The Fall and Rise of Aubrey Beardsley



(Aubrey Beardsley)

About a year before his death at a very young age from tuberculosis, Aubrey Beardsley embraced Catholicism.  Some cynics presuppose that this wasn’t a true conversion, but Beardsley’s own correspondence indicates otherwise.

Arthur Symons, son of a Wesleyan minister and a poet who wound up making his own form of Amends, recalled an 1895

conversation with Beardsley.  Idle Speculations presents this 1966 recollection from Symons about one of Beardsley’s

disclosures during that long-ago conversation:  And he told me then a singular dream or vision which he had had when a child, waking up at night in the moonlight and seeing a great crucifix, with a bleeding Christ, falling off the wall, where certainly there was not, and had never been, any crucifix.

It took quite a while for Beardsley to come back full circle to that childhood connection.  During the interim, he had developed quite the reputation for leading a decadent life.  Wikipedia quotes him as saying during this period:  I have one aim – the grotesque.  If I am not grotesque I am nothing.  This “grotesqueness” was especially expressed within his artwork.  After his conversion to Catholicism, he begged his publisher to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings… by all that is holy all obscene drawings.”  This heartfelt request was ignored.

Idle Speculations points out that French poet Marc-Andre Raffalovich, who chose to become a Dominican brother, was a major influence in what Beardsley referred to as “the most important step in my life.”  In a series of letters to Raffalovich, Beardsley expressed his feelings about this step:  I feel now, dear Andre, like someone who has been standing waiting on the doorstep of a house upon a cold day, & who cannot make up his mind to knock for a long while.  At last the door is thrown open & all the warmth of kind hospitality makes glad the frozen traveller…

As it is also written:  “Knock and it shall be open.”

No matter what has gone before…

Resources

http://books.google.com/books?id=RZ1AAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=Aubrey+Beardsley+religion&source=bl&ots=hC9ZuUrkQh&sig=-Tu-L3HKzMvkfeQCVPPztXNXlMI&hl=en&ei=ZjNNToCRHYXw0gGjvIH8Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&sqi=2&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://idlespeculations-terryprest.blogspot.com/2009/08/religious-sensibility-of-beardsley.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Beardsley

http://www.poemhunter.com/arthur-symons/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc-Andr%C3%A9_Raffalovich

Copyright August 21, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved