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Title: Aubrey Beardsley
Author: Haldane MacFall
Release date: January 29, 2025 [eBook #75239]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1927
Credits: Alan, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUBREY BEARDSLEY ***
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY
_by F. H. Evans_]
AUBREY
BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
[Illustration]
HALDANE MACFALL
NEW YORK
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
MCMXXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
EARL E. FISK
THIS SMALL TRIBUTE
TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP
H. M.
“I have one aim--the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.”
“I may claim to have some command of line. I try to get as much as
possible out of a single curve or straight line.”
[AUBREY BEARDSLEY.]
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 17
I: BIRTH AND FAMILY 23
II: CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL 27
“THE PUERILIA”
III: YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK 35
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”
IV: FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP 42
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty
THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”
V: BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST 58
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to Twenty-one
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”
VI: THE JAPANESQUES 95
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-one
“SALOME”
VII: THE GREEK VASE PHASE 113
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-one to Twenty-three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
VIII: THE GREAT PERIOD 159
“THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-three to Twenty-four
I. “THE SAVOY”
IX: THE GREAT PERIOD 234
ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE
1897 to the End--Twenty-five
II. THE AQUATINTESQUES
X: THE END 260
1898
A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY 269
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY _by F. H. Evans_ _Frontispiece_
SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 25
HOLYWELL STREET 33
HAIL MARY 60
PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD 67
HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN 71
“OF A NEOPHYTE....” 85
HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” 92
THE PEACOCK SKIRT 94
THE STOMACH DANCE 103
TITLE-PAGE OF “SALOME” 108
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III 112
LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS 115
MESSALINA 121
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 125
NIGHT PIECE 129
PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL 136
THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN 139
DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD 143
THE SCARLET PASTORALE 149
ATALANTA 153
TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS._ I _AND_ II 158
FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER” 161
THE MIRROR OF LOVE 165
A CATALOGUE COVER 169
ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS) 173
THE ABBÉ 175
THE FRUIT BEARERS 179
CHRISTMAS CARD 181
THE THREE MUSICIANS 185
TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS” 186
COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO._ I 189
THE BILLET DOUX 191
THE TOILET 195
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 197
THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES 201
THE BARON’S PRAYER 203
THE COIFFING 207
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ IV 209
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ VII 213
FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 215
HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS 219
TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 220
A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE” 223
FRONTISPIECE TO “THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD” 225
ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND 229
BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE 231
THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY 235
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES” 241
ALI BABA IN THE WOOD 245
COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE” 249
INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE” 255
THE DEATH OF PIERROT 261
AVE ATQUE VALE 270
FOREWORD
About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in
Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet,
who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop
on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had
forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary
and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation came pouring
out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man broke away from
the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched
awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping,
dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of
God’s acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly
efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by
the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away
coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long
white hands, his lean wrists showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid
cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing
mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who
called to him, showing his “tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed
down and plastered over his forehead in a “quiff” almost to his
eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so
awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted;
but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.
_The Yellow Book_ had come upon the town three months gone by.
Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a
night. He was the talk of the town--was seen everywhere--was at the
topmost height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was
out he was to be expelled from _The Yellow Book_! As he had come up, so
he was to come down--like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out
of the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and
for some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed
young dandy--fling him from _The Yellow Book_--and dim for him the
splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. Within
a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was to drop
out of the public eye almost as though he had never been.
But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered
there--and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered
there--this young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year
or so the masterpieces of his great period--the drawings for a new
venture to be called _The Savoy_--and was soon to begin work on the
superb designs for _The Rape of the Lock_, which were to thrust him at
a stroke into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years
were run out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave.
As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the dead,
so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be--one long struggle to
crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that yawned
for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being dragged
back to it again and again by unseen hands--was to spend his strength
in the frantic struggle to escape--he was to get almost out of sight
of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to find
himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge of
the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat
plays with a mouse--with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of the
grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high
road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we,
who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that
were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this
agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical
things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very
breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise
that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the
skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room.
For, realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and
charm of _The Rape of the Lock_. Surely the hideous nightmares that
now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject
for bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his
facile pen!
Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood,
and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each
twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows--he knew
that he had but a little while to which to look forward, and had best
live his life to-day. And he lived it like one possessed.
HALDANE MACFALL.
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
1872-1898
I
BIRTH AND FAMILY
To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something in the
city,” of the name of Beardsley--one Vincent Paul Beardsley--and to
his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of the family
of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first day
of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the army surgeon
at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, a boy, whom they
christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing that in a short
hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie a-dying, having made the
picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous.
Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption
that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does not
appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive,
stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the
chronicles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades
away, departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his
work of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it
be that so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us
wondering by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called
to the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name
and raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it
should stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of
the age. For, when all’s said, it was a significance--if his only
significance--to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying
at twenty-five, had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording
tablets of the genius of his race in the indelible ink of high
fulfilment. However, in the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a
brief moment into the limelight and is gone, whether “something in the
city” or whatnot, does not now matter--his destiny was in fatherhood.
But at least it was granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to
him, that, from whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he
should live to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son,
who, as at the touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line
into very music--the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age....
As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright
personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with
unceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and
character--therefore the man’s--in so far as the moulding of mind and
character be beyond the knees of the gods--a mother whose affection
and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful
sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world
of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy
inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as
a girl.
[Illustration: SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY
(_Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy_)]
II
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL
THE “PUERILIA”
Of a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road,
Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class
home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred and
cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably became
a forcing-house to any intelligent child--and both children were
uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or three
years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as things
turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely a
healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward
spirit.
It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over
the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Caldecott
which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s
life--yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest
illustrators that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure
test of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their
children are given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the
somewhat empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given
Kate Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons
in drawing and in “seeing” character in line and form, and in the
wholesome joy of country sights and sounds.
A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing his
pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music.
Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced
lessons, but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or
drawing or decoration.
The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s
heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell
disease which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was
sent to a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years.
Here the child seems to have made his chief impression on his little
comrades and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an
extreme reserve--which sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled
waters. However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat
of consumption; and a change had to be made.
At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a
couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a
profound influence over his future.
In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled
in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age
so skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an
infant prodigy--the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s
knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy in
the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologising
for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the plea
that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feeling for
sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the years
to come, he was to give forth line that “sings” like the notes of a
violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation-cards
in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or not, the
little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite considerable
sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome things.
As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched and
unpromising stuff.
A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it
absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to
send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where
the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the very
loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history, eagerly
reading Freeman and Green.
In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; and in
the January of 1885 he became a boarder.
Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half years
at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King, greatly
liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by letting him
have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey Beardsley
was happy as the day was long. His “quaint personality” soon made its
mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday, he wrote a
little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The delicate boy,
as might be expected, found all athletic sports distasteful and a
strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to be found with a
book when the others were at play. His early love for Carlyle’s “French
Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Restoration dramatists,
was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read “Erewhon” and “enjoyed it
immensely,” though it had been lent to him with grave doubts as to
whether it were not too deep for him. His unflagging industry became a
byword. He caricatured the masters; acted in school plays--appearing
even before large audiences at the Pavilion--and was the guiding spirit
in the weekly performances at the school got up by Mr. King and for
which he designed programmes. His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a
kindly attitude towards the lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively
encouraged his artistic leanings, as Mr. King his theatrical.
Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these
“puerilia” have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as
revelations of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain
unvarnished truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have
been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Probably
his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as the
grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley
himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on
reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every
means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging
good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether
incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such
unutterable trash.
Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind at
school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of the
“Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giving
amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays. By
the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he had
a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it,
very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong
meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad
was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French
he worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile
reader--but such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the
dog-Latin of a public school classical education.
Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that Aubrey
Beardsley drew the designs for the “Pied Piper” before he left
the school in mid-1888--though the play was not performed until
Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December the 19th
1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen and wash
drawing of _Holywell Street_ was made in mid-1888 before he left the
school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red hair--worn _á
la Bretonne_,” which I take it means “bobbed,” as the modern girl now
calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work, but writes verse
and is very musical. His “stage-struck mood” we have seen encouraged by
his house-master, Mr. King.
C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at Brighton; and at
one of these is played “_L’Enfant Prodigue_” without words--it was to
make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley.
There is no question that _L’Enfant Prodigue_ and the rococo of Bright
Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beardsley; and
he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked mediævalism; he was
to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to Pierrot and the
bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion.
Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, though
how exactly he fitted the red hair “_a la Bretonne_” to his theory
of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the
wearer, would require more than a little guesswork.
The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it came
to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were
numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a marked
personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely proud of him.
But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, on the eve of his
sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding farewell and leaving
for London, straightway to become a clerk in an architect’s office.
At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his
“puerilia”--or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but
these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant,
inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the
“Pied Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing
of _Holywell Street_. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him a
month or two false--it is difficult to see why Beardsley should have
made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London that he
had not yet learnt to frequent--but even granting that the _Holywell
Street_ was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his
schoolfellow a month or two later, in the _Holywell Street_ (1888)
there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley leaves his
school and his “puerilia” cease--he enters at once on a groping attempt
to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his ideas and impressions.
So far, of promise there has been not a tittle--one searches the
“puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign--but there is none.
In the _Holywell Street_ there _is_ the sign--and a portent.
It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic,
tragi-comic wayfaring.
[Illustration: HOLYWELL STREET]
III
YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”
At sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall
dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to
live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood
Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in
the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an
Insurance office.
The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and shy
and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent
young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat
solitary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first
little Pimlico home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly
appreciative, sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of
his devoted mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother
and sister was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite
unimportant, an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the
end of his day’s drudgery in the city, and--with the loud bang of the
hall-door--shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and
sister were happy in their own life.
But it is that _Holywell Street_ drawing which unlocks the door. It
is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy
old ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row--that made an
untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary le
Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych--was
the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the toes of Prime
Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with equal absence
of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, its fantastic
jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions--and its devotion
to books--was nearing its theatric end. In many ways Holywell Street
was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow spent every moment he
could snatch from his city office in such fascinating haunts as these
second-hand bookshops.
We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A Brown
Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; and that
before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act
comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.”
A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the National
Gallery to browse amongst antique art.
His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate
health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his behalf
from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening he
really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night by
consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London was
filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with any
sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices to hear
good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even dreamed of
pursuing an artistic career.
The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred
Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged
Beardsley’s artistic leanings. Beardsley had only been a year
in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became
a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth
birthday--August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or
whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning
of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for
the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of
Aubrey Beardsley--and as blank of achievement as they were black.
From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s
career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian
Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a
violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and
operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength
remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the
Insurance Office in the city.
The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking
down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body
compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of
the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life
which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he
might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in
the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy
were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which
mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all
hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued
youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon--it was enough to have
broken the courage of the strongest man. Beardsley’s first three years
in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen
he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in
the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What
interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion,
during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these
two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in
which his eyes gazed in terror at death.
His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite
eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed
to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease
led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams
led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo--especially the
human fetus--with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art
on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy.
Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian
Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones
and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither
he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures--to
Beardsley the supreme treasure.
It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside
bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor,
but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost
daily frequenter.
The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside,
which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so
well--indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called
the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth--was but
a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to
London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one
of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here
Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at
the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the
friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They
also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick
Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the
finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his
achievement and his vogue.
Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship
in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time
and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a
footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in
exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more
for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate.
At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young
clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture
galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the
bookshop in Cheapside.
“We know by the _Scrap Book_, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890,
what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time,
and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of
this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the
pictorial idea--only an increasing sense of selection--that is all. His
“juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there
begins to appear a certain personal vision.
From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books--saw life only through
books--was aloof from his own age and his own world, which he did not
understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather vulgar to
understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his daily toil,
he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere with
Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle de Maupin,
Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux Camélias, as his intimates. He
sketched them as yet with but an amateur scribbling. But he dressed
for the part of a dandy in his narrow home circle, affecting all the
airs of superiority of the day--contempt for the middle-class--contempt
of Mrs. Grundy--elaborately cultivating a flippant wit--a caustic
tongue. He had the taint of what Tree used to whip with contempt as
“refainement”--he affected a voice and employed picturesque words in
conversation. He pined for the day when he might mix with the great
ones as he conceived the great ones to be; and he sought to acquire
their atmosphere as he conceived it. Beardsley was always theatrical.
He noticed from afar that people of quality, though they dressed well,
avoided ostentation or eccentricity--dressed “just so.” He set himself
that ideal. He tried to catch their manner. The result was that he gave
the impression of intense artificiality. And just as he was starting
for the race, this black hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made
him despair. In 1890 had appeared Whistler’s _Gentle Art of Making
Enemies_--Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself
to form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic
ambition.
As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration
had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached
mid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from him,
his courage returned with health--and his belief in himself. So far he
had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided to
make an effort to become an artist.
The sun shone for him.
He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured an
introduction to Burne-Jones.
IV
FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty
THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”
On a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth
birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.
Beardsley being still a clerk in the city--his week-ends given to
drudgery at the Insurance Office--he had to seize occasion by the
forelock--therefore Sunday.
The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in
his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened
his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave;
and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic
endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long
North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise
of renewed health.
We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show
Burne-Jones--we have seen what he had gathered together in the _Scrap
Book_ as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add
to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the
wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time--a sorry
thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross
who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British
Museum--an act which, had Beardsley known the betrayal that was to
be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet.
We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an
occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably
promising _Molière_, which it is difficult to believe as having been
made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no
hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s
style for a while.
Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his
quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him
to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high
spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to
pour forth from his hands for a couple of years.
Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy--the solemnities reigned,
and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned
with serious fresco--’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness.
As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house
opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great
world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit
to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic
conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his
whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once
he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so
far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the
old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas
cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed
was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that
he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise whereon to
found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century
loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the
keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but
his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic
sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at
his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much
a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the
young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard
to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance.
Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the
Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered
London as she had conquered France--if rather a pallid ghost of Japan.
The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with
Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing
more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how
beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it
was so.
It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued
Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of
pure line by the Japs--he saw prints in shops and they interested him,
but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and
use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of
bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English
types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective
and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed
to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque
effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.
Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F.
Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting
Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of
its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with
his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and
furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to
Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to
smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf.
It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts
of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression
of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs
make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may
have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word
for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as
simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war
against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian
drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which
touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness,
and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme,
carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better
its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the
stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint
upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art,
to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the
youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to
its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the
furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed
to be adopted by Beardsley as the basis of his drawings of furniture
a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the
superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the
sensitive brain of the younger man--those peacocks that were to bring
forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of
years later when he was to give his _Salome_ to the world.
It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a
fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father--as quickly to vanish
again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls
for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking
and he and his “pater” alone in the house.
Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become
secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a
little magazine called _The Bee_; and it was in the November of 1891
that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his _Hamlet_ in which he at
once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.
It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on
Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one of
note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting
and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling for
line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly
working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some six
months after the summer that had brought hope and life to Beardsley
out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer Vallance,
one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went to call on the
lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half the urgings
of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known the boy when at
Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoon at Charlwood
Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away wildly enthusiastic
over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at his demand. It is to
Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and then turned the lad’s
ambition towards becoming an artist by profession--an idea that up to
this time Beardsley had not thought possible or practicable.
Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s
enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he
overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled
us in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile
“puerilia”--the _Pied Piper_ stuff--which one cannot believe that
Beardsley would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque _Hamlet_ from
the _Bee_ just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques.
He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had not done
anything better than the _Hamlet_. Then there was the _Scrap Book_!
However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won so
powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal friend
as Aymer Vallance.
On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the winter
was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross and
Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert Ross wrote
of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any case his
record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed
with the personality of the youth--Ross was always more interested
in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for his
was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the antique
dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a powerful
friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the doors of
fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a kindly man
enough; and he had not only come to have considerable authority on
matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the great, but
with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. Ross, with
his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was fascinated
by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy youth
whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of being
_ebouriffé_ as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was brushed
smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and
narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the impression of being
brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better as “tortoise-shell”--it
was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as his voice and manner.
The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was always cadaverous. The
young fellow seems gradually to have thawed at this forgathering at
Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company, and was soon
found to have an intimate knowledge of the British Museum and National
Gallery. He talked more of literature and of music than of art. Ross
was so affected by the originality of the young fellow’s conversation
that he even attributed to Beardsley the oft-quoted jape of the old
French wit that “it only takes one man to make an artist but forty to
make an Academician.”
It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of
Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting--what precisely did
Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under his
arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were in the
portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the _Procession of Joan
of Arc_ in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans, a work
which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with any merit
from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced to part for
all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a pen-and-ink replica
from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the May of 1892. The
youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his own work than had
his admirers.
It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his
twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic
promise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace
_Procession of Joan of Arc_ could stand out at the forefront of his
career, and was, as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order
to get him public recognition--in which it distinctly and deservedly
failed. He himself was later to go hot and cold about the very mention
of it and to be ashamed of it.
We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,”
his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley
could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his
rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking
for him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship of
that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom he loved to
glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is canting and
stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged down. Nothing
of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste drew about him, he
was not compelled into, the company of the erotic and the precious in
craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small share in opening wide the
doors to him.
But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a
curious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval
atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted
him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art
and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best.
It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the
French writers--it was their challenge to the past--it was their very
inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that
brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have
remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was
to run riot in eroticism--he was to treat sex with a marked frankness
that showed it to be his god--but it is only right to say that the
artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has
as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist
of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual
moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood
nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that
any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree.
And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race.
It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure
in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is
alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.
Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit--it
was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the
middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class--he was one of the
most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he
had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness
of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter
Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened
the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his
work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and
thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss
criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or
patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it,
as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he
was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and
witty companion.
Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley after
a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is
said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled.
However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition
growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his
friends, to dare all and make for art.
Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember
that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of
Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a
very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament.
Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young
fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had
learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training
of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in
high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the
steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.
This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday;
and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis de
Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged
him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune
artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”
Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all
intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and
Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s
night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with
his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to
be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his
art--the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios
talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it
is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor
Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly
influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is
spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism
is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and
Burne-Jones at this very time--Whistler had published his _Gentle Art
of Making Enemies_ in 1890, and London had not recovered from its
enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to
say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but
his eager eyes were quick to see.
However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an
occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city
and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the
Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.
And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth
now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most
impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The
generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris--or Beardsley; but
his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted
boy’s cause.
Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves
of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all,
Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made
a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement.
Next--and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting
fact--Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of
the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content!
Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling
rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that
to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse--probably not very
exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the
conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this.
And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to
Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker,
not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender
finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or
drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made
the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore
intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist
in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings,
with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he
knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared
nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social
injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern
him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored
him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the
society of the great--his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed
society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the
middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic
whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing
each one as the mood took him--only doing it with an air and dressing
well for the part.
Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of
these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done
into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible
years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a
priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or
social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were
racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy--they
even lack manhood--they do not suggest quite a fully developed
intelligence.
However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his
troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott
books--he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then
anxious to produce--_Sidonia the Sorceress_. Vallance leaped at
the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once
persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all
being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892,
his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to
Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received
the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a
ridiculous pill.
We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but
mediocrity--a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on
the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter
unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques
for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what
the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know--and to achieve. Can
one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to
Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in
grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black
cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of
his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to
this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat
black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young
fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go
much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling
it--far less any of his sponsors. And yet!----
Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few
narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting
of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival
publication to the Kelmscott Press--he was to smash it to pieces and
make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been
able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood
awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point--and Frederick Evans
was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull
futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence
than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was
set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he
did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who
was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris
least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank
young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which
he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection
and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be
aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s
portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little
of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful
nor attractive, but probably trying to find _something_ to praise,
at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added
fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”--and so saying he
dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed;
but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being
repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his
drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he
was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care
for his drawings--he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone
for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris
with a fixed determination never to go there again--and he could never
be induced to go.
Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott
House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead
another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad
refused to go, and Vallance went alone--but that is another story.
For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was
to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far
wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in
the doing--one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer
Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for
the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for
ever--desert the night-school at Westminster--burn his boats behind
him--and launch on his destiny as an artist.
V
BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to twenty-one
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”
John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to
put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way
that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly
costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott
Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s _Le Morte d’Arthur_ to
lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend
Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street,
Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts--300
copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies;
but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and
illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist.
[Illustration: HAIL MARY]
Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in
the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he
believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent
Beardsley’s _Hail Mary_, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he
comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one
risen from the well-dressed dead--Aubrey Beardsley had happened in,
according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from
the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst
the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the
other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s
your man!”
To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he
was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to
discover to be the well-known publisher.
So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.
Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his
“_Morte d’Arthur_,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden
splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback.
Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of
Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him
a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he
would at once commission him to illustrate the work.
Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a
specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties.
Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of
any consequence--he was utterly unknown--and his superb master-work
that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to
mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he
had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for
a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a
trifle old for studentship--he was twenty before he made a drawing that
was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books,
and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him
some idea of what was in Dent’s mind--of what was expected of him.
At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at
the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a
chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans
assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.
Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create
the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott
tradition, took the drawing to Dent--the elaborate and now famous
Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as _The Achieving of the San
Grael_, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the
youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear
in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the _Morte
d’Arthur_.
Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious
original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold
effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque
mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; _and the design
is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”_ It is his first use of
the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time
reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark”
is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of
mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for
three candles and three flames--a baser explanation was given by some,
but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all
that Beardsley did.
Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the
_Morte d’Arthur_, which was to begin to appear in parts a year
thereafter, in the June of 1893--the second volume in 1894.
So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic
the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval
woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem
of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John
Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might
enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have
the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt
him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind.
* * * * *
Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate
and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging
and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship
in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back
on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the
National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the
studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in
close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked
to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by
famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that
Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_
mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the
grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no
pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic
designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and
were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of
an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were
trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than
others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally
dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But
the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held
Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were
the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught
himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him.
One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for
the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black
decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the
utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career
depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to
reach his full powers in making them.
Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred
designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell
which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To
Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was
not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to
make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious
enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his
debt to Greece through Anning Bell.
We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during
this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and,
whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for
Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_.
Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the
glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of
achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written
“after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been
forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance
masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_
for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see
him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the
more a marvel--almost a miracle.
It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the
decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew
that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he
poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds
drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere
that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to
all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had
now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that
true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry
or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious
increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create
it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that
ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the
British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls,
delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him
work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he
was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley
worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully,
his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet
no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art
that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or
enhanced that art.
Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his
effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to
fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the
only sketch he made for the completed design--when the pen and ink had
next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber.
The well-known pencil sketch of _A Girl_ owned by Mr. Evans shows
Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough
rhythm of his scrawls.
A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight;
as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of
the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into
day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was
quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to
recognition.
Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at
night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into
working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting
out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the
mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the
dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his
mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the
job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper,
and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has
ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We
can judge better by his unfinished designs--than from any record by
eyewitnesses--that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper
on which he began it, without sketch or study--that he began by vague
pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and
composition and balance of the thing as a whole--that he then drew
in with firmer pencil lines the main design--and then inked in the
pen-line and masses.
[Illustration: PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD]
Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind
of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made
much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the
journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the
Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth
the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread
him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and
held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously
wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the
town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”
Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which
was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He
received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on
which stood two tall tapering candlesticks--the candlesticks without
which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of
pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very
young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose
whereon to lean for reputation.
* * * * *
His rapid increase of power--and one now begins to understand
Vallance’s enthusiasm--induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the
favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892,
half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth,
that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot
towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let
him have a printed proof from the _Morte d’Arthur_ of _The Lady of the
Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur_ to show to Morris. Several
of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we
must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white
decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few
months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering
revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually
offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in
poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have
fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and
Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott
idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole
achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious
and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris.
Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation”
which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any
hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do
his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as
a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly
did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward
Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an
angry remonstrance to Dent.
[Illustration: HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN
_from “Le Morte D’Arthur”_]
How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old
glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not
easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point
much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high
integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley
and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a
rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris,
it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble
of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the
Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had
the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his
being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with
beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for
art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And
the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink
his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted
friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art
of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even
though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no
cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_ were
soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex,
which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned
his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have
been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or
in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there
was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men
of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is
quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that
it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to
create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the
music die in him unsung.
William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years
thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied
outrival him in his “mediæval fake”--find himself--and give to the
world in _The Savoy_ a series of decorations that have made his name
immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the
ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become
an elaborate boredom.
* * * * *
Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get
the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he
was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and
plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s
_Shaving of Shagpat_--a desire to which he returned and on which he
harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of
the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional
publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about
a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering
at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not
impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that
Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason,
with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought
after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in
reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.
However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of
Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the
young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His
health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the
possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration,
he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on
strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely--here he could
use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in
which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy
_Morte d’Arthur_ convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque
vein for _Bon Mots_, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in
Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist
saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as
being latent in him.
* * * * *
Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black
portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the
young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into
the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his
achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every
hand his life long.
The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to
enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left
the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of _The Art
Journal_, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind
had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine
for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of
“dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane,
then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very
astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles
Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of
William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane,
the friend of both men, brought them together--and in the December
of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis
Hind--and _The Studio_, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great
satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of
Charles Holme as his best asset--Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair
as _his_ best asset.
So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go
of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and
artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace
Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of
1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced”
pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had
been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine,
was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was
playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the
room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent
mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with
his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s
elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow
hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in
the style of Phil May--a pallid silent young man, but self-confident,
self-assured, alert and watchful--with the inevitable black portfolio
under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined
for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon
him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked
the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s
portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of
genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé
air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the
two frontispieces for _Le Morte_ _d’Arthur_, the _Siegfried Act II_,
the _Birthday of Madame Cigale_--_Les Revenants de Musique_--“Some
_Salome_ drawings”--with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for
the _Morte d’Arthur_. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the
_Salome_ drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he
looked at the first number of _The Studio_ published three months
later. Wilde’s _Salome_ did not see print until February, a full month
afterwards and was quite unknown.
However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, _The
Studio_, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that
Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to _The Studio_
offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind;
indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the
drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.
Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read
critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley
abroad--and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed
by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But
Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked
him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the
millionaire, had bought the daily _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the weekly
_Pall Mall Budget_ and was launching a new monthly to be called _The
Pall Mall Magazine_. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed
editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, asked Hind to become editor of the
weekly _Budget_ at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look
about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new
art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command
of _The Studio_ in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the
vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what
was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the _Pall Mall Budget_,
for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such
unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind.
So the first number of _The Studio_ was to appear in the April of 1893
glorifying a wonderful youth--his name Aubrey Beardsley!
* * * * *
It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the
good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic
and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of
the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in
encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented
much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had
the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism
who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation
which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive--and they forgave
Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and
Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at
Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the
aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts
men.
On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover
design for _The Studio_ from the much gratified youth, who went
home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire--here
was _réclame_! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or
what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to
appear in the first number of _The Studio_ after Frank Brangwyn, then
beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his
work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from
the portfolio in his several styles--the Japanesque, and the mediæval
_Morte d’Arthur_ blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new
illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life
a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to
champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days.
And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush
irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many--he gave it just
and fair and full value.
All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness
to the first number of _The Studio_ in bringing him before the
public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really
did contain very remarkable work--at the same time it was scarcely
world-shattering--and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic
honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything
more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of
arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction
was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art--and all of
us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work
by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that
process-reproduction won through--and not least of all Beardsley. What
Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it
was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous
style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down
and died.
The first number of _The Studio_ did not appear until the April of
1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is
true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around _The Studio_
that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind.
_The Studio_ itself was no particular success, far less any article in
it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested
greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by
mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp.
Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was
only in our little narrow artistic and literary world--and a very
narrow inner circle at that--where _The Studio_ caused any talk, and
Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé
to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a
somewhat dinted toy--we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the
Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that,
even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very
earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and
bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the
many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so--he
had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at
the New Year had gone from _The Studio_ offices to edit the _Pall
Mall Budget_, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley
to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the
like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley,
utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his
reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the
most wretched drawings imaginable--drawings without one redeeming shred
of value--work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that
were decorating the _Morte d’Arthur_, which however the public had not
yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year.
But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for _Morte d’Arthur_
were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in
the _Pall Mall Budget_. The first volume of _Bon Mots_ appeared in
the April of 1893--the _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_ volume--although
few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was
pretty poor stuff.
* * * * *
Now, though the _Morte d’Arthur_ was in large part done before _The
Studio_ eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise
the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a
glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent
public in _The Studio_ article. There are examples from the _Morte
d’Arthur_, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in
combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with
their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation.
The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance
mimicry of Mantegna called _The Procession of Joan of Arc entering
Orleans_ was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own
choice a year gone by when he made it--so far had he now advanced
beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art
seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far
more masterly _Morte d’Arthur_ decorations. If the writers were at
sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The _Siegfried Act II_ of
mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows
excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his
Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry--it is his typically early or
“hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The
_Birthday of Madame_ _Cigale_ and _Les Revenants de Musique_ show
the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are
akin to _Le Debris d’un Poète_ and _La Femme Incomprise_. But there
was also a Japanesque in _The Studio_ which was to have an effect on
Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published
in the February of 1893 in French the play called _Salome_ by Oscar
Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and
in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the
leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has
been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai
baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous
Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in _The Studio_ which
was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later,
decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found
the destined illustrator of the English _Salome_, translated by Lord
Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that _Salome_ was to be a
marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley.
It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of _The
Studio_, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy
flourishy design of this _Salome_ drawing to the more severe and
restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the
book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed.
Note also another fact: The title of the article published in _The
Studio_ first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at
latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent;
and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to
his work--the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large
pencil drawing of _Sandro Botticelli_ made in 1893 about the time
that _The_ _Studio_ was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been
made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his
figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge
he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings.
Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the
work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the
year before.
Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is
dead--and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible
that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not
so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s
peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as
he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.
* * * * *
By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done
with the _Morte d’Arthur_; and it was only by the incessant prayers
and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans
to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that
Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it.
He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism
from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly
concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for
ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And
another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley;
with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania
so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the
dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping
himself in study of phallic worship--and when all’s said, the worship
of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations,
and is implicit in much that is not so early.
It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the
decorations he wanted for the _Morte d’Arthur_ in the young fellow’s
first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end
of the year of 1892, to which half year the _Morte d’Arthur_ almost
wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled
to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about
the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back
on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as
search the book that the _Morte d’Arthur_ was never completed--we find
designs doing duty towards the end again more than once--but Dent had
secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration.
There appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for June 1893, drawn in
April 1893, as the first _Studio_ number was appearing, a design known
as _The Neophyte_, or to give its full affected name, “_Of a Neophyte,
and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel_”;
it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called
_The Kiss of Judas_--both drawings reveal an unmistakable change
in handling, and the _Neophyte_ a remarkable firmness of andform,
and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed.
Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque
frontispiece to the _Morte d’Arthur_ and kindred works in his “hairy
line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists
was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators
were reaching quite wonderful effects through it--it was not lost on
Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities.
[Illustration: “OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED UNTO
HIM”]
It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley
for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a
long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just
to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will
in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he
has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a
handling as _The Neophyte_. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more
obvious to the lay mind a little further on.
It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s _Morte d’Arthur_
phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that
the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it
for months--indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late
1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even
in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy
line” called _The Questing Beast_ is dated by Beardsley himself “March
8, 1893”--as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley
by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893
decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques
decorations of late 1892; and by the time the _Morte d’Arthur_ began
to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely
rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.
The two cover-designs for _The Studio No. I_ in April 1893 were
obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the
_Morte d’Arthur_--in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be
exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the
_Morte d’Arthur_ drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of
Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.
There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating
procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the _Morte
d’Arthur_ on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs.
Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work.
Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in
bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half
awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with:
There was a young man with a salary
Who had to do drawings for Malory;
When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure
You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”
As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry
of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty,
faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius.
And as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a
Japanesque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be
outdone in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque
mark” of the three candles, with three flames--in the more elaborate
later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke--or as Beardsley
himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as
important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and
paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light
that he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether
the “Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to
employ the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for
three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from _The Yellow
Book_--his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years--we shall
find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition to his
name. So it is well to dwell upon it here.
The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 1892 to
mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped, and he
employed it indifferently and incongruously on any type of his designs
whether _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism or the Japanesque grotesques of
his _Bon Mots_. And we have seen that it was in the middle of his
twentieth year--he last used it in fact in the February of 1893--that
he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his initials and signature.
He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative years. He signs henceforth as
A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as Aubrey B.
In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon his
_Salome_ designs, as weary of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques as of the
_Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque mark”
become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate--the V quite
departed from his signature.
I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as he
called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most
amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on
forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it!
[Illustration]
From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship
by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at twenty-one except
to a small artistic circle. The _Bon Mots_ grotesques, mostly done in
the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, _Sydney Smith
and Sheridan_, in the April of 1893; the second volume at the year’s
end, _Lamb and Douglas Jerrold_, in December 1893; and the third, the
last volume, _Foote and Hooke_, in the February of 1894. The _Morte
d’Arthur_ began to be published in parts in June 1893. The feverish
creation of the mediæval designs in the late part of 1892 alongside of
the _Bon Mots_ grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s enthusiasm, and his
style evaporated with the growth of his weariness--by mid-1893 he was
finding the _Morte d’Arthur_ “very long-winded.” And what chilled him
most, he found the public indifferent to both--yet Beardsley knew full
well that his whole interest lay in publicity.
It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. This
is a larger question and a serious question--but it _is_ a question.
It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as
well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to that.
But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed
his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism of the
_Morte d’Arthur_, by that time he came near to the end of the book
he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created for it; so also
his next development was as rapid, and by the time he is at the end of
his new Japanese phase in _Salome_ we shall see him again advancing so
rapidly to a newer development of his style that he grew weary of the
_Salome_ before he completed it, and threw in a couple of illustrations
as makeweight which are utterly alien to the work and disfigure it. And
yet these two drawings were made immediately after working upon this
_Salome_, and were thrown in only out of a certain sense of resentment
owing to the suppression of two designs not deemed to be circumspect
enough. But Beardsley did not refuse to make new drawings in key
with the rest--he had simply advanced to a new style quite alien to
_Salome_, and he found he could not go back. This will be clearer when
we come to the _Salome_.
So precisely with the _Morte d’Arthur_; even the last decorations he
made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in _The Yellow Book_.
* * * * *
Before we leave the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the difficulties with
Beardsley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors
are often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps
to the ladder of Fame--and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M.
Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to
bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with
his song wholly unsung--there would have been for him no _Studio_
“réclame,” no _Yellow Book_, no _Salome_, no _Savoy_. Dent, employing
with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an
edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal _Morte d’Arthur_ which is a
triumph for English bookmaking--he gave us the supreme edition that
can never be surpassed by mortal hands--he did so in a form within the
reach of the ordinary man--and in the doing he made the much vaunted
work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear second-rate,
mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires.
[Illustration: HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”]
[Illustration: THE PEACOCK SKIRT
_from “Salome”_]
VI
THE JAPANESQUES
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-One
“SALOME”
Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the
edge of manhood.
We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have
paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He
really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial
fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this
mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical
challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the
thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs
of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque _Caricature of
Whistler_ on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time.
Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his
visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put
down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of
the early part of 1893--at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that
its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years,
and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and
craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the _Salome_ founded frankly
upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by
Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of
Whistler have been delayed for two years?
But--as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this
time revealed to the seeing eye--it was now to the work of the better
Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan.
The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable
for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach.
His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by
these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such
Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their
wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It
was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints
by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features
and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his
Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the
sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add
to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on.
* * * * *
It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to
publish the _Morte d’Arthur_ in parts in the June of 1893, as it had
called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane
now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition
of Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The
young fellow leaped at it--not only as giving him scope for fantastic
designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing
over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin
Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice,
founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley
had made--either on reading the French edition, or on reading the
widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in
the February of 1893--illustrating the lines that raised so hot a
controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé
ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several
illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the
birth of _The Studio_ in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.
Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his
back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness
he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before,
was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for
_Salome_.
Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the
Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing
house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day--they
were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant
support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on
producing _belles lettres_ in an attractive and picturesque form.
This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns.
The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints
repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack
publishers.
On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather
on trust--the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Bon Mots_ were far from what
they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that
Beardsley was but little known.
It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the
true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar
Wilde--but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias
as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than
Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King
Herod--but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and
did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s
play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play.
Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would
conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock
Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed
was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the _Morte
d’Arthur_, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes
as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his
imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play--and he proceeded
to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that
pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street
jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the
rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his
beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power.
It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if
reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press,
to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have
been hard put to it to explain--it was a sort of philistine literary
or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact
of line is perhaps more obvious in the _Salome_ drawings than in the
_Savoy_, since the _Salome_ designs are largely line unrelated to mass,
there are even so-called critics to be found who place the _Salome_
drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!
Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but
happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his
line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius
thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the _Salome_
drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line
condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged
application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this,
the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last
surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded
itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite
a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear
sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional--grave or gay.
But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor
when he completed, the _Salome_, wherein his line is yet hesitant,
thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is
stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan.
Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies
the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the _Salome_ against the
genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It
is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture
the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In _Salome_ he got
all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in
_The Stomach Dance_, the finest as it is the only really grossly
indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese
line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the
_Salome_ he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of
1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered
that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen
worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is
in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of
arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the
_Salome_ designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal
the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He
was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese
conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with
feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and
by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for
the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness--the
groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep
of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective--all are
gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is
secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the _Morte d’Arthur_,
and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the
mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and
hand--neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley
laid down the book of _Salome_ he had completed it with a final
decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley
closed the book of _Salome_ he had found himself. His last great
splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he
sat down and drew the exquisite _Burial of Salome_ in a powder-box in
the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was.
_Salome_ finished, however, was not _Salome_ published. Elkin Mathews
and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without
certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two
gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public
recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be
“difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me
amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly
pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward,
and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who
would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or
indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that
Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations
on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made
from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little
done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus
the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum--however much
they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously
puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were
passed by! By consequence, the _Title Page_, and _Enter Herodias_
were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I
was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings
that were deliberately and grossly obscene, _The Stomach Dance_
appeared without change--was accepted without demur by the public
and in silence by the censorious--indeed the lasciviousness of the
musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the _Toilette of
Salome_, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction,
had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very
second-rate design of _John and Salome_, and in place of the two
had been inserted the wretched _Black Cape_ and Georgian _Toilette_
which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the
fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a
strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared
to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and
cheap conceit--for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt
to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his
supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting
or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been
the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public
thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The
public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering,
and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young
fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any
case, the mediocre _Black Cape_ and the better Georgian _Toilette_,
quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were
an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so
greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will
thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to
complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.
[Illustration: THE STOMACH DANCE
_from “Salome”_]
The interpolated _Black Cape_ and the _Second Toilette_ we may here
dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they
are wholly outside the _Salome_ atmosphere. Of the pure _Salome_
designs, incomparably the finest are _The Stomach Dance_ and the
_Peacock Skirt_. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times,
that he considered the best drawings to be _The Man in the Moon_, the
_Peacock Skirt_, and _The Dancer’s Reward_--it should be noted by
the way that Beardsley showed by his _Book of Fifty Drawings_ that
his title was _The Man in the Moon_ not as the publishers have it,
_The Woman in the Moon_. But it is in _The Climax_, one of the less
noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride--for
though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to
be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as
compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his
flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the
same design, drawn but a year before and shown in _The Studio_ first
number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards
ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with
the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs
in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.
We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely
censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be
on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to
the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time
of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to
carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be
produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man
should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence
of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book.
Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow
that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening
effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an
utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to
such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the
enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour
after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact
position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a
living wage?
Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen
and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given
the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between
his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was
compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust
upon him, in having accepted long contracts--or rather contracts that
took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his
commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have
fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him,
passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step
back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted
at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can
the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then
could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of
the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the
_Salome_ drawings for instance have appeared in the _Morte d’Arthur_?
But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high
achievement would have suffered--and Death was beckoning to him not
to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the
artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it
in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement
of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the
letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating
a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone
forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by
doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure?
Of the 544 or so decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_, several are
repeated--some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate,
just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for
the _Morte d’Arthur_, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get
a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100
for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings
a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300
would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what
he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not
permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain
usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist
to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know
the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of
flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up
self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to
pay his pound of flesh....
Even before Beardsley was done with _Salome_, he had exhausted the
Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has
to evolve a _Title-page_, a _List of Contents_, and a _Finis_; and
we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of _Salome_,
weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield
his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of
his _Morte d’Arthur_ designs again, he was about to burst into a new
song as hinted at by the last three designs for _Salome_. An artist is
finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”]
About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley
wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new
book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,”
which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said:
that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a
new venture about to appear. For _The Yellow Book_ is the only contract
that emerges out of this time.
It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this
time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they
took their scheme to John Lane.
Whilst at work on the _Salome_, Beardsley began the long series of
decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back,
forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews
and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as
_The Keynote Series_ of novels, published on the heels of the wide
success of _Keynotes_ by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist
stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.
And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art
Club.
Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists
and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother
and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after
their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his
sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental
roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought
their little home--a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III]
VII
THE GREEK VASE PHASE
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister
Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home
in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance
decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much
talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds
today!
Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London.
Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother,
were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care
to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play
the host--and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities
were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young
man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his
“tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white
forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for
it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.
Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running
from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs
of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at
her dressing-table known as _La Dame aux Camélias_. The couch in his
studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much
of his all too short life lying upon it.
* * * * *
When Beardsley began the _Salome_ drawings at twenty-one he was, as
we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese
masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the
craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces
was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque
features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work
upon the _Salome_ designs he was much at the British Museum and was
intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum
is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in
their line and mass fascinate Beardsley--not only was he struck by
the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered
by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius
which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of
the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye
towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified”
by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it
was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered
erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly
intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs
upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris,
appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they
had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his _Salome_
drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr
peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it
behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to
make him famous.
* * * * *
[Illustration: LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III_]
On the 15th of April 1894 appeared _The Yellow Book_. It made Beardsley
notorious.
In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl
with the 3rd, the last, volume of _Bon Mots_; and _Morte d’Arthur_
was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say
that _Salome_ made Beardsley famous. _Salome_ was an expensive
book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but
ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and
_Salome_ passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But _Salome_ did lead
to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public
eye.
Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing
a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather
together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that
had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the
so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe
or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of
_The Yellow Book_ developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich
in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to
make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort
of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes--to answer in the pictorial
realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have
fired a publisher. _The Yellow Book_ quarterly, however, was a very
different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art
of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley
dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It
was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the
literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne
witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and
himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth
Club, founded the much discussed _Yellow Book_.” This quarterly, to
be called _The Yellow Book_ after the conventional name of a “yellow
back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each
number--not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a
magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the
one on the other.
Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the _Salome_, as
we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them
and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of
1894, the _Salome_ off his hands, that _The Yellow Book_ was planned in
detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery
ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the
expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning
to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near
at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the _Salome_ into the wastepaper
basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime
flung aside the _Morte d’Arthur_ Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now
gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it--through books--and
he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of
his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with
flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done--employing
line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and
enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the
_Morte d’Arthur_ now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking
subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was
cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan
and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of
social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world--he
took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of
the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts;
its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than
the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little
insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his
own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own
class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience
whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else--but we are coming to
that.
It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German,
Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic
weekly, _Pick-Me-Up_, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a
monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that
it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the _Graphic_
and _Illustrated London News_.” Struck by some article attacking the
art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly
review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called _St.
Paul’s_. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the
general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an
opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make
some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac--(remember, _St.
Paul’s_ was to begin as a monthly!)--and to illustrate the subjects
to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books,
Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “_Man that holds
the Water_ _Pot_” and the “_Music_,” but the paper did not appear
in January--indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and
fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably
meant for Dent’s _Bon Mots_--however they may have been intended for
_The Fashions_ and _The Drama_ pages of _St. Paul’s_. He made in all
four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not
greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I
“might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value,
however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of
1894--they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked
increase of power over line--they end his _Salome_ Japanesque phase.
It is somewhat curious that, whilst _The Man that holds the Water Pot_
is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the
fourth drawing he made for _St. Paul’s_ seems to have been missed by
all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of
it!
Before we leave _St. Paul’s_, it is interesting to note that at this
time the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by
the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental
headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for _St. Paul’s_ and other
papers.
[Illustration: MESSALINA]
It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the _Poster for the
Avenue Theatre_ which really brought him before a London public more
than anything he had so far done--a success, be it confessed, more due
to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the Avenue
Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which could
not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. Needless
to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw was
to float into the public ken with his play of _Arms and the Man_ at
this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house that from
its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross Bridge, it was
cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost Seagulls.” I shall
always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster with Shaw’s rise
to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being called before
the curtain at the end of _Arms and the Man_, some man amongst the
gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s ready Irish wit
brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the darkness, his lank
loose figure waited patiently until complete silence had fallen on
the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I agree with that
gentleman in the gallery, but”--shrugging his shoulders--“what are we
amongst so many?”
Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s _Plays_ appeared about the
April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of
a wide public.
* * * * *
Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.
It was the publication of _The Yellow Book_ in the mid-April of 1894
that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow
circle so far interested in him.
London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, or
at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room
was sprinkled with the latest books--the well-to-do bought pictures and
wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves on their
literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London white in a
night, so _The Yellow Book_ littered the London drawing-rooms with
gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand. It “caught on.”
And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the crest of its wave
of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. After all, everything
that was outstanding and remarkable about the book was Beardsley. _The
Yellow Book_ was soon the talk of the town, and Beardsley “awoke to
find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured his work; and soon he
was himself caricatured by “Max” in the _Pall Mall Budget_; whilst the
Oxford undergraduates were playing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like.
But it was left to Mostyn Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque
on any poem in our tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus:
’Twas rollog; and the minim potes
Did mime and mimble in the cafe;
All footly were the Philerotes
And Daycadongs outstrafe....
Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!
The aims that rile, the art that racks,
Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun
The stumious Beerbomax!
* * * * *
Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod,
The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue,
Came piffling through the Headley Bod,
And flippered as it flew....
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
_from “The Yellow Book” Volume III_
PAR LES DIEVX
JVMEAVX TOVS
LES MONSTRES
NE SONT PAS EN
AFRIQUE]
As one turns over the pages of _The Yellow Book_ today, it is a
little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth.
Indeed, London’s passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic
weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But it _was_ a sensation. And that
sensation flung wide the doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He
enjoyed his fame with gusto. He revelled in it. And the ineffable and
offensive conceit that it engendered in the lad was very excusable and
understandable. He was lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere
and enjoyed every ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good
fortune that his fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours,
was enhanced by an increase of health and strength that promised
recovery from the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and
waking. His musical childhood had taught him the value of publicity
early--the whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means
and at every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and
loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes
he even felt a little ashamed of it--and of his Jackals. But his vogue
now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody--and
he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained.
It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even at
the publishing of the second volume of _The Yellow Book_ in July there
was that which happened--had he had prophetic vision--that boded no
good for the young fellow.
The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane fell in,
and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane in sole
possession of The Bodley Head--and _The Yellow Book_.
The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head
considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The
Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a
twelvemonth was out.
It was on the designs of this second volume of _The Yellow Book_ of
July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last
time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; for,
in the _Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf
Club_ on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given place
to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.”
Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his
work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had
no need to work--were above work. He liked to pose as one who did
not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly
appeared, he won an increase of notoriety--or obloquy, which was much
the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was
to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that
scared him--and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip.
Meanwhile the Christmas number of _Today_ produced his very fine
night-piece _Les Passades_.
[Illustration: NIGHT PIECE]
Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue--as playwright and wit and
man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the _Salome_, with its
erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a
false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never
were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer
of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented
Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley
delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what
was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that
Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young
talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It
came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites to go over
to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship,
and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified
his condescension to that end--but the gross patronage of Wilde on
the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had
flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an
intimate--he never again sought to bask in the radiance.
To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a
novel called _The Green Carnation_ of which Wilde and his associates
were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination.
The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s
intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even
if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very
well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to
pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He
sprang at opportunity--and struck hard. With the reckless courage
so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he
struck--and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a
leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the
healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his
vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening
public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at
a state of elegant decay.
Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which brought
Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde but to
bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social pariah.
On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and charged at
Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial; and on the
3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary
public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April amidst the wild
enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested the same evening.
On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow Street with
a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch during the
fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde and Taylor
were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, on the
26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. After a
case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed and the
prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again refused. A
week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail for £5,000;
and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor was put on
trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May the 20th,
and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed. The
following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began at the Old
Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” and with
Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour.
The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. The
fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of mark with
like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general scare set
in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but it also caused
a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a short while
before been in truculent vogue....
John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume III of
_The Yellow Book_ in October 1894 and volume IV in the January of
1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number, volume
V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number bound,
when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook society.
The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend of Oscar
Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the writers of _The
Yellow Book_; but whatever the cause, John Lane who was in America
was suddenly faced with an ultimatum--it was said that one of his
chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened that without
further ado either he or Beardsley must leave _The Yellow Book_ at
once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not alone but
had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her vogue,
with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits of the
storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John Lane in
his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet was
a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own
business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision
could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s
drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, and
anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. It
may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship was
solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a most
unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic
in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts of moral
cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley _The Yellow
Book_ was doomed--it at once declined, and though it struggled on, it
went to annihilation and foundered.
This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant
that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John
Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in
deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it
might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite
pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But
Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in
that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be
thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made
responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly
detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself.
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ was very bitterly resented by
Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height
of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him
by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did
with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must
be confessed that _The Yellow Book_ at once became a stale farce
played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the
scene-shifter--_Hamlet_ being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even
more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment
at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an
intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking,
Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude
towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous
price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at
least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in
the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his
very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable
personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL
_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I_]
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ placed Beardsley in a very awkward
financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings for
_The Yellow Book_ must have been but small at best; and it is a mystery
how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and
that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man
of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been
dangerously staunched by his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_.
The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for
volume V of _The Yellow Book_, printed for April, but suppressed at
the last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and
craftsmanship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a
new craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves
in the later _Yellow Book_ designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895,
at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an
interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was
about to astonish the world.
* * * * *
_The Yellow Book_ phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what
went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine
firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous _Lady
Gold’s Escort_ and _The Wagnerites_ are the type, and of which The
Nightpiece is the triumph--and a very thin delicate line, generally
for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn
head--of which the _Mrs. Patrick Campbell_ is the type and _L’Education
sentimentale_ a variant--whilst the three remarkable _Comedy-Ballets of
Marionettes I, II, and III_, show white masses used against black.
Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in mid-1894
in the July volume, No. 2, of _The Yellow Book_. The _Plays of John
Davidson_, several _Madame Réjanes_, the fine _Les Passades_, the
_Scarlet Pastorale_, and the _Tales of Mystery and Wonder_ by Edgar
Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 _Yellow Book_ phase.
But in the third volume of _The Yellow Book_, the fanciful and
delightful portrait of _The Artist in bed_, “_Par les dieux jumeaux
tous les monstres ne sont pas en Afrique_,” and the famous _La Dame
aux Camélias_ standing before her dressing table, advance his handling
in freedom and rhythm; as does the exquisite _The Mysterious Rose
Garden_, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of
Biblical illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the
_Annunciation_”--indeed he could not understand the objections of the
prudish to it and resented its being misunderstood! The _Messalina with
her Companion_ is of this later _Yellow Book_ phase; and the _Atalanta
without the hound_ of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example of
it.
The beautifully wrought _Pierrot Invitation Card_ for John Lane; the
remarkable wash drawings _A Nocturne of Chopin_ from the suppressed
Volume Five, and the _Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47_ of _The Studio_,
all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, show
Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the
double-page _Juvenal_ of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair,
he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change,
as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that
followed Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_; for, being
commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for _An Evil
Motherhood_, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected _Black Cape_, of
the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only
under the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that
Beardsley made the now famous design of the _Evil Motherhood_ in which
he entirely breaks from _The Yellow Book_ convention and craftsmanship,
and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.
[Illustration: THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN
_from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV_]
It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_
that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s
_Posters_ for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a
mediocre poster for _The Pseudonym Library_, a woman in a street
opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest _Poster_ he ever
designed--a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in
black and purple, for _Christmas Books_--all three of _The Yellow Book_
phase.
* * * * *
There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from _The Yellow
Book_, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s
life--an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a
curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by.
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and
it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to
criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in
the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for
it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying
what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d
campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient
philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and
conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full
career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter,
if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy
opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against
modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great
magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted
that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of
Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time.
I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English
Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was
ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and
Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples
of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and
Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff
Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists
at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement.
Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so
far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national”
in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not
as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his
art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and
Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were
not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken
English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through
borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision.
In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British
genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being
“effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”--which was not at all typical
of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very
brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD]
Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him,
cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply;
and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously
hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition
of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the
Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of _St. Paul’s_; and the editor,
Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to
its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but
contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:
114 Cambridge Street
S. W.
June 28th
SIR, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism,
or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic
surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I
may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am
“sexless and unclean.”
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if
he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
Yours &c
Aubrey Beardsley
This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic
delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to
answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be
published--that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in
seeking self-advertisement--but I was the last man in the world to
allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to
Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw
at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown
before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword
and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired
to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by
cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with
“Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his
naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply
at the same time, as follows:
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.
SIR,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee,
his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his
untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy
bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove
descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to
establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal
confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking
his morning bath--a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling
thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours truly
Hal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the
fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to
advertisement--the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a
weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt--before giving
out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s
“masterpiece”--on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be
too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed
to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on
me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that
Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys
more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his
mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention
of mine to lash _at him_ but at Harry Quilter--at the same time perhaps
he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I
thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts
to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites,
when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as
it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the
years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley
trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published
were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to
Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid
his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to
employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his
line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere
advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design,
Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told
me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him
a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at
Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy
whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly
when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who
had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group
that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly
agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more
than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton
lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died
about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of
craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the
containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired
the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered
Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as
masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but
both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying:
and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own
significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him
before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the
day of bitter regret was at hand.
* * * * *
Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894
or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with
oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The
Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_;
he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The
Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently
tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture;
and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the
unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style.
“I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints,
and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that
produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
[Illustration: THE SCARLET PASTORALE]
It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_
in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement
for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first
appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a
wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome
prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact,
Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men
in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec,
and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was
essentially “in the small.”
For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured
intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his
dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, John Lane whilst in America during
the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much
resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the
flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it
out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his _Lady
Gold’s Escort_ and his _Wagnerites_.... The decadent fad can’t long
stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant
wonder that the _Daily Chronicle_ asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr.
Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art
bitterly offended Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but
who still more resented this desire to show him as being really
“quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of
the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have
satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested,
not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused
of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling
together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the
vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to
try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist--he was none.
A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”
* * * * *
At a loose end, on his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley
drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and
began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling _Venus and
Tannhäuser_--it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as _Under
the Hill_--a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He
completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings
for _The Yellow Book_, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to
create his great style and supreme achievement in art.
The smallness of the page of _The Yellow Book_ had galled him by
compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size
of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him;
it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and
flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was
kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid
as though he knew he had but a short way to go.
[Illustration: ATALANTA]
_Baron Verdigris_ was the transition from the _Morte d’Arthur_ phase
to the _Yellow Book_ or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as _The Fat
Woman_ was the transition from his Greek vase stage; _Black Coffee_ the
end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of _The
Yellow Book_ page and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley
was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of
detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own.
He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street,
with his sister, when expelled from _The Yellow Book_. It was about
this time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent
movement and became a Roman Catholic priest--the friendship soon became
more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was to have
a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published Beardsley’s
letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and were soon
very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate
insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this time.
Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,” from
which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was from the first
bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes and artistic
temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, soon
we find Gray priming the young fellow with arguments to refute his
“Anglican” friends.
* * * * *
The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with _The
Yellow Book_, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health
began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to
his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or
whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from _The
Yellow Book_ and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at
114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St.
James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.
He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so
ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.
And _The Yellow Book_ went on without him, to die a long lingering
ignoble death.
* * * * *
Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley
Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook
his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the
making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of
1895--and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank
in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original
art of astounding power. It was the proof of the _Venus between
Terminal Gods_. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite
_Mirror of Love_, wrought just before the _Venus between Terminal
Gods_. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom
of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS. 1 AND 2_]
VIII
THE GREAT PERIOD
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four
“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES
1. “THE SAVOY”
It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even
the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good
fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That
fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for
his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his
art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or
put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve
his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show
sympathy, far less to help.
But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to
venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man
who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For,
at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday,
Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought
out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a
providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny--a man who
proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor
and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this
fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to
this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe
the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work.
Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey
Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung.
Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley
lying on a couch--“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.”
Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to _The
Yellow Book_ which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the
fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely
to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme
for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for
Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons.
A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more
than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art.
The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and
in their keen interest in the erotic emotions--Arthur Symons had not
hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet
of a Night.”
Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of _The Savoy_ for
the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to
Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable
his work to be produced on a larger scale.
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”]
The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and he
was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement.
What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of
his art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of
his publisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work
whatsoever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of
Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see
working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made him a
free man.
The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives
us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from _The
Yellow Book_ in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for
Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two
drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him
into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age--these drawings,
clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one
hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly _Venus between
Terminal Gods_, designed for his novel of _Venus and Tannhäuser_,
better known as _Under the Hill_, and the exquisite _Mirror of Love_,
or as it was also called _Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of
a Mirror_. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and
utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill
is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the
different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew
subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm,
orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two
masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of
sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom.
The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a
fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious
figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to
be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the
north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked,
gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to
London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature
and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the
life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and
set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its
narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of
questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at
the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean
and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such
rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there
drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the
original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation
of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman
held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and
resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought
and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put
up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained
door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his
henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed
their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his
daring _coup_ with Burton’s unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_, which was to
be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing
Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a
London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the
country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it
clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work
would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an
ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced
her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully
delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the
bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible
for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday
morning--returned to town with the scrip--and spent the rest of the
evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing
frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or
eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the
Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for--it
is gossiped--some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the
bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the
doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with
a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money
into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for
this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning
correspondence. It had been touch and go.
[Illustration: THE MIRROR OF LOVE]
Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine
editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came
about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers
with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from
him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith
to usurp _The Yellow Book_. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly
humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable
flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and
Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more--or at any
rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an
“exaggeration” to his own advantage--Beardsley’s bank-books alone can
verify or refute it--he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley
from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free
from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what
song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that
he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth
Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had
to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley
should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he
won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every
appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a
show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful
way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair
means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill.
He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when
Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers
was the most loyal and devoted friend he had.
[Illustration: A CATALOGUE COVER]
A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper,
_M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as
he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal
Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden;
as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place
in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a
subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and
interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception
to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come
under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden,
Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room
painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the
walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey
Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his
brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and
very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and
has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be
noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power
of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great
palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy
and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at
Walton-on-Naze....”
You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world
his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious
mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for
ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was
Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s
life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the
humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a
good friend as well as a publisher.”
Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which
was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one
of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public.
There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be
published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to
exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow
was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his
novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to
illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare
craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.
* * * * *
Disgusted with _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley put his immediate past
and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his
beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest
achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated
this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now
opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the
early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again
begun to dog his steps.
Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed
to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley
in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from
money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with _The Savoy_ due to
appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th
century, and at once his art burst into full song.
Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered
Beardsley immersed in his work for _The Savoy_; but finds him now more
concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard
at work upon his obscene novel _Venus and Tannhäuser_, the so-called
_Under the Hill_, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the
inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and
scribbling phrases as they came to him.
[Illustration: ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)]
[Illustration: THE ABBE]
The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a
city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city
he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk
for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked
violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of
the Prudential.”
It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his
master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters,
his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world
of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature
proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial
type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary
gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate,
let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university
magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay
art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead.
He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of
bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise
proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound
sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is
precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial
minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product
not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city
and scholastic circles.
_Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_,
and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to
understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons
could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any
say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without
cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured
stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The
real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another
matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling
in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish
it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground
press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the
real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would
be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour
to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant
erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only
value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing
but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with
an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite
as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to
express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the
real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any
rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the
world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.
[Illustration: THE FRUIT BEARERS]
[Illustration: A CHRISTMAS CARD]
As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us
Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy
images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing--better
uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for
literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical
essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and
art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of
using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a
pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of
mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined
English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere”
than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,”
“reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,”
and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl
with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever
were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”--what Tree used wittily to
call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other
at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic
phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose,
and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of
cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,”
“Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and
refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet
little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant
chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat
old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a
sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and
the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings
of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the
constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary
achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that
publication is impossible.
This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate
or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we
read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had
been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace,
unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour
of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved
Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows
so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals
no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that
vex the age--he is concerned solely with his health or some business of
his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion
shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of
any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling
fellows, not a sign!
It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that
he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned
him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid
contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that
others published.
In _Under the Hill_ Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art
except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul,
so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé--it sounded more real to
him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley--a
hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or
generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable
of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on
satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome
garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings
over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind
as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being
nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament--it explains
his art, his life, his vision--and it proves the cant of all who try to
excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil,
he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as
being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it.
[Illustration: THE THREE MUSICIANS
_from “The Savoy” No. 1._]
[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”]
The story of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, bowdlerised as _Under the
Hill_--by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for
even Beardsley feared to _write_ the Mons Veneris,--he seemed undecided
as to which to call it--the story was without consequence, without
cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of
little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and
desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life
burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons
that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly
coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe.
He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except
in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never
walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night
fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life
that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one
was there--to flit awhile into the room where the children danced--the
sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the
inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes.
He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a
phrase--he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like
a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits
to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of _The
Three Musicians_ with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the
old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies,
as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the _translation from
Catullus_. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse
rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in
literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand
the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make
literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional
act--he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because
he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument
for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to
order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of
all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe
whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was
more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It
was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings--it was
a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the
aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the
eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were
obsolete, a dead language--he is more concerned with dead words than
with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot
make it alive even for himself--he cannot fulfil a character in it
or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street
of fine clothes--there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He
is not greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly
concerned with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this
akin to Oscar Wilde.
* * * * *
It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques
Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable
friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the
picture he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to
Beardsley’s infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see
the author of one of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, _La Dame aux
Camélias_--Alexandre Dumas, fils.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO. 1_]
[Illustration: THE BILLET-DOUX]
Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley
in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of
Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm.
Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be
“unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an
affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully
common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all
except in the atmosphere of its workshop.
He was now working keenly at _The Savoy_ drawings and the illustrations
for his bowdlerised _Under the Hill_, to be produced serially in that
magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the
rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed,
in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for _The Yellow
Book_, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of
the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for _The Savoy_,
being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for
December, _The Savoy_ eventually had to be put off until the New Year;
meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the
famous sequence of masterpieces for _The Rape of the Lock_, announced
for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March.
In January 1896 _The Savoy_ appeared, and made a sensation in the art
world only to be compared with the public sensation of _The Yellow
Book_. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward
with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like
beauty of the superb Title Page--the two black-masked figures in white
before a dressing table--the deft witty verses of the naughty _Three
Musicians_, the _Bathers on Dieppe Beach_, the three sumptuously rich
designs of _The Abbé_, the _Toilet of Helen_, and _The Fruit-bearers_
for the novel _Under the Hill_ which began in this number, capped by
the stately _Christmas Card_ of _The Madonna and Child_ lifted the new
magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.
The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest,
with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which
Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him
to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from
it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his _Morte
d’Arthur_ experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation
even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the
artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath
from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared
the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to _The Rape of the
Lock_--masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the
first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, _The New
Star_--with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of _The Dream_, the
exquisite _Billet-Doux_, the _Toilet_, the _Baron’s Prayer_, and the
magnificent _Rape of the Lock_ and _Battle of the Beaux and Belles_.
[Illustration: THE TOILET]
[Illustration: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK]
The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning
to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming
nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an
extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces--we find
silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal,
each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to
and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a
freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his
design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In
the two drawings of _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Battle of the Beaux
and Belles_ it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the
white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the
single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the
muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and
satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially
as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the
cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of
the thing.
* * * * *
By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s
life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the
February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous
scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable
time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon
that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended
in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his
state--he was about to learn the dread verdict.
The second number of _The Savoy_ appeared in April, as a quarterly,
and its charming cover-design of _Choosing the New Hat_ screened a
sad falling off in the output of the stricken man--for the number
contained but the _Footnote portrait of himself_; the _Third Tableau
of “Das Rheingold”_ which he had probably already done before going
to Brussels; a scene from _The Rape of the Lock_; and but one
illustration to _Under the Hill_, the _Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima_;
whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No.
II--in all but four new drawings!
Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next--the
third--number of The Savoy to appear in July, _the driving of Cupid
from the Garden_, and worked upon the poem of the _Ballad of a Barber_,
making the wonderful line drawing for it called _The Coiffing_, with a
silhouette _cul-de-lampe_ of _Cupid with the gallows_; but his body was
rapidly breaking down.
On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the
letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which
Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this
day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change,
wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning
to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread
he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand
within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to
start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his
wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking
stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It
is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the
Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side
if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that
“_Note_” for the July _Savoy, No. 3_, announcing the end of _Under the
Hill_--Beardsley has made his first surrender.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES]
[Illustration: THE BARON’S PRAYER]
So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last
restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the
terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had
to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the
fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write
as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition
to alien peoples--it was London that found him, London that raised
him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley
himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It
was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the
bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for
the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but
it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though
Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual
home with him--clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture
and to his books and the inspiration of his genius--the engravings
after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he
clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was
never happy at his work.
By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom;
where he set to work on illustrating _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_
as a Christmas Book--for which presumably was the fine _Ali Baba in the
Wood_. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his
“entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he
bends all his powers on illustrating _Lysistrata_! and in this July of
1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings
for the _Lysistrata_ as would have made any man’s reputation--but alas!
masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately.
However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe,
and the plagued man had to prepare for another move--it is a miracle
that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented
body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay
lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately
the world at large can never look upon--the _Lysistrata_. It is almost
unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite
art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he
drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for
publication--that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to
the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order--they utter
the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion--their very
mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself
full well that the work was masterwork--“I have just completed a set of
illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things
I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray,
who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic
Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the
_Lysistrata_ should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that
Beardsley reached the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes through the French
translation of Maurice Donnay--he was so anxious to assert that the
purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in
book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The _Lysistrata_ finished, he
turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the _Sixth Satire
of Juvenal_.
But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off
hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad
state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made
his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the
mischief.” Beardsley found relief--in the _Juvenal_ drawings! “I am
beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for
the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.
[Illustration: THE COIFFING]
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 4.]
With the July number, _No. 3_, _The Savoy_ became a monthly magazine;
and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse
Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost
passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the
_Lysistrata_ sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August
_Savoy, No. 4_--but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this
beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze
curtain, in the same month that he drew the _Lysistrata_ sequence, and
that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives
the world a hint of what it lost.
August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two
Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the _September
Savoy, No. 5_, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the
uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of _The
Woman in White_ which he had made from the _Bon Mots_ line drawing long
before--there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps
lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design
showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white.
It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after
signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work
with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his
drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three
drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but
they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were
most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they
should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the
issues of _The Savoy_ so as to prevent a sense of monotony--we shall
see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at
the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with
the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature.
Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur
Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from
month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at
least one. The full signatures on the _Death of Pierrot_ and the _Cover
for the Book of Fifty Drawings_ are the last signatures in full; and
both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are
about to see.
Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent
business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of
the bleeding from the lungs--a train journey always upset him. He had
to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a
state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe
as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing
cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.”
The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic _Death of
Pierrot_ that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now
brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design,
so the powerful _Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ had to be used
as a cover for the October _Savoy No. 5_. The _Death of Pierrot_ is
wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the
sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual
literary beauty of its written legend.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 7.]
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”]
September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s
winter.
It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices
at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the
first offices of _The Savoy_ at Effingham House, Arundel Street,
Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade
that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already
done, and their publication in an _Album of Fifty Drawings_, to appear
in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his
suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the
end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the _Death of
Pierrot_. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the _Cover
for A Book of Fifty Drawings_. The fifty drawings were collected and
chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes
it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September,
the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive _Bookplate of the
Artist_ for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the
Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm,
however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely
to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path
in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the
extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have
upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade
greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on
view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.
The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful _Cover for the
November Savoy, No. 7_, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the
book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of
“Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful
translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing _Ave
atque Vale_ or “Hail and Farewell” for the _Carmen C I of Catullus_,
whilst the third illustration for the November _Savoy_, the small
_Tristan and Isolde_, shows his interest maintained in the musical
sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended
to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October,
Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s _Das
Rheingold_, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he
himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of _Tannhäuser
returning to the Horselberg_, was trying to induce Beardsley at this
time to illustrate the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ for him. The month of
October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire
with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber
from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly
ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am
quite paralysed with fear,” he cries--“I have told no one of it. It’s
so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer
ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet
before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a
long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s
bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress
made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to
start on her American theatrical tour.
[Illustration: HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS]
[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”]
November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was
to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that
ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the
achievement of this great period of his art--he writes that he has
just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet
of Ernest Dowson’s, _The Pierrot of the Minute_” which was published
in the following year of 1897--a grim irony that a boredom should have
brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work,
he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November
a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to
avail anything.”
There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to
illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one
design in particular of the several good designs in the _Pierrot of
the Minute_, that “_cul-de-lampe_” in which Pierrot, his jesting
done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing
wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework--a
tragic comment on the wonderful _Headpiece_ when Pierrot holds up the
hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob,
blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of
human hands.
It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on
Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the
appearance of his own _Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line_,
“an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some
reason difficult to plumb--it is neither good nor bad, and certainly
not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this
time for the _Book of Fifty Drawings_. It is a pathetically tragic
thought that the November of the exquisite _Pierrot of the Minute_ was
for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room
for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the
belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about
the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state,
a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know
what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that
my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now
since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be
with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains
bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed
state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”
It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the
published prints for the cover and the title-page of _Evelina_--of his
“own early designing.”
The _Savoy_ for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon
drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that
now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.
It was soon clear that the days of _The Savoy_ were numbered and the
editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the
last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public
support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley,
spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it
a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest
and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful _A Répétition of Tristan
and Isolde_--and he flung into the number all the drawings he now
made or had made for _Das Rheingold_, which included the marvellously
decorative _Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold_, that
“sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated
his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book
for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the
unimportant fragments _Flosshilde_ and _Erda_ and _Alberich_, which he,
as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote
of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two
portraits of musicians, the _Mendelssohn_ and the _Weber_; he somewhat
fumbles with his _Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar_ from that _Don
Juan_ of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives
us the _Mrs. Margery Pinchwife_ from Wycherley’s _Country Wife_; he
very sadly disappoints us with his _Count Valmont_ from Laclos’ _Les
Liaisons Dangereuses_ for the illustration of which Beardsley had held
out such high hopes; and he ends with _Et in Arcadia Ego_.
[Illustration: A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”]
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE]
It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for
_The Savoy_ that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number
announces that _The Savoy_ is in future to be half-yearly and a much
higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on
Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.
Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the
appearance of _The Book of Fifty Drawings_ which he had completed
in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design--an
afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance
copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.
The December _Savoy_, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload
all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the
idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, _Les
Liaisons Dangereuses_ by Laclos, and Stendhal’s _Adolphe_....
On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing
himself for _The Idler_”--the interview that appeared in that magazine,
shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.
About Christmas his edition of _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ was taking
shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the
170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to
each of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s
enthusiasm. At this Yuletide appeared _The Book of Fifty Drawings_,
in which for the first time were seen the _Ali Baba in the Wood_, the
_Bookplate of the Artist_, and the _Atalanta in Calydon_ with the
hound. This book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own
estimate of his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty
best drawings; it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did
not always know what was his best work. It is interesting to note that
Beardsley includes the mediocre and commonplace _Merlin_ in a circle,
yet omits some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting
in that Beardsley not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his
early work, but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant
that he would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it,
certain definite drawings--he particularly forbade anything from
the _Scrap Book_ then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected
Ross’s malicious thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to
exchange good, and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces
and inadequacies. And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my
presence solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley
was dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the
temptation until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous
betrayal. However that was not as yet.... Evidently, though the fifty
drawings were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed
one October drawing for something thrown out, for the October _Ave
atque Vale_ appears; and it may be that the _Atalanta in Calydon with
the hound_, sometimes called _Diana_, and the Beardsley _Bookplate_
together with the _Self-portrait silhouette_ that makes the Finis to
the Iconography, may have been done as late, and replaced other
drawings. Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to
the man who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very
beginning--Joseph Pennell. It was the least he could do.
[Illustration: ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND]
[Illustration: BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE]
December had begun with more hope for Beardsley--his lung gave him
little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than anything
else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he felt
he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made
him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in
London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would be
“abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.”
And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he was
becoming quite hopeful again when--taking a walk about New Year’s Eve
he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a dreadful state”
before he could get any help. And he began the New Year with the bitter
cry: “So it all begins over again. It’s so disheartening.” He had
“collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to take him to some
more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved.
* * * * *
So ended the great _Savoy_ period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated to
the span of twelve moons.
IX
THE GREAT PERIOD
ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE
1897 to the End--Twenty-Five
II. THE AQUATINTESQUES
So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley was
now twenty-four and a half years of age--the great _Savoy_ achievement
at an end.
The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897 came in
amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of carrying on
_The Savoy_ had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition was so serious
at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier View to a house
called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where the change seemed
to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He was very funny
about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little from the name of
this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his
Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he writes whimsically.
He began to find so much relief at Muriel, notwithstanding, that he was
soon planning to have rooms in London again--at Manchester Street.
[Illustration: THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY]
By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was “sketching
out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with Boussod
Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his _Frontispiece_ for
Theophile Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, for which he was now
making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style of
the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done--scant wonder
that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after reproduce his
works!--he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous _Bookplate
for Miss Custance_, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, and he also
designed the _Arbuscula_ for Gaston Vuillier’s _History of Dancing_.
For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in Beardsley’s
keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by death one of
the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they hold, the
subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that suffuses
them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering display of
Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he should
have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man.
Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding had
almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious
bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully, and
made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two afterwards
he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sunshine makes
the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire and dreads
to go out. “At present my mind is divided between the fear of getting
too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough sunshine,
or rather warmth near home.” But the doctors had evidently said more
to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided now and in
future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of February saw
his doctor take him out to a concert--a great joy to the stricken
man--and no harm done.
In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to draw.
He also started a short story _The Celestial Lover_, for which he was
making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March turned
cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed a serious
lip over his promise to let him go up to town--to Beardsley’s bitter
disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South--if only even
to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in his room
were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months now.” Yet a
day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in all directions
are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with cold winds, and
bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted fellow amongst
the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh how tired I am
of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made pair of boots....
I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved bitterness.” The
move to London for the South was at last decided upon, for the first
week in April--to the South of France by easy stages. He knew now that
he could never be cured, but he hoped that the ravages of the disease
could be prevented from becoming rapid.
On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even more
eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought to have
the right to beg for a few months more of life--“Don’t think me foolish
to haggle about a few months”--as he has two or three pictured short
stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, Wednesday the
31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church--on
the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the Sacrament which had to
be brought to him, to his great grief, since he could not go to the
Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for near upon a twelvemonth.
From this day of his entering the Church of Rome he wrote to John Gray
as “My dear brother.”
There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art from
his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual
upheaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going
through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been
drawing the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, or indeed steeping
in that novel at all, or drawing the _Arbuscula_. For months he has
been led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church;
yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on _Under
the Hill!_ and drawn the designs for _Lysistrata_ and the _Juvenal!_
not five months since he has drawn his _Bookplate!_ And by the grim
irony of circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same
month that there appeared in _The Idler_ his confession: “To my mind
there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have
the sun shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March _Idler_
by Lawrence, one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the
framework and then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in
the details, was as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend
John Gray, written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just
departing. That interview will therefore remain always as an important
evidence by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It
is true that he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having
despatched it, was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I
have not said too many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute
to the complexity of the human soul that the correspondence with the
poet-priest John Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are
hidden from us, was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to
Rome, he was lending him books and interesting him in books, side by
side with lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their
fellowship with the saints.
Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a week
after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, staying
a day or two at the Windsor Hotel--a happy halt for Beardsley as his
friend John Gray was there to meet him--and crossed to France, where
on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel Voltaire, quai
Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted mother.
Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. He loved to
be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in May he was
reading _The Hundred and One Nights_ for the first time, and inspired
by it, drew his famous _Cover for Ali Baba_, a masterpiece of musical
line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure resplendent
with gems--as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous design.”
Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the prospect
of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sunshine. He
felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he was soon
able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again--perhaps it had been
better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to the sun. There
was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beardsley’s return
from America and their early meeting. He could now write from a café:
“I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though he could not get a
sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove which, being shut
off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a sitting-room and
thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room--he could forget he
was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a lift, the waiters
would carry him up stairs--he could not risk the climbing. And the
bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal joy to him.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”]
With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping
better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his
new religion; reads works of piety, and--goes on his way poring over
naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out of
his room awhile--talks even of getting strong again quite soon.
But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for
Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of
his room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the
following day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him.
A month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised;
and Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its
picturesqueness--indeed St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to
inspire him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself
breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the air
was to make a new man of him.
The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had secured
him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celebrities. And
the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St. Germain,
upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cautioned care.
Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye,
where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue
de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May
drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was
giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch by
assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet--if he
went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth and the
South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St. Germain.
However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a walk in the
forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s creaking body.
The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of the lungs started
again and made him wretched. The arrival of his sister, however, was a
delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his delicious waggery that
she showed only occasional touches of “an accent which I am sure she
has only acquired since she left America.” His health at once improved
with his better spirits.
Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living
genius of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s _Evan
Harrington_; it was about the time that the _Mercure_ published in
French the _Essay on Comedy_ which started widespread interest in the
works of Meredith.
By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; “everyone in the hotel
notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sitting
out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and
lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled
again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a
journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised
to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised
by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley
decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the means
forbade.
[Illustration: ALI BABA IN THE WOOD]
Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high hopes,
Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence he wrote of
his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in the rue Halle
au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that he was out and
about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz Thaulow’s family
welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of his improved health,
it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best of all blessings,
he was now able to work. It was in this August that he met Vincent
O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty-fifth birthday.
Before the month was half through he was fretting to be back in Paris
for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He found this Hotel
rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more sheltered lodgings
in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado, hoping that Dieppe
might still know a gentle September. Though the weather remained wet
and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to Paris. His London doctor
came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered him vastly with hopes of a
complete recovery if he took care of himself, and advised Paris for the
early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was for Paris, turned his back on
Dieppe with a pang--he left many friends. However, late September saw
him making for Paris with unfeigned joy, and settling in rooms at the
Hotel Foyot in the rue Tournon near the Luxembourg Gardens.
His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again from
a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doctor
considered him curable still; he might have not only several years of
life before him “but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching heat
of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the
chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much
out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was--reading
the _Memoirs of Casanova!_ But he had grown cautious; found that seeing
many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and inspiring book.”
But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake solemn heads--all
the talk was henceforth of the South of France. “Every fresh person
one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh objections to the places
we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger late in Paris; but
what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put aside on account of
its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of it show it horribly
“Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cœur sent him a bottle of
water from Lourdes. “Yet all the same I get dreadfully nervous, &
stupidly worried about little things.” However, the doctors sternly
forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly, with fogs; and
Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November saw his mother
taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in the rooms at
the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his last place of
flitting.
Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have ever
been since my school days”; but the fogs that drove him forth made him
write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved so well:
“If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go down hill
rather quickly.”
At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque place.
Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied again and
was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eating well;
was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement in him, to
his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustrations for Ben
Jonson’s _Volpone_, and was keenly interested in a new venture by
Smithers who proposed a successor to _The Savoy_ which he wished to
call _The Peacock_.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”]
The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier and more
peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.”
So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the _Cover of
Volpone_ one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever brought
splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book. He also
made a pen drawing for the _Cover of a prospectus for Volpone_, which
was after his death published in the book as a _Frontispiece_, for
which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning
which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear
in the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had
developed and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All
the same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs,
or so it seems to me, as a Title Page, since _Volpone_ is lettered on
a label upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor
would have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at
all; for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole
style of the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction
on the _Prospectus_. But in this _Prospectus Cover for Volpone_ his
hand’s skill reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his
body’s sorry state--its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical
severity. And all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are
there, the white robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands
raised palm to palm suppliant-wise--the dark polished wood of the gilt
doorway--the fabric of the curtains--the glitter of precious metals and
gems.
In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete list
of drawings for the _Volpone_,” suggested its being made a companion
volume to _The Rape of the Lock_, and asked Smithers to announce it
in _The Athenæum_. Besides the now famous and beautiful _Cover_, he
planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of _Volpone_
to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did execute
are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals that
the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, _Volpone
and his treasure_, but that is to be in line and wash--obviously in
the style of _The Lady and the Monkey_--yet strangely enough, the
remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! And
it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus
in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate
and line version of the _Frontispiece_--and that it is not to appear
in the book. We have the line drawing for the _Prospectus_--and we can
only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated
in the manner of _The Lady and the Monkey_ or the _Initials_. That, in
this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling
in face of the fact that the _Initials_ were in the new method, line
with pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely
states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month,
that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything he
had yet done, which the _Initials_ certainly were.
On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” sending
the _Cover Design for Volpone_ and the _Design for the Prospectus
of Volpone_, begging for proofs, especially of the _Design for the
Prospectus_, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs of
the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for Beardsley’s
Christmas cheer. The beautiful _Miniature_ edition of _The_ _Rape of
the Lock_, with Beardsley’s special _Cover-design in gold on scarlet_,
had just been published--the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley called them.
However, these 24 designs for the _Volpone_ were never to be. But we
know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on the
19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new magazine
of _The Peacock_ projected by Smithers, of which more later. Whilst
delighted with the idea of editing _The Peacock_, Beardsley expresses
fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put the
_Volpone_ into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so,
that there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the
_Initials_ with this letter, for he underlines that _Volpone_ is to
be an important book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that
Beardsley is now sending him--indeed the _Initials_ were, alas! all
that he was ever destined to complete--the 24 illustrations were not to
be. That these _Initials_ were the designs sent is further made clear
by the remark that the new work is a complete, “a marked departure as
illustrative and decorative work from any other arty book published
for many years.” He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he
has left behind him definitely all his former methods. He promises the
drawings to be printed in the text by the first week in January, and
that they shall be “good work, the best I have ever done.”
On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers,
urging on the production of the _Prospectus for Volpone_; and it is
interesting to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in
line and wash, in his aquatint style, of _The Lady and the Monkey_,
was originally intended for the _Volpone_ and not for the set of the
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ in which it eventually appeared; but was cast
out of the _Volpone_ by Beardsley as “it will be quite out of keeping
with the rest of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was
clearly the method he had intended to employ for his illustrations.
What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed for
the illustrations to _Volpone_ only _The Lady and the Monkey_ and the
_Initials_ can hint to us--he was never to create them.
The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the place,
the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued fellow; and
again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depression left him.
He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold or chill; indeed
his only “grievance is mosquitoes.” He would weigh himself anxiously,
fearful of a set-back at every turn.
* * * * *
Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career--a fact
that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley
has noticed--was the very brief period of the public interest in him.
Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound--with _The Yellow
Book_; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the
last number of _The Savoy_ he had vanished from the public eye almost
as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings;
and his failure to keep the public interest with _The Savoy_, and all
its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie
in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire
whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what
new books he was producing. The _Book of Fifty Drawings_ seemed to
have written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better
cause to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to
continue _The Savoy_ in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume;
but Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture--it
had all ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the
public homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought
it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper
cutting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about
that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called _The Peacock_,
to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of _The Savoy_; and
had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s
flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the name
of _The Peacock_ to _Books and Pictures_, which sounded commonplace
enough to make _The Peacock_ appear quite good when otherwise it seemed
somewhat pointless.
[Illustration: INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”]
Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly in
reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the editor of
his new magazine _The Peacock_ and should design the cover and whatever
else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one unswerving
condition, and but one--that “it is quite _agreed that Oscar Wilde
contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously or
otherwise_.” The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s detestation
of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public eye, is the
more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the Church of Rome
with much publicity. Beardsley would not have Wilde in any association
with him at any price.... Before Beardsley leaves the subject of
_The Peacock_ he undertakes to design “a resplendent peacock in
black and white” and reminds Smithers that he has “already some fine
wash drawings” of his from which he can choose designs for the first
number of the magazine. So that we at least know that this first
number of _The Peacock_ was to have had a resplendent peacock in
black and white for its cover, and that it was to have been adorned
with the superb decorations for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, the supreme
artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent skill. He outstripped
in beauty of handling even his already exquisite craftsmanship: and
it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that he was to die
before he had given the world the further fulfilment of his wondrous
artistry--leaving us wondering as to what further heights he might have
scaled.
Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in his
“aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement.
We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers
was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off
Bond Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, at Beardsley’s request, which had been
beautifully reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley
himself realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a
mark in watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings.
But the gods had willed that it should not be.
Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to
the planning of his prospectuses--he watched over them with fatherly
anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part
he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was
art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture of
_The Peacock_, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon
which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals
in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers, should
not be produced “unless you have piles of stuff up your editorial
sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis his
ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions of
the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for
the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns
of _The Yellow Book_ and even _The Savoy_. “The thing,” he writes,
“must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas
about everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little
backbone-less babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical
infinitely more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory
genius (especially when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives
in more detail his mature attitude towards literature: “On the literary
side, impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness
should be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount.
Let verse be printed very sparingly.... I should advise you to let
Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together
a staff. Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something
to say.”... And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and
antipathies in art--“On the art side, I suggest that it should attack
_untiringly and unflinchingly_ the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval
business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of what
picture making should be.”
There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed, his
limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of
eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn
confession of his artistic faith.
X
THE END
1898
Yet the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man with
relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” It
kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine again,
and his hopes were reborn.
So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, with
Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.
In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by
the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked
like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives
on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have
known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind
come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s
life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left
his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he
arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of
being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed--a bad omen
for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost
heart--he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any
further to clamber out of it.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF PIERROT
“_As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon
tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the
comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with
much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of
Bergamo; whither, we know not._”]
The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon
a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his
designs and decorations for the _Volpone_, and remembering the pushing
forward of the _Prospectus_ that he had urged on the publisher,
he had fallen back on the pencil--as the elaborately drawn _Initial_
letters show--for each of the scenes in _Volpone_, employing pencil
with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked
his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams
he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be
abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of _The Savoy_ he had come
nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers
in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were
when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had
found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as
were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase
in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his
imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil,
and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere
and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the
sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or
white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his
skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the
fragile body failed him--at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his
bloodless fingers--his work was done.
As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before
he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the
Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard
Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to
fulfil--even had he had the will--for “the written word remains,” and,
printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven:
Jesus is our Lord & Judge
Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad
drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that
is holy--all obscene drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley.
In my death agony.
But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter
repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting
theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist
lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made
no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He
faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last
words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a
marvellous achievement--and he did so without stooping to any attempt
at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the
truth--and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on
to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius
might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort
as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were
they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes--indeed, almost
before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not
only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together
for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well
Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to
their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship.
On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and
seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body
was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity.
The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian
throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death,
together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the
end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.”
So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds
from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the
Cross--it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a
grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an
arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last
walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.”
Hail and Farewell!
[Illustration: AVE ATQVE VALE]
A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY ACCORDING TO THE STYLE
OF HIS SIGNATURE
PUERILIA
Mid-1888 he comes to town
JUVENILIA
Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement
FORMATIVE PERIOD--BURNE-JONESESQUES
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892
During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three
initials A. V. B.
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
The _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Bon Mots_
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”--the _stunted_ mark.
In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending
of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of
his signature. He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in
ill-shaped “rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque
mark,” even sometimes when he does employ it.
“SALOME”
Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes longer,
more slender, and more graceful.
“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD
This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this
_Yellow Book_ period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque
mark” for the last time.
THE GREAT PERIOD
I. “_The Savoy_” and II. “_The Aquatintesques_”
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 1897
From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, right up to
the end--the only difference being that in the last phase of the
_Aquatintesque line and wash_ work with the few line drawings of this
time, that is from Mid-1896, he signs as a rule only the initials A. B.
in plain block capitals, but now usually _in a corner of his design_,
either in or without a small square label.
“AUBREY BEARDSLEY”
HAS BEEN DESIGNED
BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
AND PRINTED UNDER HIS
SUPERVISION BY THE
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
BINGHAMTON
NEW YORK
Transcriber's Notes:
Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed.
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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