Beardsley had one great talent apart from the mere mastery of line. Over-civilised himself, he was unequalled in suggesting the tragedy of over-civilisation, though quite possibly he did not feel it. He could portray with remorseless truth, though in a convention as strict as that of an old Chinese artist, certain types of modern men and women. He is the limner of the pinched soul, the pampered body, the craving without appetite, the animalism without animal health. At Brighton, even as a boy, he must have studied with close attention those types which are easily lost in a great city, but are isolated at the seaside as on a lighted stage, and, dominating nature as actors do their scenic properties, give the impression that large fortunes and small passions are the stuff life is made of. To Beardsley the greater light and the less only existed as astronomical facts of minor interest; his real element was the arc-light of the street or the shaded glow of the interior. There is a sense of joyless depravity about his men and women, as if vice were a routine, and even a solemn social ritual; and his illustrations of the “Morte d’Arthur” are made ridiculous by the perpetual recurrence of the haggard eyes and small, evil features of people Beardsley had studied in a Piccadilly restaurant or the Casino at Dieppe. Anachronism, so often the joy and life of literature, is no necessary fault in the decorative artist, and nobody need quarrel with Beardsley for taking liberties with the gowning of Isolde. But it was an anachronism without excuse to swap souls as well as dresses. The chief fault was with those who commissioned him to do work for which he was unfitted. An artist who really loved the domes and minarets of the Brighton Pavilion should have been manifestly out of the running for the illustration of the heroic.
Those who think of genius as a form of disease of course connect the radical unhealth which is the stamp of everything Beardsley did with the physical malady which claimed him as an early victim, forgetting that many men with much the same peculiarities have lived to a good old age with no trouble more serious than an occasional indigestion. If he were an invalid, Beardsley, like Stevenson and Henley, was a virile one, and it may be doubted whether the lines of his career were predestined for him by his phthisical disposition. His disease was very far advanced before it left any considerable mark on his work, and it might almost be said that up to the end he was making progress. A more reasonable explanation of the peculiar flavour of his work is to be found in the reaction of a highly individual mind to an intellectual fashion. The fashion came from France, and was the result of the defeat of 1870; it was born on the other side of the Channel of a quite explicable despair, but adopted on this side of the Channel only for wantonness. After the terrible year, the French could no longer pretend to one sort of primacy in Europe, but a primacy of some kind seems to be necessary to the life of France, and so the French intellectuals pretended to a primacy in decay. The arguments, unconsciously worked out, seemed to run something like this: “We, the French, are the most civilised race of mankind. We have been beaten by healthy barbarians. We are doomed to be beaten again, some time or other, by the same healthy barbarians. Health is the quality of barbarism. Let us, therefore, make a boast of our unhealth, and if it does not exist let us make a false pretence of it. The tricolour is lowered. Let us raise the yellow flag of the lazar-house.” The yellow flag was accordingly unfurled, and the Yellow Book was the answering signal in England. Most that was unwholesome in England in the Nineties was French in origin, and most that was unwholesome in France sprang from a poisoned wound then only twenty years old. Beardsley was Beardsley chiefly because Bismarck was Bismarck.