The Incompleteness of Beardsley's Venus and Tannhäuser

24 THE INCOMPLETENESS OF,, BEARDSLEY'S VENUS AND TANNHAUSER By Geoffrey Harpham (University of California, Santa Barbara) The legend of Venus and Tannhäuser was one of the guiding myths of the aesthetic movement. After serving Wagner, Swinburne and Morris, the tradition expires with Beardsley's parody, The Story of Venus and Tannhauser.! The struggle, which had dominated so much late Victorian literature, between Venus and Christ for the hero's soul comes to no conclusion, and the hoped-for reconciliation is never realized. In fact, the central critical question concerning Beardsley's story would seem to be its incompleteness. In a recent discussion,2 Dr, Annette Lavers mentions difficulties with publishers and the outspokenness of the story, which made it unsuitable for any but private circulation; but the center of her essay is her contention that Beardsley, torn between his art and his soul, gradually came to feel that the two were perhaps incompatible, and abandoned the story which would have reconciled them. According to Dr. Lavers, Beardsley's "undoubted masochistic streak" led him to see himself as the hero of the story; he had internalized the debate to such an extent that the aesthetic problem dwindled in significance when compared to his own spiritual dilemma. This is a persuasive argument with which I do not argue. But to the extent that Dr. Lavers focusses on Beardsley's biography, she neglects the dynamics of the story itself, the inner signs of tension, and the progress toward resolution which Beardsley made in the act of writing. The primary reason for the incompleteness of the story seems to me to be not that Beardsley abandoned it arbitrarily, but that it was moving simultaneously in two directions, seeking an impossible resolution; as Beardsley progressed with his story - which occupied him more than half his creative life - he progressed in his journey into the bosom of the Church. It is impossible to tell what Arthur Symons meant when he said that the story "could never have been finished for it had never been really begun," but one possible sense is that Beardsley had not solved .the problems posed by the legend before he started. For in this spiritual self-portrait (in another version of the story, Tannhauser was called the "Abbé Aubrey"), Beardsley is both sinner and penitent. On one level, Tannhäuser's "sin" is merely conventional indulgence in sensualism. Beardsley's Jansenist inclinations3 led him, near the end of his life, to condemn this weakness in particular; he ordered, for example, the destruction of the Lysistrata drawings he considered obscene. And the structure of the Tannhäuser legend lent itself perfectly to an indictment of gross fleshliness. But if this was Tannhäuser's only offense against virtue, the story would scarcely deserve our attention. Two factors complicate the issue of Tannhäuser's corruption. First, the kind of sexuality portrayed on the Venusberg has a quality of childish 25 innocence, of, as Dr. Lavers points out, "polymorphous perversion," with a characteristically decadent yearning for the dawn and virginal things. The world of the Venusberg is not the world of de Sade; its inhabitants seem scarcely even conscious that the pleasures of the flesh are sinful.4 And Beardsley is at pains to stress this quality of reversion in Tannhäuser's retreat from the world. Following is the description of the entrance to the Venusberg ι The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Menzelius, Huge moths so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open, and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and rose up like hymns in the praise of Venus, for, from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures. ... He stepped into the shadowy corridor that ran into the bosom of the wan hill. . . , When Tannhäuser enters the Venusberg, he steps into the womb of an immense, supine female form. The second complicating...