Two letters before dying
Aubrey Beardsley wasn't quite twenty-six when he died and he left behind him a mass of decadent drawings. Judged in today's terms with its utter lack of shame they were modest, but in the nineties of the 19th century they were shocking. Even Oscar Wilde (who was a bit jealous of Beardsley) thought they were too sensuous and complained that they made his own writings (which Beardsley sometimes illustrated) more sexually decadent that he meant them to be.
Beardsley died from pulmonary tuberculosis but not before he utterly renounced all the work he had done that expressed the French decadent movement and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was terrified at the thought of the moral influence of his drawings and wrote to a friend saying, "I implore you to destroy all copies of [naming a work of his], and all drawings that are harmful. Show this to [and he named a friend], and conjure him to do the same. By all that is holy, all obscene drawings." Then he signed his name, adding the words, "In my death-agony."
This young man was one of a number who were carried away by the power of popular and influential people into a swift current they couldn't resist. Not only did Beardsley leave behind drawings of which he was mortally ashamed; he didn't leave behind a mass of work of which he could have been proud.
Many centuries before Aubrey Beardsley an older man, worn out and imprisoned, waiting for a death sentence he never earned, wrote to a young friend. There was no terror, there was peace. There was no raging guilt—there was deep satisfaction that he had used his life and giftedness for a world-renewing purpose. He said, "The last drops of my own sacrifice are falling; my time to go has come. I have fought in the good fight; I have run my course; I have kept the faith. Now the crown of a good life awaits me, with which the Lord, that just Judge, will reward me on the great Day." (2 Timothy 4:6-8, Moffatt)
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.