$ 6DWLULVW RI 9LFHV DQG )ROOLHV %HDUGVOH\ (OLRW DQG ,PDJHV RI 'HFDGHQW &DWKROLFLVP Martin Lockerd Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 37, Number 4, Summer 2014, pp. 143-165 (Article) 3XEOLVKHG E\ ,QGLDQD 8QLYHUVLW\ 3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/jml.2014.0037 For additional information about this article Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries (6 Nov 2014 18:03 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jml/summary/v037/37.4.lockerd.html
Transcript
“ t r t f V nd F ll : B rd l , l t, nd f D d nt th l
Martin Lockerd
Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 37, Number 4, Summer 2014,pp. 143-165 (Article)
P bl h d b nd n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/jml.2014.0037
For additional information about this article
Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries (6 Nov 2014 18:03 GMT)
“A Satirist of Vices and Follies”: Beardsley, Eliot, and Images of Decadent Catholicism
Martin LockerdThe University of Texas at Austin
Critics have begun to assess T.S. Eliot’s ties to Aestheticism and Decadence in recent years, after many decades of ignoring an important influence that Eliot himself had anx-iously disavowed; the influence of Beardsley, however, remains unexamined. The artistic enfant terrible of the 1890s — to art what Oscar Wilde was to letters — Beardsley made a reputation for himself with openly erotic black-and-white illustrations stylistically influenced by the Japanese prints then in vogue in Parisian artistic circles. A Catholic convert, Beardsley was “a satirist of vices and follies and extravagancies, but not, so to say, a sentimental student of them for their curiosity and fascination’s sake;” so wrote poet Lionel Johnson in a letter that Eliot later acquired for publication in the April 1925 issue of The Criterion. Much the same could be said of Eliot.
Keywords: T.S. Eliot / Aubrey Beardsley / Oscar Wilde / Decadence / Catholicism
W.B. Yeats was one of the first to acknowledge the essential relationship between British Decadence and Roman Catholicism. Thanks in large part to Yeats’s myth of the “tragic generation,” Decadence became
synonymous with an aesthetic of failure. His romantic version of literary history depicts decadent artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Lionel Johnson, and Ernest Dowson as men fated for early deaths preceded by lives dominated by profound excess and a self-torturing, medieval spirituality. In Yeats’s Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, their deaths become precursors to a less destructive and more serious literary period, later conceptualized under the protean term Modernism. Yeats tells his readers that, “In 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody joined the Catholic church, or if they did I have forgotten” (xi). Present-ing a telling caricature of the decadent artist as a mad, absinthe-swilling Roman Catholic, Yeats asserts that Decadence died even before Queen Victoria.
Following in Yeats’s footsteps, scholars of late nineteenth-century literature, including Ian Fletcher and R.K.R. Thornton, have acknowledged the tension at the heart of the decadent movement between competing desires for hedo-nistic excess and the spiritual sanctuary offered by Rome. Ellis Hanson’s study,
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Decadence and Catholicism (1997), examines this tension from the perspective of queer theory and insists that for artists such as J.K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, John Gray, Fredrick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), and others, the Church offered an “ideal stage for the subversive gestures of the . . . dandy” (6). According to Han-son, the Church was both the source of a complex “dialectic of shame and grace” (29), and “a beautiful and erotic work of art, a thing jeweled over like the tortoise that expires under the weight of its own gem-encrusted carapace in À Rebours” (6). To put it another way, the Church provided a framework for understanding and interpreting the shame of internalized homophobia and did so beautifully. Whether discussing Wilde’s Dorian Gray or Beardsley’s “The Ascension of Saint Rose of Lima,” Hanson’s primary concern is with mapping the myriad ways in which late-Victorian artists employ Catholic symbols, sacraments, images, and themes as aids in performing their own homosexuality.
More recent criticism has embraced the variety of decadent Catholicism that Hanson’s study partially excludes or overlooks. Critics like Marion Thain have moved beyond Hanson’s homo-centric focus by pointing to links between lesbian desire and Catholicism in, for example, the poetry of “Michael Field” (311). Alex Murray’s 2013 article on the figure of the recusant in Catholic poetry of the fin de siècle, expands the range of Hanson’s study by placing greater emphasis on theol-ogy and Church history. Specifically, he explores the British, recusant Catholic “as a noble figure of resistance who stands in opposition to modernity and the Protestant history of post-Reformation England” (355). By widening the range of what decadent Catholicism means and how it makes meaning, these critics have demonstrated that the term is most appropriate and useful when it names a textual space where Decadence and Catholicism — variously and sometimes contradictorily conceived — intersect, overlap, or clash.
As with Modernism, decadent Catholicism did not name itself, and those involved in it were not perhaps all that conscious of belonging to any such move-ment. They formed some alliances, but also were in tension with each other, as I will touch on in the case of Wilde and Beardsley. They were probably not often sure themselves where the aesthetic appeal of Catholicism left off and its spiritual and moral appeal began. Nevertheless, the following close readings should dem-onstrate that this admittedly broad definition allows for precision not by creating a neat category, but by providing a place where texts such as Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) and Beardsley’s “The Dancer’s Reward” (1894) can speak to one another across the great divide of Modernism.
Scholars have examined Eliot’s study of art history at Harvard and the pro-found influence on him of artists such as Mantegna,1 but Beardsley’s infamous illustrations have yet to receive any attention in Eliot studies. The following paper will argue for Beardsley’s influence on Eliot. More importantly, however, it will insist on the artists’ shared decadent Catholic sensibility — one obsessed with satirizing vices and follies. Eliot’s critics have yet to address adequately the role of this decadent Catholic sensibility in his formation, but attention to the hitherto
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unacknowledged influence of Beardsley, whose illustrations, in the words of a contemporary reviewer, distill “the very essence of the decadent fin de siècle” (“New Publications” 185), helps to shed light on Eliot’s complex debt to Decadence.
A STORY OF CONVERSION
Decadent writers already occupy a place among contemporary influences upon Eliot. In fact, as early as 1936, Louis Untermeyer, one of Eliot’s harshest early crit-ics,2 acknowledged the poet’s decadent Catholic heritage in a review of Collected Poems for the “New Poetry” section of the Yale Review:
T.S. Eliot has become a symbol of all that is advanced in poetry, and yet he is an anachronism in the sense that he is both futurist and fin de siècle. No one, as far as I know, has compared him to the aesthetes of the Nineties; yet his course and theirs are curiously similar. . . . They — Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley — could no longer face their own distortions and turned to the Catholic church, which supplied them with new color as well as a new impetus; he, unable to dwell in the Waste Land, with its nightmares of vulgarity, has found an Anglo-Catholic haven. . . . (165)
Untermeyer’s insights are mainly biographical and impressionistic: Eliot and his decadent precursors, including Beardsley, share a “curiously similar” turn away from art that dwells on personal “distortions” and haunting “nightmares of vulgarity” to traditional religions that provide new “color” to their work and a “haven” for their souls. Untermeyer’s implicit equation of Roman Catholicism with Anglo Catholicism now seems a little careless, especially in light of Barry Spurr’s 2010 study, Anglo-Catholic in Religion, which emphasizes the intention-ality of Eliot’s turn away from Rome and rightly insists on acknowledging the Anglo in his Anglo-Catholicism. Still, Untermeyer’s insights prefigure the later work of critics such as Ronald Schuchard, Vincent Sherry, and Cassandra Laity, who have identified many of Eliot’s more distinct stylistic, formal, and thematic debts to Johnson, Dowson, Wilde, Swinburne and others.3
In spite of these gains, however, the thematic parallels between Beardsley’s art and that of Eliot — parallels that were apparent to Untermeyer in 1936 — remain unexplored. Such a critical lacuna is hardly glaring, considering the fact that the archive of Beardsley’s influence is nowhere near as vast as that of, for example, Laforgue, whose name crops up repeatedly in Eliot’s prose and whose poetry directly and obviously impacted the formation of his aesthetic. Beardsley’s name appears on the syllabus for a course that Eliot taught in 1917 on modern English literature along with other “personalities” from “the group of the ‘Yellow Book’ ” (Schuchard 43), but he is all but absent from both the letters and the published prose, with one important exception.
In the sixth of Eliot’s Clark Lectures (1926), he makes his only explicit mention of Beardsley. After establishing Crashaw as a “devotional” and “fervent”
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Roman Catholic who “had more in common with Cardinal Newman than with Thomas Aquinas,” Eliot traces this religious impulse in art through Newman and along a rather unexpected trajectory. He claims that the “current of feeling” that links Crashaw and Newman “passes through Arnold, Ruskin, and Pater to Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley, and even in a degraded and popularized form to Oscar Wilde” (Varieties 162). In this schema, the British decadents (Thompson, Johnson, Beardsley, and Wilde) function as nineteenth-century Crashaws — fervent, devotional, and Roman Catholic. True to form, Eliot provides no justification for or explanation of Beardsley’s inclusion in this genealogy of devotional fervor, but one possible reason for the artist’s inclusion appears in a letter that Eliot acquired for publication in the Criterion shortly before delivering his Clark Lectures.
Eliot wrote twice to Lionel Johnson’s executrix in pursuit of a letter Johnson wrote regarding Beardsley’s death; and his correspondences with Frederic Man-ning and Geoffrey Faber reveal that this epistle was not a casual addition to the Criterion. The text even inspired Eliot to ask Faber if he thought they might publish a book of Johnson’s letters (Letters 739). The book never appeared, but Johnson’s reflection on the relationship between Beardsley’s notoriously obscene art and his deeply felt religious impulses did make it into print:
He [Beardsley] became a Catholic with a true humility and exaltation of soul, prepared to sacrifice much. . . . [H]e would have dismissed from it [his work] all suggestion of anything dangerously morbid: he would have made it plain that he was sometimes a satirist of vices and follies and extravagancies, but not, so to say, a sentimental student of them for their curiosity and fascinations [sic] sake. I believe that he had some thoughts of entering some order or congregation, in which he could have followed his art, and dedicated it directly to the service of the faith. . . . He was not the man to play with high things, still less with the highest of all: he would never have been a fantastical, dilettante trifler with Catholicism, making it an emotional foil to other and base emotions. (“Some Letters” 361–63)
The devout, humble, pious Aubrey Beardsley depicted in this eulogy hardly comports with the young artist whose outrageous illustrations of Wilde’s Salomé (1894) and the infamous Yellow Book challenged and subverted Victorian propri-ety. Yet few could have guessed that the “dangerously morbid” poetry of young Tom Eliot, with its lusty Tinker, murderous Saint Sebastian, fleshly Sweeney, and impotent Prufrock contained the seed of a complex but largely orthodox religious sensibility. The work of both artists represents what Eliot claims he would “like” to find in religious literature: art that is “unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian” (Selected Prose 100).
Nine days prior to his death, Aubrey Beardsley, the man who bore such titles as the Fra Angelico of Satanism and the imp of the perverse, the man who once claimed to have “one aim — the grotesque,” wrote a brief but poignant missive to his publisher.
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Jesus is our Lord and Judge
Dear FriendI implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same.By all that is holy all obscene drawings.
Aubrey BeardsleyIn my death agony.
Had his epistle been addressed to anyone other than Leonard Smithers, the dar-ing publisher and arch pornographer, the author might have harbored some hope of success. Fortunately for posterity, Smithers’s lack of scruples and his desire to squeeze as much money as possible out of Beardsley’s work preserved the “bad drawings” and secured the legacy of the illustrator of the decadents.
A convert to Roman Catholicism who was facing imminent death at the age of twenty-five and feared the verdict of his accepted “Lord and Judge,” Beardsley clearly viewed his work as a liability. His contemporaries, however, did not share the artist’s ultimate assessment of his work as “obscene” or sacrilegious. As we have already seen, Johnson viewed his friend and contemporary as “a satirist of vices and follies and extravagancies, but not, so to say, a sentimental student of them for their curiosity and fascinations [sic] sake” (“Some Letters” 356–74). Yeats, who agreed with this sentiment, defended Beardsley’s art as an expression of “rage against iniquity” (Collected Works 254). For Yeats, Beardsley’s task was to “take upon himself . . . the knowledge of sin” as the saint takes upon himself the “consequence” of sin when he heals the sick. Similar contemporary readings of Beardsley’s work abound. Even Roger Fry, who once called Beardsley “the arch-priest of a Satanic cultus,” saw in his decadent contemporary “all the stigmata of the religious artist” (qtd. in Desmarais 21).
These reflections are by no means the last word on Beardsley, but, seen in their light, his drawings become more than “bad” and “obscene.” They are instead expressions of Decadence divided against itself, manifestations of an aesthetic both darkly Catholic and brightly obscene, perverse reflections of the fervent, devotional feelings of Crashaw and Newman, and visual precursors of Eliot’s own artistic via negativa.
WAGNERITES AND HOMICIDES
The aesthetic affinities shared by Beardsley and Eliot make themselves felt in their treatments of one of the most pronounced obsessions of decadent Catholic art, the opera of Wagner. Ellis Hanson identifies Wagner as “a touchstone for the peculiar dialectic of shame and grace that is the foundation of decadent Catholicism” (29), and he sees in the German composer an artist celebrating “a highly sensual and ritualistic conception of the faith that was visionary in its temptations, exquisite in its repentance, medieval in its intensity, and mystical in its tone” (31). Inspired
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by the celebration of perverse beauty and abject piety in Tannhäuser, Beardsley composed his own version of the myth in the unfinished, erotic novel Under the Hill (1896), parts of which originally appeared in The Savoy. He also produced illustrations of scenes from Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde, among others. Eliot’s fascination with Wagner’s music manifests itself most powerfully and transpar-ently in the echoes of Tristan und Isolde that haunt The Waste Land (1922). Sur-prisingly, the two artists converge not in their reimagining and reconstituting of Wagner’s art, but in their satiric treatment of his followers. If, as Johnson suggests, Beardsley’s Catholic sensibility manifests itself in his decadent art through the satire of “vices and follies,” then what we see in his illustration “The Wagnerites” (1894) and Eliot’s early, unpublished poem “Opera” (1909) is a common artistic sensibility situated at the intersection of Decadence and Catholicism.
Opera
Tristan and IsoldeAnd the fatalistic hornsThe passionate violinsAnd ominous clarinet;And love torturing itselfTo emotion for all there is in it,Writhing in and outContorted in paroxysms,Flinging itself at the lastLimits of self-expression.We have the tragic? oh no!Life departs with a feeble smileInto the indifferent.These emotional experiencesDo not hold good at all,And I feel like the ghost of youthAt the undertakers’ ball.
The first stanza of “Opera,” with its emotive instruments, self-torturing love, and romantic “paroxysms,” recalls the sound and fury of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. This is the thundering Wagner Lady Henry praises in Dorian Gray for being “so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says” (40). But these loud revelations of tragic power “Do not hold good at all.” The passion of the music only highlights the ennui of experiencing lofty emotions that have no place in the banal, modern world, where “Life departs with a feeble smile / Into the indifferent.” This realization of debased modernity devoid of “the tragic” leaves the speaker feeling “like the ghost of youth at the undertaker’s ball.” Just as Eliot’s poem reveals the banality of life after the music stops, Beardsley’s drawing (Figure 1) presents the viewer with the backs of a ghostly audience and scarcely hints at the spectacle of the stage. The only figure aware of the viewer’s
gaze is a frail creature craning over its shoulder with a look of spleen. The only clearly male character is a Prufrockian balding man in spectacles surrounded by what Chris Snodgrass calls “vicious women” (263). Linda Gertner Zatlin describes the effect in Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics:
The collection of thick-lipped and hard-looking women in The Wagnerites is the art-ist’s ironic comment on those affected women whose emotional involvement with the composer’s Tristan und Isolde appears to be on the same limited plane as would be their involvement with their fellow human beings. (87)
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These “affected” women are the ideal attendants at the “undertakers’ ball” that is Eliot’s opera house. What Zatlin reads as their limited “emotional involvement” with Wagner’s work resonates with Eliot’s speaker’s conclusion that modern audiences do not, in fact, “have the tragic.”
Whether or not Beardsley’s illustration directly inspired or informed Eliot’s later poem is a matter for conjecture. As Emma Sutton insists in Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism of the 1890s (2002), “In biographical terms, we can only speculate whether the image was conceived as a scathing critique of contemporary Wagnerites . . . or as an approving delineation of the decadence, the sensuality, of Wagner’s music and its admirers” (100). Given Beardsley’s tendency toward satire, however, I would argue that reading his illustration as somehow in sympathy with its subject is less tenable than reading “The Wagnerites” as a model for the scathing critique of audience in “Opera.” For Eliot and, we can surmise, Beard-sley, the Wagnerites who passively observe stories of passion are little more than empty shells, pale shadows of the heroic humanity that lives on stage. Eliot’s poem allows us a glimpse into the psyche of one member of Beardsley’s crowd from the position of the introspective poetic “I.” Such an argument for the complementar-ity of the work of Eliot and Beardsley may seem thin on its own, but I intend to demonstrate that the convergence of sensibility evident in “The Wagnerites” and “Opera” is far from an isolated example.
In his article “T.S. Eliot’s Ambivalences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor” (2012), John Paul Riquelme, whose 1991 publication Harmony and Dissonances helped situate Eliot as a precursor to postmodernism, builds on the work of Ron-ald Bush and Richard Shusterman when he argues that the influence of Wilde on Eliot’s poetry has been largely overlooked. Specifically, he maintains that “Salomé had a particularly intense effect on Eliot” (354). While I agree with this assertion, Riquelme’s assumption that the influence of Salomé (1894) necessarily suggests the influence of Wilde remains questionable. Given the sensation caused by the notorious illustrations of the play and Eliot’s apparent favoring of Beardsley’s sensibility over Wilde’s, as evidenced in his prose, Salomé may well have secured its place in the genealogy of Eliot’s poetry primarily thanks to the visual artist. And beyond the infamous Salomé drawings, Beardsley’s works demonstrate a latent decadent Catholic aesthetic that manifests itself through the satire of sin and resonates with much of Eliot’s early verse.4
Riquelme finds evidence of the masked influence of Salomé most notably in Eliot’s unpublished poem, “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian,” a work that he claims is “obviously indebted to Wilde” (376). Drawing on the correspondence between Eliot and Conrad Aiken, he insists that the title “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian” masks the poem’s imaginative debt to Wilde’s play about the death of St. John the Baptist:
He [Eliot] is not entirely sure about speaking the name of this poem, that is, about what to call a poem that has a head when he sends it to Aiken but is headless in the version used for the body of the poem in Inventions of the March Hare. As Ricks
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himself points out in his annotations, Eliot refers to another St. John, “among the Rocks,” in his letter, suggesting St. John the Divine, “But St John the Baptist should not be excluded.” (Riquelme 369)
Christopher Ricks’s observation that “John the Baptist should not be excluded” from consideration as the poem’s subject opens the door to reading Eliot’s poem as a masked reimagining of Wilde’s play. Riquelme, however, provides few parallels between the two texts beyond the fact that both depict “gender turbulence” and both allude to pools of blood, death, and white body parts (374). While I agree that Salomé is an informative text for Eliot, those seeking a possible antecedent for “Saint Sebastian” may find a richer model in Beardsley’s poem, “The Ballad of a Barber,” which appeared in the July 1896 issue of The Savoy.
The poem tells the tale of Carrousel, a barber who “cut, and coiffed, and shaved so well, / That all the world was at his feet” (Beardsley 91). Renowned for his prowess as both a barber and a lover, Carrousel attracts “reigning belles” and “beaux” alike, and his work exemplifies the decadent preference for artifice over nature. But his skills fail when he attempts to coif the hair of a thirteen-year-old princess. Linda Gertner Zatlin suggest that the barber’s “ ‘fingers lose their cunning’ . . . because he becomes sexually aroused” (155). Infuriated by both his failure as an artist and his own sexual frustration, Carrousel snaps, and mangles his failed masterpiece:
The Princess gave a little scream,Carrousel’s cut was sharp and deep;He left her softly as a dreamThat leaves a sleeper to his sleep.
He left the room on pointed feet;Smiling that things had gone so well. (Beardsley 93)
His assault ambiguously suggests both murder and rape. Several commentators link this horrendous act with the murderous aesthetician in John Gray’s decadent poem “The Barber,”5 but Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” also seems a poetic model for both Beardsley’s Carrousel and Eliot’s Sebastian.6 All three poems involve the murder of an objectified beloved inspired by a deranged desire to pos-sess her completely, but Eliot’s poem and Beardsley’s illustration share a distinctly Catholic undertone beneath their decadent surfaces.
The speaker of “Saint Sebastian” approaches his beloved as a self-flagellating “neophyte,”7 and enacts a grotesque parody of ascetic worship by dressing in a “shirt of hair,” “flogging” himself, and undergoing “hour on hour of prayer / And torture and delight:”
I would come in a shirt of hairI would come with a lamp in the nightAnd sit at the foot of your stair;I would flog myself until I bled,
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Figure 2: Aubrey Beardsley. “The Coiffing” (1896).
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And after hour on hour of prayerAnd torture and delightUntil my blood should ring the lampAnd glisten in the light;I should arise your neophyte. . . . (Inventions 78)
Substituting the beloved, with her white gown, for the usual female focus of adoration, the Virgin Mary, the psychotic ascetic obsesses over the “curl” of her ears. This obsession reenacts Carrousel’s erotic fixation on the curl of the Princess’s hair: “Three times the barber curled a lock, / And thrice he straightened it again.” But the Catholic element that is so prevalent in Eliot’s decadent poem seems to be absent from Beardsley’s “The Ballad of a Barber,” until we consider the illustration that accompanies the poem (Figure 2).
Beardsley’s illustration places the viewer in the position of the barber’s mirror prior to the horrendous act. Carrousel seems to contemplate his next move while leering over the shoulder of the virginal Princess, and they share the scene with one other figure. The diagonal line that cuts through the middle of the drawing, along the line of the foregrounded pair, finds its pinnacle at the crown of statue of the Virgin and Child. This statue stands out in greater relief because it receives no mention in the poem itself. Its very absence from the written text makes it all the more conspicuous in the visual one.
Here, the mother of Christ becomes a witness to the rape/murder and stands in silent judgment over the decadent artist Carrousel. The subtle placement of a specifically Catholic icon in a position of contrast and judgment suggests once again that Beardsley’s art does much more than glorify the grotesque and wallow in what Poe might term “the perverse.” By juxtaposing the loving union of the mother and child with the barber’s incipient act of violence against a young girl, Beardsley invites viewers to contemplate the sinister urges that may underlie and distort the pursuit of beauty through artifice. Similarly, the twisted devotion of Eliot’s homicidal Saint Sebastian suggests that the urge to objectify and possess another human being through violence is a perversion of the martyr’s act of self-sacrifice. Neither Carrousel nor Sebastian plays on pathos or begs for sympathy, unlike, for example, the speaker of Yeats’s “He Wishes his Beloved Were Dead” (1899), yet another reimagining of Browning’s poem. Instead, these texts imply a better way to love by highlighting the grotesqueries of the egotistical desire for objectifying possession.
BEARDSLEY’S SALOMÉ IN ELIOT’S POETRY
While the parallels proposed between such works as “The Wagnerites” and “Opera” and “The Ballad of the Barber” and “Saint Sebastian” are based primar-ily on speculation concerning similarities of theme, tone, and subject matter, more direct connections between the two artists emerge when we trace Beardsley’s influence through the mediation of Wilde. When confronted with the drawings
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that Beardsley produced to accompany Salomé, Wilde expressed some fear that his text would end up “illustrating Aubrey’s illustrations” (qtd in Weintraub 59), and his sentiment proved prophetic as reviewers instantly singled out Beardsley’s not-so-subtle satire on the author and the play’s aestheticized reimaging of the martyrdom of a saint. In “Enter Herodias” (Figure 3), for example, Wilde’s broad features appear in both the visage of the behemoth drag queen Herodias and the jester skulking in the corner and gesturing toward the trinity of phallic candles. The illustration betrays an almost school-boyishly innocent fascination with all things naughty, including the poorly concealed erection of the monstrous attendant, the phallic candles, and the exaggerated, pneumatic bust of Herodias/Wilde. Beardsley may even provide the viewer with a thinly-veiled caricature of the nubile, blond Lord Alfred Douglas staring adoringly up at the man who mis-guidedly entrusted him with the translation of Salomé, a job for which Beardsley had originally applied.
Except for a few critics,8 most commentators agree that Beardsley used the Salomé commission as an opportunity to lampoon Wilde. Biographer Matthew Sturgis, for example, argues that, “in the illustrations for Salomé Beardsley made his most devastating assault upon Wilde” (151). According to Wilde’s literary executor Robbie Ross in his study of Beardsley (1909), the artist “was too subjec-tive to be an illustrator. Profoundly interested in literature for the purposes of his art, he only extracted from it whatever was suggestive as pattern” (33). Wilde him-self acknowledged the disparities between the two texts of Salomé. Considering the illustrations “too Japanese,” he complained that they resembled the “naughty scribbles a pernicious boy makes in the margins of his copybook” (qtd. in Sturgis 153). Acknowledging the many caricatures of Wilde in Beardsley’s illustrations, Maureen T. Kravec concedes that “Beardsley’s audacious visual objectification of depravity . . . may not match the deliberately crafted metaphors of remote, cold beauty that sustain Wilde’s tragedy” (30). In spite of these disparities, however, she suggests that the drawings and the text both “satiriz[e] the folly of self-centered possessiveness” (30). To my mind, such a characterization holds more water in relation to Beardsley, whose grotesque pictures satirically subvert a world domi-nated by perverse lusts and self-destructive, unchecked desires, than it does in relation to Wilde, whose play more nearly conforms to the difficult notion of art for art’s sake.
Beardsley’s subversion of Wilde may have played a part in Eliot’s later favor-ing of the imp of the perverse over the arch dandy in his Clark Lectures. For Eliot, the “current of feeling” found in the “devotional” Roman Catholic verse of Crashaw finds its inheritors in people like Newman and Beardsley, but in Wilde’s work, the impulse becomes “degraded” and “popularized.” Eliot certainly recognized Wilde’s importance,9 but he reprises this distaste for the man, at least in terms of the relationship between art and religion, in his 1930 essay, “Arnold and Pater.” There, he lumps the decadent artist in with those who get “all the emotional kick out of Christianity one can, without the bother of believing it” (Selected Essays 349). Whether Eliot’s comments fairly or accurately represent
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Wilde’s actual relationship with religion is of little importance in the current dis-cussion.10 What matters is that Beardsley represents a far more appropriate artistic precursor — a young artist tortured by what Beardsley critic Jane Desmarais calls an “inner conflict” between “devout Catholicism and pagan desire” (21). As I have already hinted, these paradoxical impulses toward the sacred and the profane in the works of Beardsley and Eliot find expression in the artists’ fascination with sin as a negative road to the good.
This strange via negativa, this route toward good through an obsessive fasci-nation with evil, seems to anticipate Eliot’s reflections on the work of Baudelaire.11 His essay “Baudelaire” (1930) argues that the godfather of Decadence betrays an insistent belief in salvation through his obsession with of evil and damnation:
Baudelaire perceived that what really matters is Sin and Redemption . . . the rec-ognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation — of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to living . . . it is this which separates him from the modernist Protestantism of Byron and Shelley. (Selected Prose 236)
This Baudelaire asserted the “reality of Sin” and found in that reality “salvation” from the ennui of a banal “modern life.” The fact that Eliot contrasts Baudelaire’s recognition of “Sin” with “the modernist Protestantism of Byron and Shelley” suggests that, even after his 1927 conversion, Eliot disdained Protestantism and may have considered himself essentially in communion with the Catholic Church, if not under its direct authority. From Baudelaire’s example, Eliot distilled the simple truth that “the sense of evil implies the sense of good” (236). In other words, the modern artist finds the good by proving the existence of evil. Like Dante, who descends to the bottom of Hell in order to ascend Mount Purgatory, Beardsley and his modernist inheritor make sin and vice the material for a complex satire that insists on the existence of something better.
Beardsley’s Salomé illustrations enact just such an interrogation of sin by rejecting Wilde’s idealized, beautiful heroine and depicting a vile and perverse subject. Wilde’s fascination with the figure of Salome resonates less clearly with Beardsley’s satiric drawings than it does with the musings of Des Esseintes, the decadent anti-hero of J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours, who spends countless hours reflecting on the disturbing sensuality of Gustave Moreau’s famous depictions of the femme fatale:
Here she was no longer just the dancing girl who extorts a cry of lust and lechery from an old man. . . . She had become, as it were, the symbolic incarnation of undy-ing Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties. . . . (52–53)
Huysmans’s novel helps turn the eponymous hero of Dorian Gray into a deca-dent anti-hero. Wilde’s narrator calls À Rebours “a poisonous book” and attests
that “One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner” (98). Like Dorian, Wilde “could not free himself from the influence of this book,” and it informs his aestheticized vision of Salomé. While the description of Moreau’s paintings (Figure 4) in Huysmans’s breviary of Decadence matches the almost magically perverse and disturbingly enticing atmosphere of Wilde’s play, Beards-ley’s iconic representation of the princess in “The Climax” (Figure 5) presents the viewer with a grotesque parody. Peter Raby argues that the drawings supply their own “visual commentary, which brought out something of the play’s dramatic qualities, and at the same time hinted at and suggested other levels of meaning” (44). By subverting Wilde’s profane retelling of the death of John the Baptist and highlighting the grotesqueries of the play rather than its cold beauties, Beardsley creates his own “levels of meaning” and reveals himself as a satirist of sin — a decadent Catholic who paradoxically pursues the sacred by immersing himself in the profane.
Moreau’s princess fits the Young Syrian’s description of Salomé at the begin-ning of the play: “She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver” (5). Such sublime language hardly applies to Beardsley’s levitating witch, with her protruding, twisted facial features and crazed stare. A reviewer for The Times described Beardsley’s illustrations as “unintelligible for the most part and, so far as they are intelligible, repulsive” (qtd. in Calloway 83). The image of Salomé’s climax certainly contains an attractive precision of line, but, as Chris Snodgrass insightfully suggests, “Beardsley exposes evil while simultaneously trying to seal it in stylized elegance” (145). Such an assertion builds upon Arthur Symons’s keen observation that, “In those drawings of Beardsley which are grotesque rather than beautiful, in which lines begin to grow deformed, the pattern, in which now all the beauty takes refuge, is itself a moral judgment (qtd. in Snodgrass 144). The subject of “The Climax” receives just such moral judgment. Salome’s intimate, necrophiliac longing for the medusa-like head of John the Baptist is so powerful that she floats free of the ground, like a fallen angel. The drawing highlights the intensity of her desire for a contra-normative sexual object. As Richard Ellmann points out, even the lust of Herod for his stepdaughter pales in comparison to Salomé’s desire for the severed head of the prophet (345). Beardsley’s art confronts the observer with all the fleshly horror of this desire unmitigated by the abstract beauty of Wilde’s text. To put it another way, Huysmans’s hero Des Esseintes would find none of the sublime perfection of Moreau in Beardsley’s work. He would find, instead, a parody.
Eliot’s work extends the reach of this parody by drawing on Beardsley as a source for one of the most memorable images in “Prufrock”: the pathetic speaker’s renunciation of prophecy and martyrdom:
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
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Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,And in short, I was afraid. (Eliot 6)
B.C. Southam attributes the allusion to a severed head to the story of John the Baptist’s death in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, and he notes that Salome plays a leading role in Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires (52). Lee Oser expands on this observation: “Besides the traditional motif of decapitation, Eliot seems to have adopted Laforgue’s idea of a modernized treatment of the biblical tale” (36). The Laforgue connection makes a great deal of sense, given his explicit, pervasive, well-documented influence on the young poet.
However, the allusion invites other interpretations, as Oser affirms by going on to tie the striking image to the figurative use of John the Baptist in nineteenth-century American national and Puritan rhetoric of evangelization and civilization. In fact, Beardsley’s Salome may resonate more with Laforgue’s princess than with Wilde’s darkly triumphant femme fatale. In Salome’s Modernity (2011), Petra Dierkes-Thurn deftly captures the poignant contrast between the two literary depictions of Salome:
Laforgue’s “Salomé” ironizes the princess to the point of utter absurdity. Wilde, by contrast, provides a prolonged dramatic profusion of Salomé’s supreme bliss mixed with grief. She remains a strangely attractive figure at the end, putting forth, in this moment of perverse tenderness, an unsettling vision of self-fulfillment and personal triumph. (44)
Beardsley’s princess exudes some of the “personal triumph” that Dierkes-Thurn sees in Wilde’s play; however, the satirical edge of the illustrations ultimately follows the manner of Laforgue by ironizing its subject “to the point of utter absurdity.”
Of course, Wilde’s play remains a popular source text for the image of Pru-frock’s head upon a platter. James Ledbetter forcefully claims that a “correct reading of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ requires that one cite Wilde” (41). Other critics note this connection, albeit without Ledbetter’s insistence,12 but there is little reason to single out Wilde’s text as a primary or exclusive source for the image. The dispari-ties in diction between “Prufrock” and Salomé deserve attention. Wilde’s hero-ine repeatedly demands Jokanaan’s head “in a silver charger” (92) — the phrase resounding in the dialogue six times in rapid succession. Granted, Eliot may have chosen “platter” for the simple reason that it rhymes with matter, but such a swerve from a supposed source text might also imply that the poet’s inspiration came from an image rather than a written text.13
Beardsley’s “The Dancer’s Reward” (Figure 6) represents a hitherto unac-knowledged extra-biblical source text for the allusion to John the Baptist’s severed head in “Prufrock.” The illustration inverts the color dynamics of “The Climax”
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but preserves an aura of the grotesque that denies Salomé the status of heroine and foregrounds the horror of her desires and actions. Rooted to the ground once more, Salomé takes on an even more horrific appearance. Her hair assumes the form and color of the scaly clouds in the upper-left-hand corner of “The Climax.” Held up by the long arm of the executioner, the prophet’s head oozes gore that matches its now black hair. This illustration haunts Prufrock, who is neither prince Hamlet nor John the Baptist. For a man whose fear of death — both the little and the big — prevents any meaningful action in life, the phallic black arm and the severed head exist in his mind as dual symbols of his non-existence.
After asking if time might lend him the strength “to force the moment to its crisis,” the speaker of Eliot’s dramatic monologue claims to have “seen” his bald-ing head “brought in upon a platter.” One of Prufrock’s famous denials, “I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter,” follows this confession. His momentary, visionary projection of his own head onto Beardsley’s gory platter represents the pathetic summit of his ambition. This fleeting act of the imagination provides a brief glimpse of “the moment of my greatness,” but Prufrock’s cowardly mind cannot entertain the possibility of the gruesome martyrdom depicted in “The Dancer’s Reward.” Death, the “eternal Footman,” derisively snickers at this hol-low man’s transitory fantasy of meaningful action, a mockery that leaves Prufrock “afraid.” Salomé would gladly dance naked for the head of the prophet, but Pru-frock’s impotent love song fails to capture the attention of the women in his life, who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (Eliot 4). Eliot’s juxtaposition of an impotent modern man with Christ’s heroic forerunner poignantly satirizes soulless, banal modernity, just as Beardsley’s horrific illustration satirizes the perverse beauty and moral nullity of Wilde’s Salomé. By presenting evil in all its horrible variety, both texts insist on the existence of something better. In so doing, they also hint at their creator’s belief in, to borrow again from Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire, “what really matters . . . Sin and Redemption.”
Gabrielle McIntire argues that this one allusion to Salome’s victim in “Pru-frock” contains a strong suggestion of the poet’s developing religious sensibility.
The speaker’s identification with the beheaded John the Baptist . . . prefigures Eliot’s own conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, and we might think of the secular uncertainty and incessant philosophic questioning that shadows ‘Prufrock’ as forecasting Eliot’s more fervent desire for answers that would culminate in his turn to the Church. (79)
Just as Yeats, Symons, and Johnson saw intimations of Beardsley’s Catholicism in his fin-de-siècle drawings, critics such as McIntire see hints of Eliot’s “turn to the Church” in his earliest poetry. Acknowledging these spiritual and artistic convergences may help us to understand better the heretofore-unacknowledged role of decadent Catholicism in the period of transition from the decadent nineties to the advent of modernism.
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Notes
1. Nancy Hargrove, for example, avers that, as early as 1910, Eliot “was familiar with a wide spec-trum of the visual arts from ancient time to the Renaissance to the contemporary period and from both the occident and the orient” (90).
2. For a survey of Untermeyer’s campaign against Eliot, see Craig S. Abbott’s “Untermeyer on Eliot.”
3. See, for example, Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel, Sherry’s Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, and Laity’s “T.S. Eliot and A.C. Swinburne: Decadent Bodies, Modern Visualities, and Changing Modes of Perception.”
4. In a 1920 review of Eliot’s poems, Untermeyer characterizes the poet as an “acrobatic satirist” — a description he repeated in the 1921 edition of the anthology Modern American Poetry (Abbott 110).
5. See Beckson 6 and Woodring 524, for example. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is yet another potential precursor to Beardsley’s poem, especially given the fact that Beardsley completed illustrations for the narrative poem in 1896.
6. For comparative readings of “Saint Sebastian” and “Porphyria’s Lover” see Schuchard 11, Gordon 84, and Childs 88.
7. The use of the word “neophyte” in the poem resonates with Beardsley’s drawing “Of a Neophyte and how the Black Art was revealed unto him.” There is no room for further commentary on the connection in this essay, but the links between the two texts deserve further attention.
8. In his article “Tumult of Images: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Elliot L. Gilbert depicts Beardsley and Wilde as “collaborators” (133).
9. Eliot’s “Preface to Modern Literature” in Vanity Fair (1923) praises Wilde and his “circle” for exploding the propriety of their time. Not surprisingly, however, he also takes the opportunity to dismiss Dorian Gray as “perfect rubbish” (44).
10. In fact, Ronald Schuchard argues very convincingly for the sincerity of Wilde’s struggle with religious belief in his essay “Wilde’s Dark Angel and the Spell of Decadent Catholicism.”
11. It is worth noting that scholars have long associated Eliot with a poetics of negation. For an early example, see T.S. Eliot’s Negative Way (1982) by Eloise Knapp. For a more recent example, see Barry Spurr’s “ ‘Oh dark dark dark: They all go into the dark,’ The Via Negativa in the Poetry and Thought of T.S. Eliot” (2004). Though the term via negativa, as used in this paper, does not track perfectly with either of these works, they help to illustrate the importance of positive negation in Eliot’s poetry.
12. See, for example, Sultan 258 and MacDiarmid 27.
13. The use of “platter” could be inspired in part by Arthur Symons’s “The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias” from Images of Good and Evil (1899).
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