mists and shadows, when the enchanted woods are full of delicate influences, and even the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream a little.' The description of the garden is as complete as any of his drawings: 'In the middle was a huge bronze fountain with three basins. From the first rose a many-breasted dragon and four little loves mounted upon swans, and each love was furnished with a bow and arrow. Two of them that faced the dragon seemed to recoil in fear, two that were behind made bold enough to aim their shafts at him. From the verge of the second sprang a circle of slim golden columns that supported silver doves with tails and wings spread out. The third, held by a group of grotesquely attenuated satyrs, is centred with a thin pipe hung with masks and roses and capped with children's heads.' And is not this an entirely characteristic description of Fanfreluche's appearance : 'He wore long black silk stockings, a pair of pretty garters, a very elegant ruffled shirt, slippers, and a wonderful dressing-gown.' The description of the Woods of Auffray, though less sharply defined, is even more atmospheric : 'In the distance through the trees gleamed a still argent lake, a reticent water that must have held the subtlest fish that ever were. Around its marge the trees and flags and fleurs de luce were unbreakably asleep. 'I fell into a strange mood as I looked at the lake, for it seemed to me that the thing would speak, reveal some curious secret, say some beautiful word if I should dare to wrinkle its pale face with a pebble. 'Then the lake took fantastic shapes, grew to twenty times its size, or shrank into a miniature of itself without ever closing its unruffled calm and deathly reserve. When the waters increased I was very frightened, for I thought how huge the frogs must have become. I thought of their big eyes and monstrous wet feet; but when the water lessened I laughed to myself, for I thought how tiny the frogs must have grown; I thought of their legs that must look thinner than spiders; of their dwindled croaking that never could be heard. 'Perhaps the lake was only painted after all; I had seen things like it at the theatre. Anyhow it was a wonderful lake, a beautiful lake.' Though so often macabre (had he a presentiment of his approaching end?) yet he has the sense of joy-a joy which is cold and cunning. For him who has eyes to see, his illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome are its most terrible criticism. While Oscar Wilde meant to write a poetical-religious-sensual drama, Aubrey Beardsley with the thousand arabesques of his pen illustrated a vicious comedy. He shows us a sort of fairyland, enigmatic, as is every proper fairyland, and it is so interesting that we forget the subject in thinking of the artist's elaborations. He could be mystic too (and it should be remembered that he died a good Catholic), as in his Saint Rosa of Lima. Had he, later, thrown himself into devotional art, his exquisite talent would have renewed the inspiration of that religious art which Huysmans so happily called 'bondieusard.' There is nothing Latin nor Italian in him, but a good deal of eighteenth-century France. It is when he is drawing frills and furbelows, great ladies' paniers, embroidered corsages, flowers and powder puffs, and all the thousand tiny details that contain so much of woman's personality that he is in his element. To accuse him of immorality were but idleness; for he plays with the surface of things. We have the impression of a cold temperament united with a riotous imagination. However that may be, Baudelaire would have recognised a descendant in this sincere artist who is dissatisfied with the world and with life, and who has left us a picture of it which, though it be at certain moments satanic, with hint of phosphorus and cantharides, is never gross, never coarse, but always charming and truly artistic. THE BAUDELAIRIAN SPIRIT IN MUSIC THE impotence of language to analyse emotion never comes home to us with so much force as when we come to consider the feelings aroused in us by music. Still it has appeared to us interesting to see if we can discover in music any trace of the Baudelairian spirit. The first thing that strikes us in modern music is that our age, though an age of extremely advanced technical mastery, is not an age of deep inspiration-and it is the change of inspiration that marks the difference between the modern and classical music. It was The change of inspiration may be conveniently taken as beginning with Wagner (Wagner being the great theoretician and leaving aside for the moment the question of what Wagner owed to Weber). Wagner who first so definitely proclaimed the importance of the universality of art, declaring that since painting, literature, and music suggest only one mode of life, and that life is the union of these three, the aim of the artist now should be to show this union in his art. As he says in his letter on Music: 'I recognised that it was just where one of these arts reached its impassable limits that—with most rigorous precision-the sphere of action of the next began, and that consequently with the intimate union of these two arts one would express with the most satisfactory clearness what each of them could not express by itself-and that, on the contrary, any effort to render by means of one of them that which could only be rendered by the two together must necessarily lead to obscurity-to confusion first, and then to the degeneration and corruption of each art in particular.' 283 |