Beardsley as Social Critic

Book Reviews (one wonders how famous the last line of "Two Loves"—"I am the love that dare not speak its name"—would be had it not been quoted at Wilde's trial and had Wilde's defense of the love not been so eloquent). In the brief afterword on Douglas's poetic prowess, the editor addresses an issue raised by Douglas in his Without Apology (1938). Douglas contended that English poetry afforded two quite different lineages—that of Donne, Dryden, Byron, Browning, and Eliot, and that of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne. Douglas saw himself as belonging to the latter tradition, one marked by what the editor sums up as "grandiloquence" (in contrast to the "wit" of the other tradition). The editor claims, without persuasive argument, or even evidence, that Douglas partook of both traditions. I suppose one might make this claim of almost any English poet, but as I was rereading the poems, Douglas's debt to Keats and Swinburne was apparent in line after line, the affinity with Donne or Dryden perhaps evident in the commitment to form. No, if one likes Douglas's poetry, one likes it precisely because it is marked by the sensuality and dreamy vagueness that characterize so much of fin de siècle poetry. The extravagant imagery ("flame-flaked hair," flowers "stained with moonlight"), the preoccupation with the macabre (as in "The Image of Death"), the love-and-death equation (in the longish "When the King Comes He Is Welcome" Giovanni poisons himself and his lover Francisco and they die, aptly enough, in an impassioned embrace), the fascination with Catholicism ("Before a Crucifix"), unrequited love, homosexuality, bitterness cum melancholy—these are the characteristics of the aesthetes of the 1890s and these are what dominate all of Douglas's poems. If Douglas had a genuine talent as a poet, it was in making poems that so perfectly reflected his age: not originality in either form or thought. David B. Eakin University of Maryland Beardsley as Social Critic Linda Gertner Zatlin. Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics. New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. 200 pp. $79.00 THE FINAL DECADE of the present century has inspired a growing number of retrospective studies of the 1890s. New works by Elaine Showalter and Eva Kosofsky Sedgwick on the artists and cultural 473 ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 changes of the fin de siècle are joined by an equally insightful exploration of the parallels and influences in Linda Gertner Zatlin's new study of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). This new book, which concentrates on "Victorian sexual politics," is an immensely stimulating exploration of that "sense of an ending" so evident in the decadent pictorial artistry of Beardsley. Within the brief span of only six years, Beardsley had established a reputation, perhaps the "strongest" of the 1890s, and his work— for all of its crystal elegance—became emblematic of the close of the nineteenth century. The sources, techniques, and influences of Beardsley's art have been extensively examined by other critics. The pervading thesis of Zatlin's new study is to see Beardsley as a social critic, a man keenly aware of the sexual politics of his time and the three or four decades preceding him. Beardsley had matured as an artist against a shifting background of what was permissible in art, literature, and life. By 1890, death had silenced many of the great Victorians—Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Browning. The great moralizing voices of Carlyle, Newman, and Ruskin were in eclipse. Within a few years, Tennyson and Lewis Carroll would relinquish their pens. The works of a new generation now fired public interest—Shaw, Conrad, Kipling. The modern world was being shaped. Gifted with an enormous talent in painting, music, and literature, Beardsley was a most daring artist of the time to display sexuality in an aura of openness and pleasure. Indeed, he was one of the major artists who provoked a palpable shift in taste in regards to sexual matter, a shift which was itself one of the distinguishing marks of the 1890s. New definitions of decent and indecent were being formulated by literary and pictorial artists, and it was no wonder that the...