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Beardsley & Wagnerism Emma Sutton. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 225 pp. $65.00
OVERPRICED AND UNDEREDITED, Emma Sutton's examination of Beardsley and Wagnerism reads like an unimproved dissertation. Aubrey Beardsley's twenty-odd drawings on Wagnerian and related themes, and his exotic, Wagner-inspired prose, are the focus of this study stretched out to book length. It is both illuminating and exasperating.
Bernard Shaw is almost as significant to Sutton's opening pages as the brilliant young artist whom G.B.S. knew, and even wrote for, in the Nineties. (His "On Going to Church" was the opening essay in the first Savoy, in 1896.) Beardsley had very likely enjoyed Shaw's missionary Wagner critiques in The Star and The World, intended to entertain not only music lovers, but readers who had a tin ear and could not read a score. Shaw's later book The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) would persuade many who thought Wagner was only a composer that the Ring cycle was as much polemic as music.
Although Beardsley once avowed, "I would do anything and go anywhere- if I could-to hear Wagner's music," Sutton ignores the "if I could," clinging to a dubious claim made in a 1998 biography by Matthew Sturgis that "intriguingly, Beardsley made a brief, apparently unaccompanied, visit to Germany in August 1895, about which few details are known___" (Did he visit the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth?) But on 30 July 1895, the tubercular Beardsley confided to publisher Leonard Smithers from London that he had just experienced another "haemorrhage of the lungs." He was in no condition for solo-or any-travel, and when he could, he sought the healing sun just across the Channel in Dieppe. Just as there are many curious linguistic usages by Sutton, and lines of pretentious vagueness (at least one sentence without a subject), there are many questionable assumptions throughout.
Early detractors flailing at a few satirically elongated Beardsley women, while ignoring the respectable presences of Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Kenneth Grahame, Harold Frederic, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, J. S. Sargent and W B. Yeats, might have castigated The Yellow Book in such terms as "a decadent mouthpiece." Yet that charge-and those words-are Sutton's. She should know better....