Fate denied Beardsley any chance of outgrowing what may possibly have been after all only the mood of youthful cynicism. His health broke down definitely in the spring of 1896, and the next two years were a mournful, hopeless, and rather lonely struggle against increasing weakness. He took refuge for the winter at Bournemouth, where he lived in a house called “Muriel,” of which he wrote to a friend: “I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey.” A few months later his troubled spirit sought repose in the Roman Catholic Church; he made his first confession in March, 1897. Commenting somewhat earlier on a priest who was also a painter, he had remarked: “What a stumbling-block such pious men must find in the practice of their art”; now he observed of Pascal that “he understood that to become a Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as Mary Magdalene must sacrifice her beauty.” “The most important step of my life,” he said of his conversion. “I feel now like someone who has been standing waiting on the doorstep of a house upon a cold day and who cannot make up his mind to knock for a long while. At last the door is thrown open, and all the warmth of kind hospitality makes glad the frozen traveller.”
An improvement in his health enabled him to go abroad during the summer. But the approach of autumn gave him warning that hopes were illusory; at Mentone he was too ill to touch paper, and he died in the early spring of 1898. Six years had comprised the span of his artistic life, and two of them had been spent in continuous illness.
When any man declaims “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” it is not easy to avoid the suspicion that (whatever his passion for principle) he is pretty sure that the heavens will not fall. If the heavens did fall he would forget all about the fine “quillets of the law.” Any woman, according to Beckie Sharp, can be good on a sufficient income; and with men, also, the love of principle thrives best in comfortable surroundings. The true test of honesty is not whether a man will resign an Under-Secretaryship rather than give his vote for a measure he disapproves: he may be rather tired of being an Under-Secretary. The true test is whether he will pay a bill when he has to go without a week’s dinners to do it. There are no doubt men who pass that test; they should be honoured, though by the nature of things they seldom are: it is not that kind of principle which wins fame or money. The kind of sacrifice to principle which wins reverence is that which is often really not much sacrifice at all. We applaud a man for being specially and splendidly honest when the fact is only that he can afford to be unusually stubborn.