Beardsley & Wagnerism

ELT 46 : 3 2003 Then, too, odd attributions crop up again and again in Wickens's effort to impose Bakhtin's terminology on Hardy's epic-drama. "The Spirit Sinister," Wickens says, "remembers that there would be no persons of distinction under the Empire if carnival had not made the transition from play to revolutionary upheaval in the streets of Paris." But in the speech Wickens quotes to support that contention, Sinister only points out that Napoleon and his bride's path cross the track of the tumbrels that carried the Bourbons to their deaths. The irony is worth noting; attempting to relate it to Bakhtin's "carnival" is more distracting than revelatory, and, indeed, Wickens's entire chapter titled "A Carnivalesque Picture of Carnival" would have been much more revealing if he had discussed the topsy-turvey features and queer juxtapositions of The Dynasts directly rather than with such persistent reference to Bakhtin. No one attempting any serious commentary on Hardy's The Dynasts can afford to neglect the scholarship of G. Glen Wickens's Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and the Many in The Dynasts. But many going through it will have occasion to grumble at how intrusive and unnecessary the manifold Bakhtin references can be and to regret those places where Wickens's fervent Bakhtinian approach led him to distortions that detract from what is in many respects a very fine work of scholarship. ROBERT SCHWEIK State University of New York College at Fredonia Beardsley & Wagnerism Emma Sutton. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 225 pp. $65.00 OVERPRICED AND UNDEREDITED, Emma Sutton's examination of Beardsley and Wagnerism reads like an unimproved dissertation . Aubrey Beardsley's twenty-odd drawings on Wagnerian and related themes, and his exotic, Wagner-inspired prose, are the focus of this study stretched out to book length. It is both illuminating and exasperating . Bernard Shaw is almost as significant to Sutton's opening pages as the brilliant young artist whom G.B.S. knew, and even wrote for, in the Nineties. (His "On Going to Church" was the opening essay in the first Savoy, in 1896.) Beardsley had very likely enjoyed Shaw's missionary Wagner critiques in The Star and The World, intended to entertain not 308 BOOK REVIEWS only music lovers, but readers who had a tin ear and could not read a score. Shaw's later book The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) would persuade many who thought Wagner was only a composer that the Ring cycle was as much polemic as music. Although Beardsley once avowed, "I would do anything and go anywhere —if I could—to hear Wagner's music," Sutton ignores the "if I could," clinging to a dubious claim made in a 1998 biography by Matthew Sturgis that "intriguingly, Beardsley made a brief, apparently unaccompanied , visit to Germany in August 1895, about which few details are known___" (Did he visit the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth?) But on 30 July 1895, the tubercular Beardsley confided to publisher Leonard Smithers from London that he had just experienced another "haemorrhage of the lungs." He was in no condition for solo—or any—travel, and when he could, he sought the healing sun just across the Channel in Dieppe. Just as there are many curious linguistic usages by Sutton, and lines of pretentious vagueness (at least one sentence without a subject), there are many questionable assumptions throughout. Early detractors flailing at a few satirically elongated Beardsley women, while ignoring the respectable presences of Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Kenneth Grahame, Harold Frederic, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, J. S. Sargent and W B. Yeats, might have castigated The Yellow Book in such terms as "a decadent mouthpiece." Yet that charge—and those words—are Sutton's. She should know better. Although an intemperate contemporary reviewer labeled The Yellow Book, of which Beardsley was the art editor, "the Oscar Wilde of periodicals ," even while quoting his foolishness Sutton concedes that Wilde was carefully kept from contributing, and indeed he would only appear in it as "George IV" in a sly caricature by Max Beerbohm conflating their excesses . That Beardsley...