Robert Baldwin Ross

“ To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age.’—Swinburne. ”

“ After you have discussed in the latest studio jargon its carpentry, valued the tones and toned the values, motive or theme must affect your appreciation of a picture, your desire, or the contrary, to possess it. That the artist is able to endow the unattractive, and woo you to surrender, I admit. Unless, however, you are a pro-Boer in art matters, and hold that Rembrandt and the Boer school (the greatest technicians who ever lived) are finer artists than Titian, you will find yourself preferring Gainsborough to Degas, and the unskilful Whistler to the more accomplished Edouard Manet. ”

“ A subject little understood, it belongs to the dim ways of criticism. There is no canon or school, and the artist is allowed to be wilful, untrammelled by rule or precedent. True grotesque is not the art either of primitives or decadents, but that of skilled and accomplished workmen who have reached the zenith of a peculiar convention, however confined and limited that convention [50] may be. Byzantine art, one of our links with the East, should some day furnish us with a key to a mystery which is now obscured by symbolists and students of serpent worship. ”

“ But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy. That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry ‘stinking fish,’ and observe that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, not being in Society, I am hardly in a position to judge; and the vices I know only at second-hand—from the preachers. Yet I see no outward signs of decay in Society; it dresses quite as well, in some ways better than, it did. Society eats as much, judging from the size and number of new restaurants; its patronises as usual the silliest plays in London, and buys in larger quantities than ever the idiotic novels provided for it. Have you ever been to a bazaar in aid of Our Dumb Friends’ League? Well, you see Society there, I can tell you ”

“ But why should I go over old history? Every one remembers the excitement that the discovery caused—the leaders in the Times and the Telegraph, the doubts of the sceptical, the enthusiasm of the archæologists, the jealousy of the Berlin authorities, the offers from all the libraries of Europe, the aspersions of the British Museum. ‘Why,’ asked indignant critics, ‘did Dr. Groschen offer his MS. to the authorities at Oxbridge?’ ‘Because Oxbridge had been the first to recognise his genius,’ was the crushing reply. ”

“ Those who cavil at his flawless technique ignore the specific quality of drawing characterising every great artist. The grammar of art exists only to be violated. Its rules can be learnt by anyone. Those who have no artistic perception invariably find fault with the perspective, just as those who cannot write a well-balanced sentence are always swift to detect faults in grammar or spelling. There are, of course, weaknesses in the extremities of Beardsley's figures—the hands and feet being interruptions rather than continuations of the limbs. ”

“ His knowledge of life, art, and literature seemed the result of instinct rather than study; for no one has ever discovered where he found the time or opportunity for assimilating all he did. Gregarious and sociable by nature, he was amusingly secretive about his methods and times of work. Like other industrious men, he never pretended to be busy or pressed for time. ”

“ I am led to these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. ‘A wish to épater le bourgeois,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons, ‘is a natural one.’ I do not think so; at least, in an artist. ”

“ L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man. You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past. Their pictures have been heard, not seen. All the younger artists are committing burglary on the old masters.
L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist.
L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen’s ‘Master Builder,’ the younger generation knocking at the door. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The anonymous author of Prejudices was no other than Quentin Burrage himself. Or rather not himself, but the other self of which neither I nor Curtis knew anything. He had been living a double existence. As a writer of trashy essays and verse, an incomplete sentimentalist surrounded by an admiring band of young ladies and gentlemen, he was not recognised as the able critic and the anonymous slater of the “Acropolis.”
‘When he first received his own book for review he recalled the words of Curtis. He must be honest, impartial, and just. No one knew better the faults of Prejudices. ”

“ Beardsley, who received recognition for this side of his genius, emphasized the grotesque to an extent that precluded any popularity among people who care only for the trivial and "pretty." In him it was allied to a mordant humour, a certain fescennine abstraction which sometimes offends: this, however, does not excuse the use of the word "eccentric," more misapplied than any word in the English language, except perhaps "grotesque" and "picturesque." All great art is eccentric to the conservative multitude. ”

“ Set for one moment beside some Rubens’ goddess a portrait by Mr. Sargent, and how would she be troubled by its beauty? Not in the slightest degree; because they are both similar but differing expressions of the same genius of painting. The centuries which separate them are historical conventions; and in Art, history does not count; æsthetically, time is of no consequence. But in the more objective art of caricature, history is of some import, and (as Mr. Beerbohm himself admitted about photographs) the man limned is of paramount importance. ”

“ While the science of Egyptology and its adepts command rather awe and wonder than sympathy from the uninitiated, who keep their praises for the more attractive study of Greek art. Yet some of us still turn with relief from the serene material masterpieces of Greece, soulless in their very realism and truth of expression, to the vague and happily unexplained monsters, the rigid gods and hieratic princes, who are given new names by each succeeding generation. ”

“ 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 [32] 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. ”

“ I was going to say Max Beerbohm. Some of his essays I put beside Lamb’s, and above Hazlitt’s. He has style; but then I am prejudiced because he is the only modern artist I really admire. He is a superb draughtsman and our only caricaturist. Then there is George Moore. I don’t care for his novels, but his essays are delightful. George Moore really counts. Few people know so little about art; yet how delightfully he writes about it. Everything comes to him as a surprise. He gives you the same sort of enjoyment as you would derive from hearing a nun preach on the sins of smart society. ”