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| author | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-01-29 07:21:04 -0800 |
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| committer | nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> | 2025-01-29 07:21:04 -0800 |
| commit | 23feaf5844bc03f8ca9deb84e3c4a29a96e91404 (patch) | |
| tree | 3d149e1c3e3360e4606fe0134513eb2f1bb4aa7d /75239-h | |
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diff --git a/75239-h/75239-h.htm b/75239-h/75239-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41623a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/75239-h/75239-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,5589 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <title> + Aubrey Beardsley | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 15%; + margin-right: 15%; +} + + h1,h2 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} + +h1 {font-weight: normal; + font-size: 160%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 0.5em; + word-spacing: 0.3em; + letter-spacing: 0.2em; + } + +h2 {font-weight: normal; + font-size: 130%; + margin-top: 2em; + word-spacing: 0.3em; + } + +p { + margin-top: .51em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .49em; +} + +.p1 {margin-top: 1em;} +.p2 {margin-top: 2em;} +.p6 {margin-top: 6em;} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + +hr.full {width: 95%; margin-left: 2.5%; margin-right: 2.5%;} + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} + +.tdl {text-align: left;} +.tdr {text-align: right;} +.tdlp {text-align: left; + padding-left: 1em; + font-size: 80%;} + +.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; + text-align: right; + font-style: normal; + font-weight: normal; + font-variant: normal; + text-indent: 0; +} /* page numbers */ + + +.blockquot { + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 10%; + font-size: 95%; +} + +.big {font-size: 300%;} +.xlarge {font-size: 140%;} +.large {font-size: 120%;} +.less {font-size: 90%;} +.more {font-size: 80%;} +.med {font-size: 70%;} + +.c {text-align: center;} + +.sp {word-spacing: 0.3em;} + +.lsp {letter-spacing: 0.2em;} + +.caption {font-size: 80%; + text-align: center;} + +.caption1 {font-size: 80%; + margin-right: 8em; + margin-left: 8em;} + +.narrow {margin-right: 8em; + margin-left: 8em;} + +.ph2 {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em; + font-size: 140%; + margin-top: 1em; + letter-spacing: 0.2em;} + +.r {text-align: right; + margin-right: 2em;} + +.l {text-align: left; + margin-left: 2em;} + +.gtb +{ + letter-spacing: 5em; + font-size: 90%; + text-align: center; + margin-right: -2em; + font-weight: bold; +} + +.pad {text-align: right; + padding-right: 3em;} + +.pad2 {text-align: right; + padding-right: 2em;} + +.pad3 {text-align: right; + padding-right: 5em;} + +.pad4 {padding-left: 3em;} + + +.bbox {border: double thick; + padding: 2em} + + +.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + +.allsmcap {font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;} + + +/* Images */ + +img { + max-width: 100%; + height: auto; +} +img.w100 {width: 100%;} + + +.figcenter { + margin: auto; + text-align: center; + page-break-inside: avoid; + max-width: 100%; +} + +.figcenter1 { + padding-top: 3em; + margin: auto; + text-align: center; + page-break-inside: avoid; + max-width: 100%; +} + + + +/* Poetry */ +.poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;} +.poetry-container {text-align: center;} +.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; font-size:90%;} +.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} +.poetry .verse {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;} + +.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;} + +/* Transcriber's notes */ +.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; + color: black; + font-size:small; + padding:0.5em; + margin-bottom:5em; + margin-top:3em; + font-family:sans-serif, serif; + border: .3em double gray; + padding: 1em; +} + + </style> +</head> +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 ***</div> + +<div class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover"> +</div> + + +<h1> +AUBREY BEARDSLEY</h1> + +<p class="c less sp">THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,</p> + +<p class="c less sp">THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE +</p> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f1"> +<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="aubrey"> +<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</p> +<p class="caption"><i>by F. H. Evans</i></p> +</div> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + + +<div class="chapter"> + +<div class="bbox"> +<p class="c lsp big"> +AUBREY</p> + +<p class="c lsp big"> +BEARDSLEY</p> + +<p class="c sp"> +THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,</p> + +<p class="c sp"> +THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE</p> + +<div class="figcenter1"> +<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="decoration"> +</div> + +<p class="c sp p2 lsp xlarge"> +HALDANE MACFALL</p> + +<p class="c sp p6"> +NEW YORK</p> + +<p class="c sp large"> +SIMON AND SCHUSTER</p> + +<p class="c sp"> +MCMXXVII +</p> +</div></div> + + + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="c sp more lsp p2"> +COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.</p> + +<p class="c sp med lsp p2"> +PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA +</p> +</div> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="c sp large"> +TO</p> + +<p class="c sp large"> +EARL E. FISK</p> + +<p class="c sp less p1"> +THIS SMALL TRIBUTE</p> + +<p class="c sp less"> +TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP</p> + +<p class="c sp p1 large"> +H. M. +</p> +</div> + +<p class="narrow p6">“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am +not grotesque I am nothing.”</p> + +<p class="narrow">“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.”</p> + +<p class="c sp more">[AUBREY BEARDSLEY.]</p> + + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="ph2">CONTENTS</p> +</div> + +<table> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdl">FOREWORD</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#cf">17</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c1">I:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">BIRTH AND FAMILY</td> + <td class="tdr">23</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c2">II:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL</td> + <td class="tdr">27</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">“THE PUERILIA”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c3">III:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK</td> + <td class="tdr">35</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c4">IV:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP</td> + <td class="tdr">42</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c5">V:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST</td> + <td class="tdr">58</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to Twenty-one</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c6">VI:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">THE JAPANESQUES</td> + <td class="tdr">95</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-one</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">“SALOME”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c7">VII:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">THE GREEK VASE PHASE</td> + <td class="tdr">113</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-one to Twenty-three</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">“THE YELLOW BOOK”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c8">VIII:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">THE GREAT PERIOD</td> + <td class="tdr">159</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">“THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-three to Twenty-four</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">I. “THE SAVOY”</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c9">IX:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">THE GREAT PERIOD</td> + <td class="tdr">234</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">1897 to the End—Twenty-five</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">II. THE AQUATINTESQUES</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c10">X:</a></td> + <td class="tdl">THE END</td> + <td class="tdr">260</td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdlp">1898</td> + <td class="tdr"></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdr"></td> + <td class="tdl">A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY   </td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#c11">269</a></td></tr> + +</table> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="ph2">ILLUSTRATIONS</p> +</div> + +<table class="less"> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY <i>by F. H. Evans</i></td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f1"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f3">25</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">HOLYWELL STREET</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f4">33</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">HAIL MARY</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f5">60</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f6">67</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f7">71</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">“OF A NEOPHYTE....”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f8">85</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f10">92</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE PEACOCK SKIRT</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f11">94</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE STOMACH DANCE</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f12">103</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">TITLE-PAGE OF “SALOME”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f13">108</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f14">112</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f15">115</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">MESSALINA</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f16">121</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f17">125</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">NIGHT PIECE</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f18">129</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f19">136</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f20">139</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f21">143</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE SCARLET PASTORALE</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f22">149</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">ATALANTA</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f23">153</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NOS.</i> I <i>AND</i> II</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f24">158</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f25">161</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE MIRROR OF LOVE </td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f26">165</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">A CATALOGUE COVER</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f27">169</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f28">173</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE ABBÉ</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f29">175</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE FRUIT BEARERS</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f30">179</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">CHRISTMAS CARD</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f31">181</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE THREE MUSICIANS</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f32">185</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f33">186</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> I</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f34">189</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE BILLET DOUX</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f35">191</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE TOILET</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f36">195</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE RAPE OF THE LOCK</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f37">197</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f38">201</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE BARON’S PRAYER</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f39">203</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE COIFFING</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f40">207</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> IV</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f41">209</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> VII</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f42">213</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f43">215</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f44">219</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f45">220</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f46">223</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE TO “THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f47">225</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f48">229</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f49">231</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f50">235</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f51">241</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">ALI BABA IN THE WOOD</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f52">245</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f53">249</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f54">255</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">THE DEATH OF PIERROT</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f55">261</a></td></tr> + +<tr> + <td class="tdl">AVE ATQUE VALE</td> + <td class="tdr"><a href="#f56">270</a></td></tr> + + +</table> + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="cf">FOREWORD</h2> +</div> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">About</span> 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.</p> + +<p><i>The Yellow Book</i> had come upon the town three months gone by.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span> +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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>! 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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>—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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Savoy</i>—and was soon to begin work on the superb +designs for <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span> +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 <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>. 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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="r"><span class="smcap large">Haldane Macfall.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></span></p> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="c sp"> +<span class="xlarge lsp">AUBREY BEARDSLEY</span><br> +<br> +<span class="less">THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,<br> +THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE</span><br> +<br> +1872-1898<br> +</p> +</div> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c1">I</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">BIRTH AND FAMILY</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">To</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span> +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....</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f3"> +<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="aubrey"> +<p class="caption">SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</p> +<p class="caption">(<i>Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy</i>)</p> +</div> + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c2">II</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">THE “PUERILIA”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">Of</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing +his pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; +and in the January of 1885 he became a boarder.</p> + +<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Holywell Street</i> was made in mid-1888 before +he left the school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red +hair—worn <i>á la Bretonne</i>,” 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.</p> + +<p>C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at +Brighton; and at one of these is played “<i>L’Enfant Prodigue</i>” without +words—it was to make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley.</p> + +<p>There is no question that <i>L’Enfant Prodigue</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, +though how exactly he fitted the red hair “<i>a la Bretonne</i>” to his theory +of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the +wearer, would require more than a little guesswork.</p> + +<p>The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it +came to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Holywell Street</i>. 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 +<i>Holywell Street</i> was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley +to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in the <i>Holywell Street</i> +(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.</p> + +<p>In the <i>Holywell Street</i> there <i>is</i> the sign—and a portent.</p> + +<p>It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic +wayfaring.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f4"> +<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="holywell"> +<p class="caption">HOLYWELL STREET</p> +</div> + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c3">III</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">At</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>But it is that <i>Holywell Street</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the +National Gallery to browse amongst antique art.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“We know by the <i>Scrap Book</i>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p> + +<p>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 <i>Gentle Art of Making Enemies</i>—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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>The sun shone for him.</p> + +<p>He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured +an introduction to Burne-Jones.</p> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c4">IV</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">On</span> a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth +birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Scrap Book</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span> +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 <i>Molière</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span></p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span> +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 <i>Salome</i> to the world.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Bee</i>; and it was in the November +of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his <i>Hamlet</i> in which +he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Pied Piper</i> stuff—which one cannot believe that Beardsley +would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque <i>Hamlet</i> from +the <i>Bee</i> 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 <i>Hamlet</i>. Then there was the <i>Scrap +Book</i>! 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span> +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 <i>ebouriffé</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Procession +of Joan of Arc</i> in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Procession +of Joan of Arc</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a curious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday; +and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Gentle +Art of Making Enemies</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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—<i>Sidonia the Sorceress</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span> +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!——</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span> +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 <i>something</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span> +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.</p> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c5">V</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to twenty-one</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">John M. Dent</span>, 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 <i>Le Morte d’Arthur</i> 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f5"> +<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="hail"> +<p class="caption">HAIL MARY</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>Hail Mary</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span> +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!”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.</p> + +<p>Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for +his “<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>,” 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Achieving of the +San Grael</i>, 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 +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>.</p> + +<p>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; <i>and the design +is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter, +in the June of 1893—the second volume in 1894.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Bon Mots</i> by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came +about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and <i>Morte +d’Arthur</i> mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to +which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the <i>Bon +Mots</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span> +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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>. It made him.</p> + +<p>One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques +for the <i>Bon Mots</i> to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid +black decorations of the mediæval <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> put upon Beardsley +for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his +whole career depended on those designs for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, and +he strove to reach his full powers in making them.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was +during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s <i>Evelina</i> +and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings +for Hawthorne’s <i>Tales</i> and Mackenzie’s <i>Man of Feeling</i>.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span> +been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance +masterpieces rose-leafwise from the <i>Rape of the Lock</i> and +<i>The Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p>It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the +decoration of the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span></p> + +<p>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 <i>A Girl</i> owned by Mr. Evans +shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the +rough rhythm of his scrawls.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f6"> +<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="sketch"> +<p class="caption">PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD</p> +</div> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span> +foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young +fellow to let him have a printed proof from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> of <i>The +Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f7"> +<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="queen"> +<p class="caption">HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “Le Morte D’Arthur”</i></p> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> +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.</p> + +<p>William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span> +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 +<i>The Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Shaving of Shagpat</i>—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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span> +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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> convention by drawing +fantasies in this Japanesque vein for <i>Bon Mots</i>, 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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Art Journal</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span> +Charles Holme and Lewis Hind—and <i>The Studio</i>, 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 <i>his</i> best asset.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Le Morte</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span> +<i>d’Arthur</i>, the <i>Siegfried Act II</i>, the <i>Birthday of Madame Cigale</i>—<i>Les +Revenants de Musique</i>—“Some <i>Salome</i> drawings”—with several +chapter-headings and tailpieces for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>. Hind’s memory +probably tricked him as to the <i>Salome</i> drawings; for, in refreshing +his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of <i>The Studio</i> +published three months later. Wilde’s <i>Salome</i> did not see print until +February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.</p> + +<p>However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, +<i>The Studio</i>, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that +Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to <i>The Studio</i> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> and +the weekly <i>Pall Mall Budget</i> and was launching a new monthly to +be called <i>The Pall Mall Magazine</i>. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry +Cust, appointed editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, asked Hind to become +editor of the weekly <i>Budget</i> 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 <i>The Studio</i> in his stead. But even +as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span> +Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship +of the <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>, for which, unfortunately, the young +fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat +dumbfounded Hind.</p> + +<p>So the first number of <i>The Studio</i> was to appear in the April of +1893 glorifying a wonderful youth—his name Aubrey Beardsley!</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a +cover design for <i>The Studio</i> from the much gratified youth, who went +home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire—here was +<i>réclame</i>! 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 <i>The Studio</i> after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span> +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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> +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.</p> + +<p>All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness +to the first number of <i>The Studio</i> 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.</p> + +<p>The first number of <i>The Studio</i> did not appear until the April of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span> +1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is +true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around <i>The Studio</i> +that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. +<i>The Studio</i> 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 <i>The Studio</i> 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 <i>The Studio</i> offices to edit the <i>Pall +Mall Budget</i>, 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, which however<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span> +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 +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable +venture in the <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>. The first volume of <i>Bon Mots</i> +appeared in the April of 1893—the <i>Sydney Smith and Sheridan</i> volume—although +few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it +respect. It was pretty poor stuff.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>Now, though the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> was in large part done before <i>The +Studio</i> 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 <i>The +Studio</i> article. There are examples from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, 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 <i>The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans</i> 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 +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can +scarce be blamed. The <i>Siegfried Act II</i> 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 <i>Birthday of Madame</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span> +<i>Cigale</i> and <i>Les Revenants de Musique</i> show the Japanesque more asserting +itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to <i>Le Debris d’un +Poète</i> and <i>La Femme Incomprise</i>. But there was also a Japanesque in +<i>The Studio</i> 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 <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>The Studio</i> 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 <i>Salome</i>, translated by Lord Alfred +Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that <i>Salome</i> was to be a marvellous +significance for Aubrey Beardsley.</p> + +<p>It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of <i>The Studio</i>, +the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy +design of this <i>Salome</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Note also another fact: The title of the article published in <i>The +Studio</i> 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 <i>Sandro Botticelli</i> made in 1893 about the time that <i>The</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span> +<i>Studio</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done +with the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>; 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of +the decorations he wanted for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> +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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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.</p> + +<p>There appeared in the <i>Pall Mall Magazine</i> for June 1893, drawn +in April 1893, as the first <i>Studio</i> number was appearing, a design +known as <i>The Neophyte</i>, or to give its full affected name, “<i>Of a Neophyte, +and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend +Asomuel</i>”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May +1893 called <i>The Kiss of Judas</i>—both drawings reveal an unmistakable +change in handling, and the <i>Neophyte</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>it—it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque +possibilities.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f8"> +<img src="images/fig8.jpg" alt="revealed"> +<p class="caption">“OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED<br> +UNTO HIM”</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>The Neophyte</i>. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious +to the lay mind a little further on.</p> + +<p>It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> +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 <i>The Questing Beast</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we +have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.</p> + +<p>The two cover-designs for <i>The Studio No. I</i> in April 1893 were +obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>—in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be +exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span> +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> drawings. They make a good full stop to the record +of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.</p> + +<p>There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating +procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the <i>Morte +d’Arthur</i> 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:</p> + + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">There was a young man with a salary</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Who had to do drawings for Malory;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure</div> + <div class="verse indent0">You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span> +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 <i>The Yellow +Book</i>—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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> mediævalism or the Japanesque +grotesques of his <i>Bon Mots</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon +his <i>Salome</i> designs, as weary of the <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques as of the +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque +mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate—the V +quite departed from his signature.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/fig9.jpg" alt="sign"> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques, +mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, +<i>Sydney Smith and Sheridan</i>, in the April of 1893; the second volume +at the year’s end, <i>Lamb and Douglas Jerrold</i>, in December 1893; +and the third, the last volume, <i>Foote and Hooke</i>, in the February of +1894. The <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s +enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his +weariness—by mid-1893 he was finding the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> “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.</p> + +<p>It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. +This is a larger question and a serious question—but it <i>is</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, by that time he came near to the end<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span> +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 <i>Salome</i> we shall see +him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style +that he grew weary of the <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Salome</i>, 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 <i>Salome</i>, and he found he could not +go back. This will be clearer when we come to the <i>Salome</i>.</p> + +<p>So precisely with the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>; even the last decorations he +made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in <i>The Yellow Book</i>.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>Before we leave the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, 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 <i>Studio</i> +“réclame,” no <i>Yellow Book</i>, no <i>Salome</i>, no <i>Savoy</i>. Dent, employing +with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an +edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> which is a +triumph for English bookmaking—he gave us the supreme edition<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span> +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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f10"> +<img src="images/fig10.jpg" alt="headpiece"> +<p class="caption">HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”</p> +</div> + + + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f11"> +<img src="images/fig11.jpg" alt="skirt"> +<p class="caption">THE PEACOCK SKIRT</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “Salome”</i></p> +</div> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c6">VI</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">THE JAPANESQUES</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-One</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">“SALOME”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">Entered</span> into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was +on the edge of manhood.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Caricature of Whistler</i> on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this +time.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Salome</i> founded frankly upon +the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span> +Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry +of Whistler have been delayed for two years?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to +publish the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>Salome</i>, 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span> +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 <i>The Studio</i> in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Salome</i>.</p> + +<p>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 <i>belles lettres</i> 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.</p> + +<p>On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley +rather on trust—the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and the <i>Bon Mots</i> were far from +what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering +that Beardsley was but little known.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span></p> + +<p>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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Salome</i> drawings than in the <i>Savoy</i>, +since the <i>Salome</i> designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span> +even so-called critics to be found who place the <i>Salome</i> drawings at +the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!</p> + +<p>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 <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Salome</i>, 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 <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Salome</i> he got all that he +could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in <i>The Stomach +Dance</i>, 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 <i>Salome</i> he was done +with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span> +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 <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, 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 <i>Salome</i> he +had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates +to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of <i>Salome</i> 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 +<i>Burial of Salome</i> in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth +century whose child he was.</p> + +<p><i>Salome</i> finished, however, was not <i>Salome</i> published. Elkin Mathews +and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear +without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span> +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 <i>Title +Page</i>, and <i>Enter Herodias</i> 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, <i>The +Stomach Dance</i> 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 <i>Toilette of Salome</i>, a fine design, which only required a very +slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent +but very second-rate design of <i>John and Salome</i>, and in place of +the two had been inserted the wretched <i>Black Cape</i> and Georgian +<i>Toilette</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span> +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 <i>Black Cape</i> and the better Georgian +<i>Toilette</i>, 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f12"> +<img src="images/fig12.jpg" alt="dance"> +<p class="caption">THE STOMACH DANCE</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “Salome”</i></p> +</div> + +<p>The interpolated <i>Black Cape</i> and the <i>Second Toilette</i> we may here +dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they +are wholly outside the <i>Salome</i> atmosphere. Of the pure <i>Salome</i> designs, +incomparably the finest are <i>The Stomach Dance</i> and the <i>Peacock +Skirt</i>. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he +considered the best drawings to be <i>The Man in the Moon</i>, the <i>Peacock +Skirt</i>, and <i>The Dancer’s Reward</i>—it should be noted by the way +that Beardsley showed by his <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i> that his title was +<i>The Man in the Moon</i> not as the publishers have it, <i>The Woman in +the Moon</i>. But it is in <i>The Climax</i>, one of the less noteworthy designs, +that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride—for though the lower +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>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 <i>The Studio</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Neophyte</i>. 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?</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span> +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 <i>Salome</i> drawings for instance have appeared +in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>? 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, several are repeated—some more than once. Let +us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span> +roughly that he made 400 drawings for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, 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....</p> + +<p>Even before Beardsley was done with <i>Salome</i>, he had exhausted +the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish +brain has to evolve a <i>Title-page</i>, a <i>List of Contents</i>, and a <i>Finis</i>; and +we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of <i>Salome</i>, +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 +<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> designs again, he was about to burst into a new song +as hinted at by the last three designs for <i>Salome</i>. An artist is finding +himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f13"> +<img src="images/fig13.jpg" alt="title"> +<p class="caption">TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”</p> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress +in a new venture about to appear. For <i>The Yellow Book</i> is the +only contract that emerges out of this time.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Whilst at work on the <i>Salome</i>, 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 <i>The Keynote Series</i> of novels, published on the heels of the wide +success of <i>Keynotes</i> by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist +stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.</p> + +<p>And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English +Art Club.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f14"> +<img src="images/fig14.jpg" alt="yellow"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c7">VII</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">THE GREEK VASE PHASE</p> + +<p class="c">New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">“THE YELLOW BOOK”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">It</span> 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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i>. The couch in his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span> +studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much +of his all too short life lying upon it.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>When Beardsley began the <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Salome</i> 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 <i>Salome</i> drawings under the Japanese erotic influence +before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry +with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f15"> +<img src="images/fig15.jpg" alt="dame"> +<p class="caption">LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III</i></p> +</div> + +<p>On the 15th of April 1894 appeared <i>The Yellow Book</i>. It made +Beardsley notorious.</p> + +<p>In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl +with the 3rd, the last, volume of <i>Bon Mots</i>; and <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> was +in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that <i>Salome</i> +made Beardsley famous. <i>Salome</i> was an expensive book, published +in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing +literary and artistic set, the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and <i>Salome</i> passed quite +unrecognised and unknown. But <i>Salome</i> did lead to an act which was +to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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. <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span> +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 <i>Yellow Book</i>.” This +quarterly, to be called <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the <i>Salome</i>, +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 <i>Salome</i> off his hands, that <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 +<i>Salome</i> into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of +relief as he had aforetime flung aside the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> now served him to splendid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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, <i>Pick-Me-Up</i>, 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 <i>Graphic</i> and +<i>Illustrated London News</i>.” 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 <i>St. Paul’s</i>. 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, <i>St. Paul’s</i> +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 “<i>Man that holds the Water</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span> +<i>Pot</i>” and the “<i>Music</i>,” 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 <i>Bon Mots</i>—however they may have been intended for <i>The +Fashions</i> and <i>The Drama</i> pages of <i>St. Paul’s</i>. 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 <i>Salome</i> +Japanesque phase.</p> + +<p>It is somewhat curious that, whilst <i>The Man that holds the Water +Pot</i> is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the +fourth drawing he made for <i>St. Paul’s</i> seems to have been missed by +all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print +of it!</p> + +<p>Before we leave <i>St. Paul’s</i>, 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 <i>St. Paul’s</i> and other +papers.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f16"> +<img src="images/fig16.jpg" alt="messalina"> +<p class="caption">MESSALINA</p> +</div> + +<p>It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the <i>Poster for the +Avenue Theatre</i> 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span> +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 <i>Arms and the Man</i> +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 <i>Arms and the Man</i>, 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?”</p> + +<p>Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s <i>Plays</i> appeared about +the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest +of a wide public.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.</p> + +<p>It was the publication of <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow Book</i> littered the London drawing-rooms<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">with gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand.</span><br> +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. <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>; 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:</p> + + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">’Twas rollog; and the minim potes</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Did mime and mimble in the cafe;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">All footly were the Philerotes</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And Daycadongs outstrafe....</div> + </div><div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The aims that rile, the art that racks,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The stumious Beerbomax!</div> + </div><div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </div> + </div><div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Came piffling through the Headley Bod,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And flippered as it flew....</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f17"> +<img src="images/fig17.jpg" alt="portrait"> +<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book” Volume III</i></p> +<p class="caption">PAR LES DIEVX<br> +JVMEAVX TOVS<br> +LES MONSTRES<br> +NE SONT PAS EN<br> +AFRIQUE</p> +</div> + + +<p>As one turns over the pages of <i>The Yellow Book</i> today, it is a little +difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span> +passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and +yellow leaf. But it <i>was</i> 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.</p> + +<p>It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even +at the publishing of the second volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i> in July +there was that which happened—had he had prophetic vision—that +boded no good for the young fellow.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></p> + +<p>It was on the designs of this second volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf +Club</i> on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given +place to “<span class="allsmcap">AUBREY BEARDSLEY</span>.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Today</i> +produced his very fine night-piece <i>Les Passades</i>.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f18"> +<img src="images/fig18.jpg" alt="night"> +<p class="caption">NIGHT PIECE</p> +</div> + +<p>Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue—as playwright and wit +and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the <i>Salome</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue +a novel called <i>The Green Carnation</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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....</p> + +<p>John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume +III of <i>The Yellow Book</i> in October 1894 and volume IV in the January +of 1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span> +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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>; 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 <i>The Yellow +Book</i> 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 +<i>The Yellow Book</i> was doomed—it at once declined, and though it +struggled on, it went to annihilation and foundered.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>His expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>The Yellow Book</i> at once became a stale farce played by all concerned +except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter—<i>Hamlet</i> +being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.</p> + +<p>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.</p> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f19"> +<img src="images/fig19.jpg" alt="campbell"> +<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I</i></p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span></p> + +<p>His expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i> placed Beardsley in a very +awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his +drawings for <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>The +Yellow Book</i>.</p> + +<p>The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for volume +V of <i>The Yellow Book</i>, 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 <i>Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p><i>The Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>Lady +Gold’s Escort</i> and <i>The Wagnerites</i> 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 <i>Mrs. Patrick Campbell</i> is the type and <i>L’Education +sentimentale</i> a variant—whilst the three remarkable <i>Comedy-Ballets +of Marionettes I, II, and III</i>, show white masses used against black.</p> + +<p>Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span> +mid-1894 in the July volume, No. 2, of <i>The Yellow Book</i>. The <i>Plays +of John Davidson</i>, several <i>Madame Réjanes</i>, the fine <i>Les Passades</i>, +the <i>Scarlet Pastorale</i>, and the <i>Tales of Mystery and Wonder</i> by Edgar +Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 <i>Yellow Book</i> phase.</p> + +<p>But in the third volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i>, the fanciful and delightful +portrait of <i>The Artist in bed</i>, “<i>Par les dieux jumeaux tous les +monstres ne sont pas en Afrique</i>,” and the famous <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i> +standing before her dressing table, advance his handling in freedom +and rhythm; as does the exquisite <i>The Mysterious Rose Garden</i>, +which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of Biblical +illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the <i>Annunciation</i>”—indeed +he could not understand the objections of the prudish +to it and resented its being misunderstood! The <i>Messalina with +her Companion</i> is of this later <i>Yellow Book</i> phase; and the <i>Atalanta +without the hound</i> of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example +of it.</p> + +<p>The beautifully wrought <i>Pierrot Invitation Card</i> for John Lane; +the remarkable wash drawings <i>A Nocturne of Chopin</i> from the suppressed +Volume Five, and the <i>Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47</i> of <i>The +Studio</i>, all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, +show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and +in the double-page <i>Juvenal</i> 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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>; for, being commissioned +to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for <i>An Evil +Motherhood</i>, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected <i>Black Cape</i>, of the +suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only under<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span> +the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley +made the now famous design of the <i>Evil Motherhood</i> in which he entirely +breaks from <i>The Yellow Book</i> convention and craftsmanship, +and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f20"> +<img src="images/fig20.jpg" alt="rose"> +<p class="caption">THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV</i></p> +</div> + +<p>It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from <i>The Yellow +Book</i> that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s +<i>Posters</i> for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a +mediocre poster for <i>The Pseudonym Library</i>, a woman in a street +opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest <i>Poster</i> he ever +designed—a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in +black and purple, for <i>Christmas Books</i>—all three of <i>The Yellow Book</i> +phase.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from <i>The +Yellow Book</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span> +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 <i>The Decay +of English Art</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span> +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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f21"> +<img src="images/fig21.jpg" alt="design"> +<p class="caption">DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>St. Paul’s</i>; 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:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"> +<p class="r"> +114 Cambridge Street<br> +<span class="pad">S. W.</span><br> +<span class="pad2">June 28th</span> +</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Sir</span>, 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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="r"> +<span class="pad3">Yours &c</span><br> +Aubrey Beardsley +</p> +</div> + +<p>This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic +delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.</p> + +<p>I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span> +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:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"> + +<p class="c">A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.</p> + + + +<p><span class="smcap">Sir</span>,</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="r"> +<span class="pad">Yours truly</span><br> +<span class="pad2">Hal Dane.</span> +</p> + +<p class="l">July 3rd 1895</p> +</div> + +<p>The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>at him</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>Beardsley during his early <i>Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>The +Comedy Ballet of Marionettes</i> which appeared in the July <i>Yellow +Book</i>; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight +changes, <i>The Comedy Ballet No. 1</i>, in William Nicholson’s manner.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span> +He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of +the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a <i>Lady with a +Mouse</i> 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.”</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f22"> +<img src="images/fig22.jpg" alt="scarlet"> +<p class="caption">THE SCARLET PASTORALE</p> +</div> + +<p>It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint <i>The Comedy Ballet I</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 <i>Le Courier Français</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured intention +of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dismissal +from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, 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 <i>Lady Gold’s +Escort</i> and his <i>Wagnerites</i>.... The decadent fad can’t long stand +such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant wonder that +the <i>Daily Chronicle</i> asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing +that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offended<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>At a loose end, on his expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, Beardsley +drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, +and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling <i>Venus +and Tannhäuser</i>—it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as +<i>Under the Hill</i>—a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. +He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his +drawings for <i>The Yellow Book</i>, and developed a new craftsmanship +which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art.</p> + +<p>The smallness of the page of <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f23"> +<img src="images/fig23.jpg" alt="atalanta"> +<p class="caption">ATALANTA</p> +</div> + +<p><i>Baron Verdigris</i> was the transition from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> phase<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span> +to the <i>Yellow Book</i> or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as <i>The +Fat Woman</i> was the transition from his Greek vase stage; <i>Black Coffee</i> +the end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of +<i>The Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<p>He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street, +with his sister, when expelled from <i>The Yellow Book</i>. 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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with +<i>The Yellow Book</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span> +whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from <i>The +Yellow Book</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>And <i>The Yellow Book</i> went on without him, to die a long lingering +ignoble death.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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 <i>Venus between +Terminal Gods</i>. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite +<i>Mirror of Love</i>, wrought just before the <i>Venus between Terminal +Gods</i>. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black +gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f24"> +<img src="images/fig24.jpg" alt="savoy"> +<p class="caption">TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NOS. 1 AND 2</i></p> +</div> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c8">VIII</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">1. “THE SAVOY”</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">It</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow Book</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of <i>The Savoy</i> +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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f25"> +<img src="images/fig25.jpg" alt="venus"> +<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”</p> +</div> + +<p>The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and +he was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>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.</p> + +<p>The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives +us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from <i>The +Yellow Book</i> 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 <i>Venus between +Terminal Gods</i>, designed for his novel of <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>, +better known as <i>Under the Hill</i>, and the exquisite <i>Mirror of +Love</i>, or as it was also called <i>Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape +of a Mirror</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was +a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span> +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 <i>coup</i> with Burton’s unexpurgated <i>Arabian +Nights</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f26"> +<img src="images/fig26.jpg" alt="mirror"> +<p class="caption">THE MIRROR OF LOVE</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow Book</i>. 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span> +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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f27"> +<img src="images/fig27.jpg" alt="cover"> +<p class="caption">A CATALOGUE COVER</p> +</div> + +<p>A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, +<i>M. A. P.</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span>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....”</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span> +was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his +novel entitled in its bowdlerised form <i>Under the Hill</i>, and later to +illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare +craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>Disgusted with <i>The Yellow Book</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered +Beardsley immersed in his work for <i>The Savoy</i>; but finds him now +more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was +hard at work upon his obscene novel <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>, the so-called +<i>Under the Hill</i>, 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f28"> +<img src="images/fig28.jpg" alt="beach"> +<p class="caption">ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f29"> +<img src="images/fig29.jpg" alt="abbe"> +<p class="caption">THE ABBE</p> +</div> + +<p>The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><i>Under the Hill</i> was published in mutilated form in the coming +<i>Savoy</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span> +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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f30"> +<img src="images/fig30.jpg" alt="fruit"> +<p class="caption">THE FRUIT BEARERS</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f31"> +<img src="images/fig31.jpg" alt="card"> +<p class="caption">A CHRISTMAS CARD</p> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span> +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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In <i>Under the Hill</i> 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span>Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and +commonplace all such as did not revel in it.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f32"> +<img src="images/fig32.jpg" alt="three"> +<p class="caption">THE THREE MUSICIANS</p> +<p class="caption"><i>from “The Savoy” No. 1.</i></p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f33"> +<img src="images/fig33.jpg" alt="tailpiece"> +<p class="caption">TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”</p> +</div> + +<p>The story of <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>, bowdlerised as <i>Under the Hill</i>—by +which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for +even Beardsley feared to <i>write</i> 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 <i>The Three Musicians</i> 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 <i>translation from Catullus</i>. The innate musical sense of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span> +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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see the author of one +of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i>—Alexandre +Dumas, fils.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f34"> +<img src="images/fig34.jpg" alt="savoy"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NO. 1</i></p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f35"> +<img src="images/fig35.jpg" alt="billet-doux"> +<p class="caption">THE BILLET-DOUX</p> +</div> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>He was now working keenly at <i>The Savoy</i> drawings and the illustrations +for his bowdlerised <i>Under the Hill</i>, 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 <i>The +Yellow Book</i>, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second +edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for <i>The +Savoy</i>, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first +number for December, <i>The Savoy</i> 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 <i>The Rape +of the Lock</i>, announced for publication in February, and which we +know was being sold in March.</p> + +<p>In January 1896 <i>The Savoy</i> appeared, and made a sensation in the +art world only to be compared with the public sensation of <i>The Yellow +Book</i>. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span> +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 <i>Three Musicians</i>, +the <i>Bathers on Dieppe Beach</i>, the three sumptuously rich designs of +<i>The Abbé</i>, the <i>Toilet of Helen</i>, and <i>The Fruit-bearers</i> for the novel +<i>Under the Hill</i> which began in this number, capped by the stately +<i>Christmas Card</i> of <i>The Madonna and Child</i> lifted the new magazine +at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Morte +d’Arthur</i> 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 <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>—masterpieces +of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first +rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, <i>The New Star</i>—with +the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of <i>The Dream</i>, the +exquisite <i>Billet-Doux</i>, the <i>Toilet</i>, the <i>Baron’s Prayer</i>, and the magnificent +<i>Rape of the Lock</i> and <i>Battle of the Beaux and Belles</i>.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f36"> +<img src="images/fig36.jpg" alt="toilet"> +<p class="caption">THE TOILET</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f37"> +<img src="images/fig37.jpg" alt="lock"> +<p class="caption">THE RAPE OF THE LOCK</p> +</div> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>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 <i>The Rape of the Lock</i> and <i>The Battle of the Beaux +and Belles</i> 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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The second number of <i>The Savoy</i> appeared in April, as a quarterly, +and its charming cover-design of <i>Choosing the New Hat</i> screened a +sad falling off in the output of the stricken man—for the number contained +but the <i>Footnote portrait of himself</i>; the <i>Third Tableau of +“Das Rheingold”</i> which he had probably already done before going +to Brussels; a scene from <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>; and but one illustration<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span> +to <i>Under the Hill</i>, the <i>Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima</i>; whilst the +beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II—in all +but four new drawings!</p> + +<p>Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next—the +third—number of The Savoy to appear in July, <i>the driving of Cupid +from the Garden</i>, and worked upon the poem of the <i>Ballad of a Barber</i>, +making the wonderful line drawing for it called <i>The Coiffing</i>, with +a silhouette <i>cul-de-lampe</i> of <i>Cupid with the gallows</i>; but his body was +rapidly breaking down.</p> + +<p>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 “<i>Note</i>” for the July <i>Savoy, No. 3</i>, announcing +the end of <i>Under the Hill</i>—Beardsley has made his first surrender.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f38"> +<img src="images/fig38.jpg" alt="battle"> +<p class="caption">THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f39"> +<img src="images/fig39.jpg" alt="baron"> +<p class="caption">THE BARON’S PRAYER</p> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span>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.</p> + +<p>By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at +Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating <i>Ali Baba and the Forty +Thieves</i> as a Christmas Book—for which presumably was the fine +<i>Ali Baba in the Wood</i>. 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 <i>Lysistrata</i>! +and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe +and masterly drawings for the <i>Lysistrata</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span> +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 <i>Lysistrata</i>. 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 <i>Lysistrata</i> should be +printed in pale purple.... It was probable that Beardsley reached +the <i>Lysistrata</i> 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 <i>Lysistrata</i> finished, he turned to the +translation and obscene illustration of the <i>Sixth Satire of Juvenal</i>.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Juvenal</i> drawings! “I +am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f40"> +<img src="images/fig40.jpg" alt="coiffing"> +<p class="caption">THE COIFFING</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f41"> +<img src="images/fig41.jpg" alt="savoy"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> 4.</p> +</div> + + +<p>With the July number, <i>No. 3</i>, <i>The Savoy</i> 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 +<i>Lysistrata</i> sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August <i>Savoy, +No. 4</i>—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 <i>Lysistrata</i> sequence, and that it +is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world +a hint of what it lost.</p> + +<p>August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the +Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the <i>September +Savoy, No. 5</i>, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the +uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of +<i>The Woman in White</i> which he had made from the <i>Bon Mots</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span> +through the issues of <i>The Savoy</i> 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 <i>Death of +Pierrot</i> and the <i>Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings</i> are the last signatures +in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after +his birthday, as we are about to see.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic <i>Death +of Pierrot</i> 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 <i>Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”</i> had to be +used as a cover for the October <i>Savoy No. 5</i>. The <i>Death of Pierrot</i> 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.</p> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f42"> +<img src="images/fig42.jpg" alt="cover"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO</i>. 7.</p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span></p> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f43"> +<img src="images/fig43.jpg" alt="pierrot"> +<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span></p> + +<p>September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s +winter.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Savoy</i> 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 <i>Album of Fifty Drawings</i>, 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 +<i>Death of Pierrot</i>. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the +<i>Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings</i>. 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 <i>Bookplate of +the Artist</i> 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.</p> + +<p>The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful <i>Cover for +the November Savoy, No. 7</i>, of spectacled old age boring youth “by +the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span> +of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful +translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing +<i>Ave atque Vale</i> or “Hail and Farewell” for the <i>Carmen C I of +Catullus</i>, whilst the third illustration for the November <i>Savoy</i>, the +small <i>Tristan and Isolde</i>, 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 <i>Das +Rheingold</i>, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he +himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of <i>Tannhäuser +returning to the Horselberg</i>, was trying to induce Beardsley at +this time to illustrate the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i> 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f44"> +<img src="images/fig44.jpg" alt="headpiece"> +<p class="caption">HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f45"> +<img src="images/fig45.jpg" alt="tailpiece"> +<p class="caption">TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</p> +</div> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span>just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of +Ernest Dowson’s, <i>The Pierrot of the Minute</i>” 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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Pierrot of the +Minute</i>, that “<i>cul-de-lampe</i>” 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 <i>Headpiece</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line</i>, +“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 <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i>. It is a pathetically tragic +thought that the November of the exquisite <i>Pierrot of the Minute</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published +prints for the cover and the title-page of <i>Evelina</i>—of his “own +early designing.”</p> + +<p>The <i>Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p>It was soon clear that the days of <i>The Savoy</i> 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 <i>A Répétition of Tristan +and Isolde</i>—and he flung into the number all the drawings he now +made or had made for <i>Das Rheingold</i>, which included the marvellously +decorative <i>Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold</i>, 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 <i>Flosshilde</i> and <i>Erda</i> and <i>Alberich</i>, which he, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span>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 <i>Mendelssohn</i> and the <i>Weber</i>; he somewhat fumbles +with his <i>Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar</i> from that <i>Don Juan</i> of +Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the +<i>Mrs. Margery Pinchwife</i> from Wycherley’s <i>Country Wife</i>; he very +sadly disappoints us with his <i>Count Valmont</i> from Laclos’ <i>Les Liaisons +Dangereuses</i> for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out +such high hopes; and he ends with <i>Et in Arcadia Ego</i>.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f46"> +<img src="images/fig46.jpg" alt="isolde"> +<p class="caption">A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f47"> +<img src="images/fig47.jpg" alt="frontispiece"> +<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE</p> +</div> + +<p>It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for +<i>The Savoy</i> that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces +that <i>The Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p>Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in +the appearance of <i>The Book of Fifty Drawings</i> 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.</p> + +<p>The December <i>Savoy</i>, 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, +<i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> by Laclos, and Stendhal’s <i>Adolphe</i>....</p> + +<p>On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing +himself for <i>The Idler</i>”—the interview that appeared in that +magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.</p> + +<p>About Christmas his edition of <i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> was taking +shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span> +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 <i>The Book of Fifty Drawings</i>, in +which for the first time were seen the <i>Ali Baba in the Wood</i>, the <i>Bookplate +of the Artist</i>, and the <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i> 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 <i>Merlin</i> 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 <i>Scrap Book</i> +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 <i>Ave atque +Vale</i> appears; and it may be that the <i>Atalanta in Calydon with the +hound</i>, sometimes called <i>Diana</i>, and the Beardsley <i>Bookplate</i> together +with the <i>Self-portrait silhouette</i> that makes the Finis to the Iconography, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f48"> +<img src="images/fig48.jpg" alt="hound"> +<p class="caption">ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND</p> +</div> + +<div class="figcenter1" id="f49"> +<img src="images/fig49.jpg" alt="plate"> +<p class="caption">BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE</p> +</div> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>So ended the great <i>Savoy</i> period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated +to the span of twelve moons.</p> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c9">IX</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE</p> + +<p class="c">1897 to the End—Twenty-Five</p> + +<p class="c less sp p1">II. THE AQUATINTESQUES</p> + + +<p>So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley +was now twenty-four and a half years of age—the great <i>Savoy</i> achievement +at an end.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f50"> +<img src="images/fig50.jpg" alt="lady"> +<p class="caption">THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>Frontispiece</i> for +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span>Theophile Gautier’s <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i>, 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 +<i>Bookplate for Miss Custance</i>, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, +and he also designed the <i>Arbuscula</i> for Gaston Vuillier’s <i>History of +Dancing</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span> +draw. He also started a short story <i>The Celestial Lover</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span> +near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church +of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i>, or indeed steeping +in that novel at all, or drawing the <i>Arbuscula</i>. 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 <i>Under the +Hill!</i> and drawn the designs for <i>Lysistrata</i> and the <i>Juvenal!</i> not five +months since he has drawn his <i>Bookplate!</i> And by the grim irony of +circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that +there appeared in <i>The Idler</i> 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 <i>Idler</i> 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Hundred and One Nights</i> for the first time, +and inspired by it, drew his famous <i>Cover for Ali Baba</i>, a masterpiece +of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure +resplendent with gems—as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous +design.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f51"> +<img src="images/fig51.jpg" alt="cover"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”</p> +</div> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Evan Harrington</i>; +it was about the time that the <i>Mercure</i> published in French +the <i>Essay on Comedy</i> which started widespread interest in the works of +Meredith.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f52"> +<img src="images/fig52.jpg" alt="ali baba"> +<p class="caption">ALI BABA IN THE WOOD</p> +</div> + +<p>Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span> +out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was—reading +the <i>Memoirs of Casanova!</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Volpone</i>, and was keenly interested in a new +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span>venture by Smithers who proposed a successor to <i>The Savoy</i> which he +wished to call <i>The Peacock</i>.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f53"> +<img src="images/fig53.jpg" alt="volpone"> +<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”</p> +</div> + +<p>The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier +and more peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.”</p> + +<p>So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the <i>Cover of +Volpone</i> 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 <i>Cover of a prospectus for Volpone</i>, +which was after his death published in the book as a <i>Frontispiece</i>, 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 <i>Volpone</i> 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 +<i>Prospectus</i>. But in this <i>Prospectus Cover for Volpone</i> 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.</p> + +<p>In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span> +list of drawings for the <i>Volpone</i>,” suggested its being made a companion +volume to <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, and asked Smithers to announce +it in <i>The Athenæum</i>. Besides the now famous and beautiful +<i>Cover</i>, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of +<i>Volpone</i> 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, +<i>Volpone and his treasure</i>, but that is to be in line and wash—obviously +in the style of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i>—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 <i>Frontispiece</i>—and that it is not to appear in +the book. We have the line drawing for the <i>Prospectus</i>—and we can +only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated +in the manner of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i> or the <i>Initials</i>. 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 <i>Initials</i> 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 <i>Initials</i> certainly were.</p> + +<p>On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” +sending the <i>Cover Design for Volpone</i> and the <i>Design for the Prospectus +of Volpone</i>, begging for proofs, especially of the <i>Design for +the Prospectus</i>, “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 <i>Miniature</i> edition of <i>The</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span> +<i>Rape of the Lock</i>, with Beardsley’s special <i>Cover-design in gold on +scarlet</i>, had just been published—the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley +called them.</p> + +<p>However, these 24 designs for the <i>Volpone</i> 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 <i>The Peacock</i> projected by Smithers, of which more later. +Whilst delighted with the idea of editing <i>The Peacock</i>, Beardsley expresses +fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put +the <i>Volpone</i> 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 <i>Initials</i> +with this letter, for he underlines that <i>Volpone</i> is to be an important +book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that Beardsley is now +sending him—indeed the <i>Initials</i> were, alas! all that he was ever destined +to complete—the 24 illustrations were not to be. That these +<i>Initials</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers, +urging on the production of the <i>Prospectus for Volpone</i>; and it is interesting +to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in line and +wash, in his aquatint style, of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i>, was originally +intended for the <i>Volpone</i> and not for the set of the <i>Mademoiselle +de Maupin</i> in which it eventually appeared; but was cast out of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span> +<i>Volpone</i> 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.</p> + +<p>What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed +for the illustrations to <i>Volpone</i> only <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i> and the +<i>Initials</i> can hint to us—he was never to create them.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="gtb">******</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Yellow +Book</i>; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the +last number of <i>The Savoy</i> 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 <i>The Savoy</i>, 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 <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i> 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 +<i>The Savoy</i> in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span>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 <i>The Peacock</i>, +to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of <i>The Savoy</i>; +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 <i>The Peacock</i> to <i>Books and Pictures</i>, which sounded commonplace +enough to make <i>The Peacock</i> appear quite good when otherwise +it seemed somewhat pointless.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f54"> +<img src="images/fig54.jpg" alt="initial"> +<p class="caption">INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”</p> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>The Peacock</i> 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 <i>agreed that Oscar +Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously +or otherwise</i>.” 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 <i>The Peacock</i> 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 <i>The Peacock</i> was to have had a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span> +resplendent peacock in black and white for its cover, and that it was +to have been adorned with the superb decorations for <i>Mademoiselle de +Maupin</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in +his “aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Mademoiselle +de Maupin</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>But the gods had willed that it should not be.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Peacock</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span> +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 <i>The Yellow Book</i> and even <i>The Savoy</i>. “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 <i>untiringly +and unflinchingly</i> the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval +business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of +what picture making should be.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c10">X</h2> +</div> + +<p class="c large sp">THE END</p> + +<p class="c large p1">1898</p> + + +<p><span class="smcap large">Yet</span> 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.</p> + +<p>So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, +with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f55"> +<img src="images/fig55.jpg" alt="pierrot"> +<p class="caption">THE DEATH OF PIERROT</p> +<p class="caption1">“<i>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.</i>”</p> +</div> + + +<p>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 <i>Volpone</i>, and remembering the pushing +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span>forward of the <i>Prospectus</i> that he had urged on the publisher, he +had fallen back on the pencil—as the elaborately drawn <i>Initial</i> letters +show—for each of the scenes in <i>Volpone</i>, 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 <i>The Savoy</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span></p> + +<div class="blockquot"> + +<p class="c">Jesus is our Lord & Judge</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p class="r"> +Aubrey Beardsley.<br> + +In my death agony. +</p> +</div> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p class="c large sp">Hail and Farewell!</p> + +<div class="figcenter" id="f56"> +<img src="images/fig56.jpg" alt="vale"> +<p class="caption">AVE ATQVE VALE</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span></p> + +<h2 class="nobreak" id="c11"><span class="less">A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY +ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE</span></h2> +</div> + +<div class="blockquot"> +<p class="c">PUERILIA</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1888 he comes to town</p> + + +<p class="c p1">JUVENILIA</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement</p> + + +<p class="c p1 sp">FORMATIVE PERIOD—BURNE-JONESESQUES</p> + +<p class="c">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892</p> + +<p>During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three +initials A. V. B.</p> + + +<p class="c p1 sp">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</p> + +<p class="c">The <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and <i>Bon Mots</i></p> + +<p>Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”—the <i>stunted</i> +mark.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<p class="c p1 sp">“SALOME”</p> + +<p>Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes +longer, more slender, and more graceful.</p> + + +<p class="c p1 sp">“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD</p> + +<p>This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this +<i>Yellow Book</i> period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque mark” +for the last time.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span></p> + + +<p class="c p1 sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p> + +<p> +I. “<i>The Savoy</i>” and <span class="pad4">II. “<i>The Aquatintesques</i>”</span><br> +Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 <span class="pad4">1897</span><br> +</p> + +<p>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 <i>Aquatintesque +line and wash</i> 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 <i>in a corner of his design</i>, either in or without a small square +label.</p></div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span></p> +<hr class="full"> + + + +<p class="c"> +“AUBREY BEARDSLEY”<br> +HAS BEEN DESIGNED<br> +BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY<br> +AND PRINTED UNDER HIS<br> +SUPERVISION BY THE<br> +VAIL-BALLOU PRESS<br> +BINGHAMTON<br> +NEW YORK +</p> +<hr class="full"> + +<div class="transnote"> + +<p class="c">Transcriber’s Notes:</p> + +<p>Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed.</p> + +<p>Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.</p> + +<p>Perceived typographical errors have been changed.</p> + +</div> + +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + diff --git a/75239-h/images/cover.jpg b/75239-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..2858437 --- /dev/null +++ b/75239-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/75239-h/images/fig1.jpg b/75239-h/images/fig1.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..98cda6b --- /dev/null +++ b/75239-h/images/fig1.jpg diff --git a/75239-h/images/fig10.jpg b/75239-h/images/fig10.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..0c2042a --- 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