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 archaeologists alike, but no less