Children Of The Age

( Originally Published 1922 )

I HAVE been reading the "Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley". A strange book, full of a sort of macabre interest. Not really a book, and yet peculiarly suggestive as an endof-the-century document. The soul of Beardsley here exposed with a kind of abnormal frankness that somehow recalls the very style of art by which he shocked and captured the world's regard. And the obvious purpose of it all, to show how he attained peace of the spirit and a quiet grave in his early manhood.

Poor Beardsley was bitten deep with the malady of his age—he ranks with the most interesting, though not, of course, the greatest of its victims. He died under thirty, and his name is known to thousands who know nothing of his art nor perhaps of any art whatever. To very many his name stands as a symbol of degeneracy. There is an intimate legend which attaints him with the scarlet sins of the newer hedonism. He is closely associated in the public mind with the most tragically disgraced literary man of modern times. In art he was a lawless genius, but a genius for all that, else the world would not have heard so much of him. The fact that counts is, that in a very brief life he did much striking work, and for a time, at least, gave his name to a school of imitators. Whether his artistic influence was for good or evil, does not matter in this view of him—let the professors haggle about that. What does matter is the fact and sum of his accomplishment, which justifies the continued interest in his name.

One naturally associates with Beardsley other ill-fated victims of the age, such as Maupassant, Bastien Lepage, Marie Bashkirtseff, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson,—to cite no more. They were all martyrs of their own talent, and martyrs also of that ravaging malady of the heart, that devouring casuistry, so peculiar to the last quarter of the Nineteenth century. We may be sure the disease was not confined to a few persons of extraordinary talent—of them we heard only because of their position in the public mind, and also because, as artists, they were bound to reveal their sufferings. Nay, we were the more keenly interested in their painful confessions, knowing that they spoke for many condemned to bear their agonies in silence. For the world will soon turn away from an isolated sufferer, as from a freak on the operating table—let it fear or recognize the disease for its own and it will never weary of seeing and hearing. This commonplace truth explains, I think, the great and continuing interest which the persons above named have excited.

All of these were unusually gifted, whether as artists or writers, and all strove to fulfill their talents with an almost suicidal fury of application. It seemed as if each had a prescience of early death and labored with fatal devotion that the world might not lose the fruit which was his to give. Generous sacrifice, which never fails to mark the rarest type of genius. Maupassant, perhaps the most gifted, the most terribly in earnest of all, went to work like a demoniac, pouring forth a whole literature of plays, poems, stories, romances, all in the space of ten years. Such fecundity, coupled with an artistic practice so admirable and a literary conscience so exacting, was perhaps never be-fore witnessed in the same writer. But the world presently learned a greater wonder still —that this unwearied artist had, in those ten years of apparently unremitting labor, lived a life that was not less full of romance, of passion, of variety and excitement than the creations of his brain. He had accomplished, as it were, a twofold suicide—in life and in art.

Maupassant died mad, his brain worn out by constant production, his heart torn by the malady of his age, which we can trace in so many pages of his work. But at least he died without disgrace, and in this respect his fate was far happier than that of Oscar Wilde, his contemporary and equal in genius, whose brilliant career closed in the darkest infamy. Poor Wilde sinned greatly no doubt,—the English courts settled that,—though his atonement was of a piece with his offending. The man dies, but the artist lives; and Wilde has work to his credit which will long survive the memory of his tragic shame.

In his last wretched days Wilde turned for consolation to the Catholic Church, which, with a deeper knowledge of human nature than her rivals can understand, still makes the worst sinner, if repentant, her peculiar care. Wilde be-came a Catholic, and he recorded that had he but done so years before, the world would not have been shocked by the story of his disgrace. This is less a truism than a confession. At any rate, one is not sorry to know that the poor, broken-hearted wretch found sanctuary at the last, and died in that divine hope which he has voiced in the noblest of his poems.

Like Wilde, Beardsley became a Catholic at the last when he was under sentence of death from consumption, and the "Letters" are addressed to a worthy Catholic priest who instructed him in the faith. Beardsley was of versatile talents, but he could not fairly be called a writer, and these letters were obviously written in perfect candor and with no thought of their ever meeting any eyes save the good priest's for which they were intended. All the same they are, as I have already said, curiously interesting, and they do not lack touches of genuine insight and emotion. The fantastic artist grew very sober in the shadow of death, and the riot of sensuality in which his genius had formerly delighted, was clean wiped from his brain. Wilde himself, in his last days of grace, might have penned this sentence:

"If Heine is the great warning, Pascal is the great example to all artists and thinkers. He understood that to become a Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as Magdalen sacrificed her beauty."

Strange language this, from an end-of-thecentury decadent, whose achievement in art was that he had carried to an extreme the suggestions of the wildest sensualism. But perhaps it was not the same Beardsley who made the pictures to "Salome" and who, through the most original, creative part of his career, worked like a man in the frenzy of satyriasis. No, it was not the same Beardsley—the sentence of premature death had turned Pan into a St. Anthony.

Not long after penning the words I have quoted, Beardsley made a sacrifice of his gifts and was received into the Catholic Church. 'Within a year thereafter he died. There is nothing to mar the moral of his conversion and edifying change of heart, except the reflection that, like so many other eleventh-hour penitents, he put off making a sacrifice of his gifts until he had no further use for them. And at last, one can't help thinking that if Beardsley had not made some fearfully immoral pictures, this book, with the highly moral story of his conversion, would not have been put before the world.

I have mentioned Ernest Dowson, a minor poet, the singer of a few exquisite songs. Less talented than the others, yet a true child of the age and stricken at the heart with the same malady, Dowson owes his fame more to the memorial written by his friend and brother poet, Arthur Symons, than to his own work, which in bulk is of the slightest. His short life was frightfully dissolute—Symons speaks of his drunkenness with a kind of awe. It was not an occasional over-indulgence with comrades of his own stamp, passing the bottle too often while their heads grew hot and their tongues loosened; it was not the solitary, sodden boozing to which many hopeless drunkards are addicted. For weeks at a stretch Dowson would give himself up to a debauch with the refuse of the London slums, and during that time he would seem an utterly different being, with scarcely a hint of his normal self. I wish some one would explain how this brutal sottishness can co-exist with the most delicate intellectual sensibility, with the poet-soul. We have had many explanations of the puzzle, and they have only one fault—they do not explain.

Dowson left us little, not because he drank much, but because he could rarely satisfy his own taste, which kept him as unhappy in a literary sense as his conscience did in a religious one. He wrote some fine sonnets to a young woman whose mother kept a cheap eating-house :—she married the waiter. The genius of Beardsley could alone have done justice to this grotesque anti-climax.

Like Beardsley, Dowson died a Catholic—he had barely passed thirty—but unlike Beardsley, he had expected to do so all his life, for he was born in the faith. Yet the faith had not saved him from le mal du siècle, nor had it kept him from the foul pit of debauchery. What it did—and this was much—was to give him a hope at the end.

Oh, sad children of the age, why wait so long before coming to your Mother, the ancient Church? She alone can heal your cruel wounds, self-inflicted, and bind up your bleeding hearts. She alone can succor you; she alone can give your troubled spirit rest and quiet those restless brains that would be asking, asking unto madness. See !—she has balsam and wine for your wayfaring in this world, and something that will fortify you for a longer journey. Hear ye the bells calling the happy faithful who have never known the hell of doubt; hear ye the organ pealing forth its jubilation over the Eternal Sacrifice ! Come into the great House of God, founded in the faith, strong with the strength, sanctified by the prayer, and warm with the hope of nineteen hundred years. Come, make here at the altar a sacrifice of your poor human gifts, and ex-change them for undying treasures. Painter, for your bits of canvas, the glories of heaven; poet, for your best rhyme the songs of the saved. Come, though it be not until the last hour—yet come, come, even then !

Whether the old Church can really give what she promises, I know not, but sure am I that men will go on believing to the end. For faith is ever more attractive than unfaith, and human nature craves a comfortable heaven; and, after all, it takes more courage to die in the new scientific theory of things than in the simple belief of the saints. And alas! the cold affirmations of science can not cure nor genius itself satisfy the stricken children of the age.