Dandy's Life

AUBREY BEARDSLEY--Haldane MacFall --Simon & Schuster ($6). Some 30 years ago a lanky fop, carrying a pair of lemon-kid gloves, his hair falling about his ears like a hermit's, attended an ironic ceremony in a London church. The occasion was the unveiling of a bust of John Keats; after it was over, Aubrey Beardsley ". . . broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead." It was an ironic ceremony because Artist Beardsley, as Poet Keats had done, was to go southward and die of consumption before he was 26 years old. It is easy to remember him now as he must have looked to the people who had come to church that afternoon--the figure of a frightened, scarecrow dandy, scampering crazily through a graveyard.

One of the people who came to church that afternoon was Haldane MacFall, then a London art critic, now the author of a biography of Artist Aubrey Beardsley. His book says little about Beardsley's family, his schooldays, his friends. It conveys scarcely any of the color of the period, already so remote and glittering, in which Beardsley drew his astonishing pictures for The Yellow Book. Only between the somewhat heavy lines of Author MacFall's writing can be discovered the eccentric tragedy of Beardsley's last year of life, when, while he was doing his best drawings for The Savoy, he was living far from London, sick and making dirty pictures. Author MacFall is still the critic; when he discusses Beardsley's technique, his methods, his artistic development, he writes more soundly than when he describes, or tries to, Beardsley's character. The book reproduces many of Artist Beardsley's works; the most spectacular, perhaps, is a drawing of a flamboyant lady, leading on a ribbon her meagre, birdfaced, pantalooned monkey.