X
THE END
1898
Yetthe cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man with relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” It kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine again, and his hopes were reborn.
So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.
In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed—a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost heart—he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any further to clamber out of it.
pierrotTHE DEATH OF PIERROT“As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of Bergamo; whither, we know not.”
THE DEATH OF PIERROT
“As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of Bergamo; whither, we know not.”
The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his designs and decorations for theVolpone, and remembering the pushingforward of theProspectusthat he had urged on the publisher, he had fallen back on the pencil—as the elaborately drawnInitialletters show—for each of the scenes inVolpone, employing pencil with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period ofThe Savoyhe had come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the fragile body failed him—at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his bloodless fingers—his work was done.
As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to fulfil—even had he had the will—for “the written word remains,” and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven:
Jesus is our Lord & JudgeDear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy—all obscene drawings.Aubrey Beardsley.In my death agony.
Jesus is our Lord & Judge
Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy—all obscene drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley.In my death agony.
But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous achievement—and he did so without stooping to any attempt at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth—and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes—indeed, almost before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship.
On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity.The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the Cross—it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.”
Hail and Farewell!
valeAVE ATQVE VALE
AVE ATQVE VALE