Max Beerbohm

“ Though he died, a great artist, in his first youth, and at the very opening of life, as life is usually reckoned, Fate did not deal with him unfairly, did not take him, as she has taken others, with a kind of brutal treachery, before the fulfilment of all the work that was in him. From his early boyhood, Aubrey Beardsley had known quite well that his life would inevitably be a short one, and it was to this knowledge, partly, that we owe the great range of his achievement in art. ”

“ Fate had given him a prematurity of power that was in accurate ratio to the appointed brevity of his life, and, in the exercise and the development of his genius, Aubrey Beardsley never rested. He worked on always, with a kind of desperate courage, and with a degree of force and enthusiasm that is given only to the doomed man. ”

“ He had that absolute power of "living in the moment" which is given only to the doomed man—that kind of self-conscious happiness, the delight in still clinging to the thing whose worth you have only realised through the knowledge that it will soon be taken from you. ”

“ Yet, though he took such a keen delight in all manifestations of life, he himself, despite his energy and his high spirits, his frankness and thoughtfulness, seemed always rather remote, rather detached from ordinary conditions, a kind of independent spectator. He enjoyed life, but he was never wholly of it. ”

“ In the drawings for Le Morte d'Arthur he was still working, of course, under the influence of Sir Edward Burne-Jones—an influence which was oddly balanced by that of Japanese art in the drawings which he did, at this period, for his own pleasure, and of which "La Femme Incomprise" is a good example. The well-known drawings which, later, he made for The Yellow Book were, with their black masses and very fine lines, arrived at through simplification of the method in "La Femme Incomprise." These were the drawings that first excited the wrath of the general public and of the book-reviewers. ”

“ Their power isolates them. It is because they stand at a little distance that they can see so much. No man ever saw more than Beardsley. He was infinitely sensitive to the aspect of all things around him. And that, I think, was the basis of his genius. All the greatest fantastic art postulates the power to see things, unerringly, as they are.
↑ A very fully illustrated interview with Mr. Beardsley appeared in The Idler for March, 1897, to which the reader may be referred for additional information, together with many more of the artist's best illustrations— [Ed. Idler] . ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1956, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 66 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”