A Study on the Material for Lu Xun’s Introduction for The Selection of Beardsley’s Illustrations :

Concerning the Essays of Symons and Jackson

Abstract

　Although Lu Xun said in his Introduction for The Selection of Beardsley's Illustrations that he took “passages from the articles of Arthur Symons and Holbrook Jackson as the explanation for the characteristics of Beardsley”, his Introduction has generally been considered as his original work.

　This paper first introduces how Lu Xun and the Chinese accepted Beardsley's illustrations in the 1920s. Second, on comparing Lu’s Introduction with Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties and Symons’s Introduction for The Art of Aubrey Beardsley in detail, this paper concludes that Lu’s Introduction is a collection of passages from the essays of Symons and Jackson.

　One of the reasons Lu chose these two essays from many studies about Beardsley is that he regarded Hisao Honma as one of the most reliable scholars of English Literature in Japan. Honma stressed the developmental side of the Decadent. Therefore it was natural for Lu to be influenced by Honma's opinion even if Lu disliked the Decadent as was generally believed.

　On the other hand, The Selection of Beardsley’s Illustrations is Lu’s collaboration with his brother Zhou Zuo-ren. This is drawn from two facts : (1) Lu did not have Jackson’s book, but Zuo-ren did and(2) Zuo-ren was associated with the Shirakaba group that introduced Beardsley’s illustration to Japan, and it is possible that Lu, in the beginning, had been affected by Beardsley along with Zuo-ren.