Claude’s view of landscape is false to nature in that it is entirely anthropocentric. His trees exist for pleasant shade; his peasants to give us the illusion of pastoral life, not to toil for a living. His world is not to be lived in, only to be looked at in a mood of pleasing melancholy or suave reverie. It is, therefore, as true to one aspect of human desire as it is false to the facts of life. It may be admitted that this is not the finest kind of art--it is the art of a self-centred and refined luxury which looks on nature as a garden to its own pleasure-house--but few will deny its genial and moderating charm, and few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for that Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us.
Messrs. Carfax have on view the most complete collection of Beardsley’s drawings that has hitherto been shown. The development of his precocious and eccentric genius can here be studied in typical examples. We have the drawings of his childhood--drawings inspired by Dicky Doyle and Robida, but in which is already apparent his proclivity to the expression of moral depravity. We pass at a leap from these crude and artistically feeble works to the astonishing “Siegfried,” in which he is already a complete and assured master of an entirely personal style.
From this time onwards, for the remaining six years of his life, Beardsley kept on producing with the fertility of those artists whom the presage of an early death stimulates to a desperate activity. His style was constantly changing in accidentals, but always the same in essentials. He was a confirmed eclectic, borrowing from all ages and all countries. And true eclectic and genuine artist as he was, he converted all his borrowings to his own purposes. It mattered nothing what he fed on; the strange and perverse economy of his nature converted the food into a poison. His line is based upon that of Antonio Pollajuolo. Again and again in his drawings of the nude we see how carefully he must have copied that master of structural and nervous line. But he uses it for something quite other than its original purpose; he converts it from a line expressive of muscular tension and virile force into one expressive of corruption and decay. Mantegna, too, was a favourite with Beardsley, who seems to have had a kind of craving for the opposites to his own predominant qualities; and from Mantegna, the most austere of Italians, he derived again and again motives for his illustrations of depravity. The eighteenth century, China, Japan, even the purest Greek art, were all pressed into his service; the only thing he could do nothing with was nature itself. Here he was entirely at a loss, and whenever he yielded to the pressure of contemporary fashions and attempted to record impressions of things seen, as in the topical illustrations of plays which he contributed to the _Pall Mall Magazine_, he failed to be even mediocre. Everything that was to be in the least expressive had to come entirely from within, from the nightmares of his own imagination.