that gives to his work its very individual quality ; the combination that reached its logical conclusion in the privately printed illustrations to Lysistrata. One has dbly to have seen the Lysistrata drawings to realise that nearly everything else that he did was merely a cloak and a disguise for his trde-intentions. However, in spite of an over- refinement which amounts at times to littleness, a great deal remains which must continue to excite admiration. Beardsley's astonishing fertility of invention and his intense seriousness, as well as the means which he adopted to express them, win for him a genuine, if minor, status. His virtues and his vices were essentially those of his age.
Mr. Walker's introductory essay and his notes to the illustrations are a testimony to his devoted study. While not attempting a detailed biographical sketch, he says a very great deal that is important to an understanding of Beardsley's life. It is perhaps characteristic of Beardsley's art that one either likes it inordinately or not at all ; Mr. Walker is usually skilful in avoiding the hyperbole of the addict, though occasionally he is betrayed into a minor extravagance of praise which may raise the eyebrows of the less devout. On the whole, however, he is a balanced guide, and his book is the most compre- hensive introduction to its subject that is now in print. The frontis- piece reproduces a superb photograph of Beardsley by Frederick
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