Books: For Art's Sake

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Death Agony. But if art for art's sake triumphed in Whistler v. Ruskin, it came a cropper in the private lives of most of its British disciples. Unlike their more adaptable, more original French contemporaries, who made Paris the authentic, though wicked, art center of the world, the Britons founded no school. They simply faded out in the squalid romanticism of the "Naughty Nineties." Oscar Wilde's brilliant career came to a catastrophic end in the world's most sensational vice trial. Poet Francis Thompson, an opium addict, was reduced to destitution, and died leaving behind his minor masterpiece of repentant self-martyrdom, The Hound of Heaven. Poet James Thomson (The City of Dreadful Night) crept starving to the bed of a blind friend, who stretched out his hands and withdrew them covered with the blood of Thomson's fatal hemorrhage. Simeon Solomon died in a poorhouse; consumption killed Ernest Dowson (Cynara) at 33. Brilliant Aubrey Beardsley, whose delicate, sensual illustrations for Wilde's Salome became more famous than the play itself, died of tuberculosis, complicated by high living, at 25, leaving a curt, harrowing letter to a friend:

Jesus is our Lord and Judge

I implore you to destroy all [my] bad drawings . . .

By all that is holy all obscene drawings

Aubrey Beardsley

In my death agony.

Most ironic fate of all was reserved for surly, misanthropic Whistler. A painting he had coldly entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black so captivated the despised, incurably sentimental public that they retitled it Mother and made it what it is today—America's favorite picture of filial piety.