Beardsley: Transcending the Decade

ELT 39:4 1996 the pen (the style, the genius)," Pater regenerates himself in the maskmirror of his art. Repositioned within "a fragment of perfect expression," those "personal , domestic, social, economic, and political conditions" are the alphabet by which Pater's life was spelled—yet the diction and syntax ofthat life now belong wholly to his writings. He will not offer his doings for interpretation, only his text in which "words should be indeed things." Pater relished the sensuous aspects of composition as much as any experience—the ribbed paper oîThe Renaissance (Symons, too, retained "the feel of it still in my fingers" nearly a half century later); the elegant black ink on those quarto sheets he purchased at the stationers; the rhythms of his prose based on the cadences of a harmonious voice. Small wonder that the best chapter is the penultimate one on Pater's style in which Donoghue's analysis rises to its full potential. Here he looks at the way diction and syntax (or, rather, parataxis) reveal "a mind concentrated upon itself," moving "through phrases and clauses" toward new impressions. It may be that "the sadness in Pater's prose marks the occasions, numerous indeed, when he feels certain that he will never be seized by supreme belief, that he will merely move quietly from one uncertainty to another." But if belief is not possible, vision may yet be—because art exists. Gerald Monsman ------------------ University of Arizona Beardsley: Transcending the Decade Chris Snodgrass. Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 338 pp. $45.00 NOARTIST who limited the play of his genius to black-and-white combined elegance and irony better than Aubrey Beardsley, who died at twenty-five in 1898. Oscar Wilde, who had every reason to dislike him, observed of Beardsley when he learned of his passing, "Superbly premature as the flowering of his genius was, still he had [experienced] immense development, and had not sounded his last stop. There were great possibilities always in the cavern of his soul, and there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower." No one has ever said it better, yet we now devote book after book to explicating the phenomenon that was the boy from Brighton. 474 BOOK REVIEWS Beardsley's work astonishes, still, even more so when we realize that he encapsulated his ouevre within half a dozen years, accomplished half a dozen metamorphoses of style in that time, and in his immensely referential and literarily grounded art seems to have read and seen, and exploited, everything in pictures and in print within his amazing reach—and forgotten nothing. In the last generation an explosion of studies have elucidated his work and validated his mastery. Chris Snodgrass's new book (its subtitle is unfortunately restrictive) seems to this early entrant (1967) in the illumination of Beardsley to be, however flawed, the most valuable analysis of his extravagance and complexity to date. Happily for him, he has had some perceptive recent scholarship to synthesize, and he is quick to credit his sources, the most valuable of which may be Milly Heyd's Aubrey Beardsley: Symbol, Mask, and Self-Irony (1986). What makes Snodgrass's study particularly worthwhile is the remarkable precision of his descriptive language, and the placement of his hundredplus illustrations of Beardsley's work, most of them sharply reproduced, helpfully close to the words about them. Beardsley's contemporaries saw him more as illustrator than as autonomous artist. We can now envision his work as more often exploiting an illustration assignment while existing on its own terms frequently at odds with the text. His canonical masters were many, from Greek vase painters to Dürer and Watteau and on to Burne-Jones and Whistler, yet Beardsley assimilated them, Snodgrass demonstrates, rather than revering them. In utter physical and intellectual control of his ideas, despite the advancing tuberculosis that left him weak, feverish , and sometimes hemorrhaging and bedridden, he could make a few lines evoke subtle or trenchant paradoxes, or use black masses or exploit empty space. When appropriate he could fill...