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diff --git a/75239-0.txt b/75239-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7c7f892 --- /dev/null +++ b/75239-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4805 @@ + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 *** + + + + + + AUBREY BEARDSLEY + + THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, + THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE + + + + + [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY + _by F. H. Evans_] + + + + + AUBREY + BEARDSLEY + + THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, + THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE + + [Illustration] + + HALDANE MACFALL + + + NEW YORK + SIMON AND SCHUSTER + MCMXXVII + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC. + + + PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA + + + + + TO + EARL E. FISK + + THIS SMALL TRIBUTE + TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP + + H. M. + + + + + “I have one aim--the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.” + + “I may claim to have some command of line. I try to get as much as + possible out of a single curve or straight line.” + + [AUBREY BEARDSLEY.] + + + + +CONTENTS + + + FOREWORD 17 + + I: BIRTH AND FAMILY 23 + + II: CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL 27 + + “THE PUERILIA” + + III: YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK 35 + + Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen + THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK” + + IV: FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP 42 + + Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty + THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES” + + V: BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST 58 + + Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to Twenty-one + MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES + “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS” + + VI: THE JAPANESQUES 95 + + Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-one + “SALOME” + + VII: THE GREEK VASE PHASE 113 + + New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-one to Twenty-three + “THE YELLOW BOOK” + + VIII: THE GREAT PERIOD 159 + + “THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES + Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-three to Twenty-four + I. “THE SAVOY” + + IX: THE GREAT PERIOD 234 + + ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE + 1897 to the End--Twenty-five + II. THE AQUATINTESQUES + + X: THE END 260 + + 1898 + + A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY 269 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + + PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY _by F. H. Evans_ _Frontispiece_ + + SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 25 + + HOLYWELL STREET 33 + + HAIL MARY 60 + + PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD 67 + + HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN 71 + + “OF A NEOPHYTE....” 85 + + HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” 92 + + THE PEACOCK SKIRT 94 + + THE STOMACH DANCE 103 + + TITLE-PAGE OF “SALOME” 108 + + COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III 112 + + LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS 115 + + MESSALINA 121 + + PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 125 + + NIGHT PIECE 129 + + PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL 136 + + THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN 139 + + DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD 143 + + THE SCARLET PASTORALE 149 + + ATALANTA 153 + + TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS._ I _AND_ II 158 + + FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER” 161 + + THE MIRROR OF LOVE 165 + + A CATALOGUE COVER 169 + + ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS) 173 + + THE ABBÉ 175 + + THE FRUIT BEARERS 179 + + CHRISTMAS CARD 181 + + THE THREE MUSICIANS 185 + + TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS” 186 + + COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO._ I 189 + + THE BILLET DOUX 191 + + THE TOILET 195 + + THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 197 + + THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES 201 + + THE BARON’S PRAYER 203 + + THE COIFFING 207 + + COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ IV 209 + + COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ VII 213 + + FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 215 + + HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS 219 + + TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 220 + + A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE” 223 + + FRONTISPIECE TO “THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD” 225 + + ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND 229 + + BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE 231 + + THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY 235 + + COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES” 241 + + ALI BABA IN THE WOOD 245 + + COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE” 249 + + INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE” 255 + + THE DEATH OF PIERROT 261 + + AVE ATQUE VALE 270 + + + + +FOREWORD + + +About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in +Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet, +who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop +on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had +forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary +and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation came pouring +out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man broke away from +the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched +awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping, +dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of +God’s acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly +efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by +the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away +coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long +white hands, his lean wrists showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid +cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing +mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who +called to him, showing his “tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed +down and plastered over his forehead in a “quiff” almost to his +eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so +awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; +but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley. + +_The Yellow Book_ had come upon the town three months gone by. +Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a +night. He was the talk of the town--was seen everywhere--was at the +topmost height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was +out he was to be expelled from _The Yellow Book_! As he had come up, so +he was to come down--like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out +of the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and +for some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed +young dandy--fling him from _The Yellow Book_--and dim for him the +splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. Within +a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was to drop +out of the public eye almost as though he had never been. + +But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered +there--and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered +there--this young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year +or so the masterpieces of his great period--the drawings for a new +venture to be called _The Savoy_--and was soon to begin work on the +superb designs for _The Rape of the Lock_, which were to thrust him at +a stroke into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years +were run out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave. + +As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the dead, +so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be--one long struggle to +crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that yawned +for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being dragged +back to it again and again by unseen hands--was to spend his strength +in the frantic struggle to escape--he was to get almost out of sight +of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to find +himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge of +the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat +plays with a mouse--with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of the +grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high +road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we, +who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that +were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this +agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical +things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very +breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise +that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the +skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room. +For, realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and +charm of _The Rape of the Lock_. Surely the hideous nightmares that +now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject +for bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his +facile pen! + +Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood, +and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each +twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows--he knew +that he had but a little while to which to look forward, and had best +live his life to-day. And he lived it like one possessed. + +HALDANE MACFALL. + + + + + AUBREY BEARDSLEY + + THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, + THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE + + 1872-1898 + + + + +I + +BIRTH AND FAMILY + + +To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something in the +city,” of the name of Beardsley--one Vincent Paul Beardsley--and to +his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of the family +of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first day +of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the army surgeon +at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, a boy, whom they +christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing that in a short +hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie a-dying, having made the +picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous. + +Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption +that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does not +appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive, +stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the +chronicles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades +away, departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his +work of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it +be that so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us +wondering by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called +to the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name +and raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it +should stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of +the age. For, when all’s said, it was a significance--if his only +significance--to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying +at twenty-five, had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording +tablets of the genius of his race in the indelible ink of high +fulfilment. However, in the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a +brief moment into the limelight and is gone, whether “something in the +city” or whatnot, does not now matter--his destiny was in fatherhood. +But at least it was granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to +him, that, from whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he +should live to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son, +who, as at the touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line +into very music--the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age.... + +As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright +personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with +unceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and +character--therefore the man’s--in so far as the moulding of mind and +character be beyond the knees of the gods--a mother whose affection +and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful +sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world +of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy +inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as +a girl. + +[Illustration: SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY + +(_Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy_)] + + + + +II + +CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL + +THE “PUERILIA” + + +Of a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road, +Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class +home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred and +cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably became +a forcing-house to any intelligent child--and both children were +uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or three +years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as things +turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely a +healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward +spirit. + +It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over +the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Caldecott +which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s +life--yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest +illustrators that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure +test of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their +children are given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the +somewhat empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given +Kate Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons +in drawing and in “seeing” character in line and form, and in the +wholesome joy of country sights and sounds. + +A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing his +pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music. + +Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced +lessons, but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or +drawing or decoration. + +The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s +heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell +disease which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was +sent to a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years. +Here the child seems to have made his chief impression on his little +comrades and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an +extreme reserve--which sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled +waters. However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat +of consumption; and a change had to be made. + +At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a +couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a +profound influence over his future. + +In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled +in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age +so skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an +infant prodigy--the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s +knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy in +the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologising +for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the plea +that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feeling for +sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the years +to come, he was to give forth line that “sings” like the notes of a +violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation-cards +in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or not, the +little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite considerable +sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome things. +As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched and +unpromising stuff. + +A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it +absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to +send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where +the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the very +loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history, eagerly +reading Freeman and Green. + +In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; and in +the January of 1885 he became a boarder. + +Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half years +at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King, greatly +liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by letting him +have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey Beardsley +was happy as the day was long. His “quaint personality” soon made its +mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday, he wrote a +little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The delicate boy, +as might be expected, found all athletic sports distasteful and a +strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to be found with a +book when the others were at play. His early love for Carlyle’s “French +Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Restoration dramatists, +was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read “Erewhon” and “enjoyed it +immensely,” though it had been lent to him with grave doubts as to +whether it were not too deep for him. His unflagging industry became a +byword. He caricatured the masters; acted in school plays--appearing +even before large audiences at the Pavilion--and was the guiding spirit +in the weekly performances at the school got up by Mr. King and for +which he designed programmes. His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a +kindly attitude towards the lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively +encouraged his artistic leanings, as Mr. King his theatrical. + +Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these +“puerilia” have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as +revelations of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain +unvarnished truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have +been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Probably +his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as the +grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley +himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on +reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every +means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging +good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether +incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such +unutterable trash. + +Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind at +school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of the +“Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giving +amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays. By +the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he had +a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it, +very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong +meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad +was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French +he worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile +reader--but such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the +dog-Latin of a public school classical education. + +Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that Aubrey +Beardsley drew the designs for the “Pied Piper” before he left +the school in mid-1888--though the play was not performed until +Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December the 19th +1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen and wash +drawing of _Holywell Street_ was made in mid-1888 before he left the +school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red hair--worn _á +la Bretonne_,” which I take it means “bobbed,” as the modern girl now +calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work, but writes verse +and is very musical. His “stage-struck mood” we have seen encouraged by +his house-master, Mr. King. + +C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at Brighton; and at +one of these is played “_L’Enfant Prodigue_” without words--it was to +make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley. + +There is no question that _L’Enfant Prodigue_ and the rococo of Bright +Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beardsley; and +he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked mediævalism; he was +to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to Pierrot and the +bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion. + +Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, though +how exactly he fitted the red hair “_a la Bretonne_” to his theory +of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the +wearer, would require more than a little guesswork. + +The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it came +to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were +numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a marked +personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely proud of him. +But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, on the eve of his +sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding farewell and leaving +for London, straightway to become a clerk in an architect’s office. + +At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his +“puerilia”--or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but +these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant, +inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the +“Pied Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing +of _Holywell Street_. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him a +month or two false--it is difficult to see why Beardsley should have +made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London that he +had not yet learnt to frequent--but even granting that the _Holywell +Street_ was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his +schoolfellow a month or two later, in the _Holywell Street_ (1888) +there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley leaves his +school and his “puerilia” cease--he enters at once on a groping attempt +to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his ideas and impressions. +So far, of promise there has been not a tittle--one searches the +“puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign--but there is none. + +In the _Holywell Street_ there _is_ the sign--and a portent. + +It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, +tragi-comic wayfaring. + +[Illustration: HOLYWELL STREET] + + + + +III + +YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK + +Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen + +THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK” + + +At sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall +dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to +live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood +Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in +the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an +Insurance office. + +The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and shy +and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent +young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat +solitary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first +little Pimlico home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly +appreciative, sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of +his devoted mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother +and sister was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite +unimportant, an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the +end of his day’s drudgery in the city, and--with the loud bang of the +hall-door--shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and +sister were happy in their own life. + +But it is that _Holywell Street_ drawing which unlocks the door. It +is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy +old ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row--that made an +untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary le +Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych--was +the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the toes of Prime +Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with equal absence +of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, its fantastic +jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions--and its devotion +to books--was nearing its theatric end. In many ways Holywell Street +was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow spent every moment he +could snatch from his city office in such fascinating haunts as these +second-hand bookshops. + +We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A Brown +Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; and that +before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act +comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.” + +A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the National +Gallery to browse amongst antique art. + +His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate +health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his behalf +from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening he +really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night by +consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London was +filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with any +sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices to hear +good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even dreamed of +pursuing an artistic career. + +The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred +Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged +Beardsley’s artistic leanings. Beardsley had only been a year +in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became +a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth +birthday--August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or +whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning +of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for +the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of +Aubrey Beardsley--and as blank of achievement as they were black. + +From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s +career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian +Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a +violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and +operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength +remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the +Insurance Office in the city. + +The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking +down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body +compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of +the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life +which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he +might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in +the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy +were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which +mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all +hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued +youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon--it was enough to have +broken the courage of the strongest man. Beardsley’s first three years +in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen +he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in +the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What +interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion, +during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these +two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in +which his eyes gazed in terror at death. + +His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite +eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed +to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease +led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams +led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo--especially the +human fetus--with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art +on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy. + +Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian +Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones +and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither +he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures--to +Beardsley the supreme treasure. + +It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside +bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor, +but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost +daily frequenter. + +The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside, +which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so +well--indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called +the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth--was but +a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to +London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one +of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here +Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at +the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the +friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They +also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick +Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the +finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his +achievement and his vogue. + +Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship +in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time +and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a +footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in +exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more +for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate. +At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young +clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture +galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the +bookshop in Cheapside. + +“We know by the _Scrap Book_, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890, +what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time, +and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of +this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the +pictorial idea--only an increasing sense of selection--that is all. His +“juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there +begins to appear a certain personal vision. + +From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books--saw life only through +books--was aloof from his own age and his own world, which he did not +understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather vulgar to +understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his daily toil, +he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere with +Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle de Maupin, +Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux Camélias, as his intimates. He +sketched them as yet with but an amateur scribbling. But he dressed +for the part of a dandy in his narrow home circle, affecting all the +airs of superiority of the day--contempt for the middle-class--contempt +of Mrs. Grundy--elaborately cultivating a flippant wit--a caustic +tongue. He had the taint of what Tree used to whip with contempt as +“refainement”--he affected a voice and employed picturesque words in +conversation. He pined for the day when he might mix with the great +ones as he conceived the great ones to be; and he sought to acquire +their atmosphere as he conceived it. Beardsley was always theatrical. +He noticed from afar that people of quality, though they dressed well, +avoided ostentation or eccentricity--dressed “just so.” He set himself +that ideal. He tried to catch their manner. The result was that he gave +the impression of intense artificiality. And just as he was starting +for the race, this black hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made +him despair. In 1890 had appeared Whistler’s _Gentle Art of Making +Enemies_--Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself +to form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic +ambition. + +As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration +had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached +mid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from him, +his courage returned with health--and his belief in himself. So far he +had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided to +make an effort to become an artist. + +The sun shone for him. + +He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured an +introduction to Burne-Jones. + + + + +IV + +FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP + +Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty + +THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES” + + +On a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth +birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones. + +Beardsley being still a clerk in the city--his week-ends given to +drudgery at the Insurance Office--he had to seize occasion by the +forelock--therefore Sunday. + +The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in +his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened +his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave; +and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic +endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long +North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise +of renewed health. + +We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show +Burne-Jones--we have seen what he had gathered together in the _Scrap +Book_ as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add +to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the +wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time--a sorry +thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross +who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British +Museum--an act which, had Beardsley known the betrayal that was to +be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet. +We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an +occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably +promising _Molière_, which it is difficult to believe as having been +made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no +hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s +style for a while. + +Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his +quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him +to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high +spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to +pour forth from his hands for a couple of years. + +Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy--the solemnities reigned, +and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned +with serious fresco--’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness. + +As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house +opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great +world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit +to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic +conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his +whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once +he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so +far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the +old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas +cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed +was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that +he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise whereon to +found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century +loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the +keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but +his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic +sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at +his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much +a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the +young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard +to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance. + +Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the +Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered +London as she had conquered France--if rather a pallid ghost of Japan. +The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with +Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing +more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how +beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it +was so. + +It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued +Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of +pure line by the Japs--he saw prints in shops and they interested him, +but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and +use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of +bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English +types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective +and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed +to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque +effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him. + +Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F. +Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting +Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of +its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with +his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and +furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to +Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to +smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf. +It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts +of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression +of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs +make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may +have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word +for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as +simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war +against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian +drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which +touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness, +and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme, +carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better +its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the +stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint +upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art, +to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the +youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to +its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the +furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed +to be adopted by Beardsley as the basis of his drawings of furniture +a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the +superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the +sensitive brain of the younger man--those peacocks that were to bring +forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of +years later when he was to give his _Salome_ to the world. + +It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a +fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father--as quickly to vanish +again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls +for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking +and he and his “pater” alone in the house. + +Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become +secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a +little magazine called _The Bee_; and it was in the November of 1891 +that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his _Hamlet_ in which he at +once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship. + +It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on +Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one of +note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting +and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling for +line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly +working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some six +months after the summer that had brought hope and life to Beardsley +out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer Vallance, +one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went to call on the +lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half the urgings +of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known the boy when at +Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoon at Charlwood +Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away wildly enthusiastic +over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at his demand. It is to +Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and then turned the lad’s +ambition towards becoming an artist by profession--an idea that up to +this time Beardsley had not thought possible or practicable. + +Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s +enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he +overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled +us in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile +“puerilia”--the _Pied Piper_ stuff--which one cannot believe that +Beardsley would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque _Hamlet_ from +the _Bee_ just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques. +He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had not done +anything better than the _Hamlet_. Then there was the _Scrap Book_! +However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won so +powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal friend +as Aymer Vallance. + +On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the winter +was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross and +Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert Ross wrote +of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any case his +record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed +with the personality of the youth--Ross was always more interested +in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for his +was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the antique +dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a powerful +friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the doors of +fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a kindly man +enough; and he had not only come to have considerable authority on +matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the great, but +with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. Ross, with +his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was fascinated +by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy youth +whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of being +_ebouriffé_ as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was brushed +smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and +narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the impression of being +brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better as “tortoise-shell”--it +was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as his voice and manner. +The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was always cadaverous. The +young fellow seems gradually to have thawed at this forgathering at +Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company, and was soon +found to have an intimate knowledge of the British Museum and National +Gallery. He talked more of literature and of music than of art. Ross +was so affected by the originality of the young fellow’s conversation +that he even attributed to Beardsley the oft-quoted jape of the old +French wit that “it only takes one man to make an artist but forty to +make an Academician.” + +It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of +Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting--what precisely did +Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under his +arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were in the +portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the _Procession of Joan +of Arc_ in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans, a work +which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with any merit +from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced to part for +all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a pen-and-ink replica +from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the May of 1892. The +youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his own work than had +his admirers. + +It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his +twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic +promise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace +_Procession of Joan of Arc_ could stand out at the forefront of his +career, and was, as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order +to get him public recognition--in which it distinctly and deservedly +failed. He himself was later to go hot and cold about the very mention +of it and to be ashamed of it. + +We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,” +his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley +could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his +rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking +for him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship of +that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom he loved to +glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is canting and +stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged down. Nothing +of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste drew about him, he +was not compelled into, the company of the erotic and the precious in +craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small share in opening wide the +doors to him. + +But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a +curious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval +atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted +him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art +and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best. +It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the +French writers--it was their challenge to the past--it was their very +inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that +brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have +remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was +to run riot in eroticism--he was to treat sex with a marked frankness +that showed it to be his god--but it is only right to say that the +artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has +as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist +of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual +moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood +nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that +any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree. +And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race. +It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure +in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is +alone subject to blame or praise in the matter. + +Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit--it +was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the +middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class--he was one of the +most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he +had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness +of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter +Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened +the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his +work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and +thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss +criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or +patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it, +as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he +was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and +witty companion. + +Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley after +a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is +said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled. +However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition +growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his +friends, to dare all and make for art. + +Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember +that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of +Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a +very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament. +Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young +fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had +learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training +of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in +high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the +steps of the National Gallery by the old masters. + +This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday; +and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis de +Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged +him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune +artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.” + +Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all +intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and +Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s +night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with +his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to +be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his +art--the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios +talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it +is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor +Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly +influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is +spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism +is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and +Burne-Jones at this very time--Whistler had published his _Gentle Art +of Making Enemies_ in 1890, and London had not recovered from its +enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to +say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but +his eager eyes were quick to see. + +However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an +occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city +and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the +Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition. + +And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth +now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most +impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The +generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris--or Beardsley; but +his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted +boy’s cause. + +Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves +of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all, +Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made +a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement. +Next--and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting +fact--Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of +the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content! +Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling +rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that +to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse--probably not very +exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the +conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this. +And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to +Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker, +not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender +finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or +drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made +the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore +intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist +in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings, +with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he +knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared +nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social +injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern +him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored +him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the +society of the great--his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed +society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the +middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic +whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing +each one as the mood took him--only doing it with an air and dressing +well for the part. + +Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of +these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done +into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible +years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a +priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or +social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were +racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy--they +even lack manhood--they do not suggest quite a fully developed +intelligence. + +However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his +troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott +books--he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then +anxious to produce--_Sidonia the Sorceress_. Vallance leaped at +the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once +persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all +being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, +his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to +Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received +the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a +ridiculous pill. + +We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but +mediocrity--a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on +the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter +unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques +for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what +the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know--and to achieve. Can +one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to +Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in +grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black +cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of +his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to +this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat +black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young +fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go +much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling +it--far less any of his sponsors. And yet!---- + +Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few +narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting +of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival +publication to the Kelmscott Press--he was to smash it to pieces and +make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been +able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood +awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point--and Frederick Evans +was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull +futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence +than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was +set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he +did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who +was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris +least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank +young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which +he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection +and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be +aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s +portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little +of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful +nor attractive, but probably trying to find _something_ to praise, +at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added +fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”--and so saying he +dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; +but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being +repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his +drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he +was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care +for his drawings--he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone +for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris +with a fixed determination never to go there again--and he could never +be induced to go. + +Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott +House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead +another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad +refused to go, and Vallance went alone--but that is another story. +For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was +to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far +wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in +the doing--one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer +Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for +the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for +ever--desert the night-school at Westminster--burn his boats behind +him--and launch on his destiny as an artist. + + + + +V + +BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST + +Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to twenty-one + +MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES + +“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS” + + +John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to +put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way +that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly +costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott +Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s _Le Morte d’Arthur_ to +lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend +Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, +Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts--300 +copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; +but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and +illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist. + +[Illustration: HAIL MARY] + +Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in +the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he +believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent +Beardsley’s _Hail Mary_, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he +comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one +risen from the well-dressed dead--Aubrey Beardsley had happened in, +according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from +the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst +the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the +other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s +your man!” + +To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he +was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to +discover to be the well-known publisher. + +So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met. + +Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his +“_Morte d’Arthur_,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden +splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback. +Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of +Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him +a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he +would at once commission him to illustrate the work. + +Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a +specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. +Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of +any consequence--he was utterly unknown--and his superb master-work +that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to +mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he +had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for +a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a +trifle old for studentship--he was twenty before he made a drawing that +was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books, +and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him +some idea of what was in Dent’s mind--of what was expected of him. + +At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at +the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a +chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans +assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well. + +Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create +the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott +tradition, took the drawing to Dent--the elaborate and now famous +Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as _The Achieving of the San +Grael_, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the +youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear +in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the _Morte +d’Arthur_. + +Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious +original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold +effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque +mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; _and the design +is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”_ It is his first use of +the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time +reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark” +is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of +mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for +three candles and three flames--a baser explanation was given by some, +but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all +that Beardsley did. + +Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the +_Morte d’Arthur_, which was to begin to appear in parts a year +thereafter, in the June of 1893--the second volume in 1894. + +So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic +the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval +woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem +of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John +Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might +enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have +the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt +him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind. + + * * * * * + +Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate +and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging +and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship +in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back +on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the +National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the +studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in +close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked +to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by +famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that +Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_ +mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the +grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no +pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic +designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and +were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of +an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were +trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than +others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally +dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But +the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held +Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were +the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught +himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him. + +One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for +the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black +decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the +utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career +depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to +reach his full powers in making them. + +Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred +designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell +which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To +Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was +not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to +make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious +enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his +debt to Greece through Anning Bell. + +We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during +this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and, +whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for +Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_. + +Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the +glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of +achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written +“after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been +forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance +masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_ +for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see +him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the +more a marvel--almost a miracle. + +It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the +decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew +that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he +poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds +drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere +that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to +all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had +now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that +true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry +or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious +increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create +it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that +ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the +British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, +delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him +work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he +was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley +worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully, +his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet +no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art +that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or +enhanced that art. + +Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his +effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to +fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the +only sketch he made for the completed design--when the pen and ink had +next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber. +The well-known pencil sketch of _A Girl_ owned by Mr. Evans shows +Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough +rhythm of his scrawls. + +A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight; +as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of +the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into +day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was +quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to +recognition. + +Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at +night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into +working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting +out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the +mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the +dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his +mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the +job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, +and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has +ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We +can judge better by his unfinished designs--than from any record by +eyewitnesses--that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper +on which he began it, without sketch or study--that he began by vague +pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and +composition and balance of the thing as a whole--that he then drew +in with firmer pencil lines the main design--and then inked in the +pen-line and masses. + +[Illustration: PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD] + +Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind +of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made +much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the +journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the +Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth +the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread +him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and +held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously +wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the +town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.” + +Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which +was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He +received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on +which stood two tall tapering candlesticks--the candlesticks without +which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of +pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very +young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose +whereon to lean for reputation. + + * * * * * + +His rapid increase of power--and one now begins to understand +Vallance’s enthusiasm--induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the +favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892, +half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth, +that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot +towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let +him have a printed proof from the _Morte d’Arthur_ of _The Lady of the +Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur_ to show to Morris. Several +of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we +must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white +decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few +months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering +revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually +offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in +poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have +fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and +Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott +idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole +achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious +and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris. + +Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” +which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any +hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do +his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as +a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly +did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward +Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an +angry remonstrance to Dent. + +[Illustration: HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN + +_from “Le Morte D’Arthur”_] + +How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old +glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not +easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point +much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high +integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley +and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a +rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris, +it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble +of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the +Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had +the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his +being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with +beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for +art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And +the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink +his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted +friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art +of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even +though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no +cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_ were +soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex, +which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned +his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have +been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or +in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there +was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men +of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is +quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that +it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to +create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the +music die in him unsung. + +William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years +thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied +outrival him in his “mediæval fake”--find himself--and give to the +world in _The Savoy_ a series of decorations that have made his name +immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the +ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become +an elaborate boredom. + + * * * * * + +Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get +the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he +was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and +plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s +_Shaving of Shagpat_--a desire to which he returned and on which he +harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of +the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional +publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about +a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering +at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not +impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that +Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason, +with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought +after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in +reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement. + +However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of +Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the +young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His +health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the +possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration, +he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on +strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely--here he could +use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in +which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy +_Morte d’Arthur_ convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque +vein for _Bon Mots_, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in +Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist +saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as +being latent in him. + + * * * * * + +Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black +portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the +young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into +the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his +achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every +hand his life long. + +The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to +enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left +the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of _The Art +Journal_, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind +had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine +for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of +“dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane, +then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very +astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles +Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of +William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane, +the friend of both men, brought them together--and in the December +of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis +Hind--and _The Studio_, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great +satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of +Charles Holme as his best asset--Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair +as _his_ best asset. + +So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go +of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and +artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace +Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of +1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced” +pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had +been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine, +was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was +playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the +room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent +mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with +his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s +elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow +hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in +the style of Phil May--a pallid silent young man, but self-confident, +self-assured, alert and watchful--with the inevitable black portfolio +under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined +for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon +him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked +the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s +portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of +genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé +air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the +two frontispieces for _Le Morte_ _d’Arthur_, the _Siegfried Act II_, +the _Birthday of Madame Cigale_--_Les Revenants de Musique_--“Some +_Salome_ drawings”--with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for +the _Morte d’Arthur_. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the +_Salome_ drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he +looked at the first number of _The Studio_ published three months +later. Wilde’s _Salome_ did not see print until February, a full month +afterwards and was quite unknown. + +However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, _The +Studio_, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that +Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to _The Studio_ +offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; +indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the +drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey. + +Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read +critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley +abroad--and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed +by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But +Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked +him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the +millionaire, had bought the daily _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the weekly +_Pall Mall Budget_ and was launching a new monthly to be called _The +Pall Mall Magazine_. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed +editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, asked Hind to become editor of the +weekly _Budget_ at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look +about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new +art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command +of _The Studio_ in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the +vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what +was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the _Pall Mall Budget_, +for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such +unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind. + +So the first number of _The Studio_ was to appear in the April of 1893 +glorifying a wonderful youth--his name Aubrey Beardsley! + + * * * * * + +It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the +good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic +and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of +the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in +encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented +much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had +the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism +who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation +which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive--and they forgave +Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and +Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at +Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the +aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts +men. + +On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover +design for _The Studio_ from the much gratified youth, who went +home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire--here +was _réclame_! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or +what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to +appear in the first number of _The Studio_ after Frank Brangwyn, then +beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his +work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from +the portfolio in his several styles--the Japanesque, and the mediæval +_Morte d’Arthur_ blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new +illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life +a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to +champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. +And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush +irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many--he gave it just +and fair and full value. + +All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness +to the first number of _The Studio_ in bringing him before the +public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really +did contain very remarkable work--at the same time it was scarcely +world-shattering--and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic +honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything +more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of +arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction +was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art--and all of +us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work +by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that +process-reproduction won through--and not least of all Beardsley. What +Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it +was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous +style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down +and died. + +The first number of _The Studio_ did not appear until the April of +1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is +true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around _The Studio_ +that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. +_The Studio_ itself was no particular success, far less any article in +it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested +greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by +mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. +Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was +only in our little narrow artistic and literary world--and a very +narrow inner circle at that--where _The Studio_ caused any talk, and +Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé +to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a +somewhat dinted toy--we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the +Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, +even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very +earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and +bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the +many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so--he +had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at +the New Year had gone from _The Studio_ offices to edit the _Pall +Mall Budget_, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley +to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the +like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, +utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his +reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the +most wretched drawings imaginable--drawings without one redeeming shred +of value--work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that +were decorating the _Morte d’Arthur_, which however the public had not +yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. +But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for _Morte d’Arthur_ +were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in +the _Pall Mall Budget_. The first volume of _Bon Mots_ appeared in +the April of 1893--the _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_ volume--although +few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was +pretty poor stuff. + + * * * * * + +Now, though the _Morte d’Arthur_ was in large part done before _The +Studio_ eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise +the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a +glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent +public in _The Studio_ article. There are examples from the _Morte +d’Arthur_, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in +combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with +their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. +The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance +mimicry of Mantegna called _The Procession of Joan of Arc entering +Orleans_ was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own +choice a year gone by when he made it--so far had he now advanced +beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art +seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far +more masterly _Morte d’Arthur_ decorations. If the writers were at +sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The _Siegfried Act II_ of +mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows +excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his +Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry--it is his typically early or +“hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The +_Birthday of Madame_ _Cigale_ and _Les Revenants de Musique_ show +the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are +akin to _Le Debris d’un Poète_ and _La Femme Incomprise_. But there +was also a Japanesque in _The Studio_ which was to have an effect on +Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published +in the February of 1893 in French the play called _Salome_ by Oscar +Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and +in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the +leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has +been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai +baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous +Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in _The Studio_ which +was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, +decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found +the destined illustrator of the English _Salome_, translated by Lord +Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that _Salome_ was to be a +marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley. + +It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of _The +Studio_, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy +flourishy design of this _Salome_ drawing to the more severe and +restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the +book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed. + +Note also another fact: The title of the article published in _The +Studio_ first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at +latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; +and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to +his work--the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large +pencil drawing of _Sandro Botticelli_ made in 1893 about the time +that _The_ _Studio_ was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been +made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his +figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge +he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. +Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the +work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the +year before. + +Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is +dead--and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible +that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not +so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s +peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as +he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones. + + * * * * * + +By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done +with the _Morte d’Arthur_; and it was only by the incessant prayers +and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans +to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that +Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. +He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism +from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly +concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for +ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And +another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley; +with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania +so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the +dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping +himself in study of phallic worship--and when all’s said, the worship +of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations, +and is implicit in much that is not so early. + +It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the +decorations he wanted for the _Morte d’Arthur_ in the young fellow’s +first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end +of the year of 1892, to which half year the _Morte d’Arthur_ almost +wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled +to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about +the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back +on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as +search the book that the _Morte d’Arthur_ was never completed--we find +designs doing duty towards the end again more than once--but Dent had +secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration. + +There appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for June 1893, drawn in +April 1893, as the first _Studio_ number was appearing, a design known +as _The Neophyte_, or to give its full affected name, “_Of a Neophyte, +and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel_”; +it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called +_The Kiss of Judas_--both drawings reveal an unmistakable change +in handling, and the _Neophyte_ a remarkable firmness of andform, +and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. +Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque +frontispiece to the _Morte d’Arthur_ and kindred works in his “hairy +line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists +was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators +were reaching quite wonderful effects through it--it was not lost on +Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities. + +[Illustration: “OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED UNTO +HIM”] + +It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley +for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a +long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just +to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will +in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he +has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a +handling as _The Neophyte_. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more +obvious to the lay mind a little further on. + +It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s _Morte d’Arthur_ +phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that +the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it +for months--indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late +1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even +in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy +line” called _The Questing Beast_ is dated by Beardsley himself “March +8, 1893”--as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley +by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893 +decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques +decorations of late 1892; and by the time the _Morte d’Arthur_ began +to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely +rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention. + +The two cover-designs for _The Studio No. I_ in April 1893 were +obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the +_Morte d’Arthur_--in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be +exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the +_Morte d’Arthur_ drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of +Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year. + +There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating +procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the _Morte +d’Arthur_ on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs. +Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work. +Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in +bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half +awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with: + + There was a young man with a salary + Who had to do drawings for Malory; + When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure + You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.” + +As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry +of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty, +faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. +And as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a +Japanesque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be +outdone in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque +mark” of the three candles, with three flames--in the more elaborate +later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke--or as Beardsley +himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as +important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and +paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light +that he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether +the “Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to +employ the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for +three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from _The Yellow +Book_--his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years--we shall +find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition to his +name. So it is well to dwell upon it here. + +The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 1892 to +mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped, and he +employed it indifferently and incongruously on any type of his designs +whether _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism or the Japanesque grotesques of +his _Bon Mots_. And we have seen that it was in the middle of his +twentieth year--he last used it in fact in the February of 1893--that +he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his initials and signature. +He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative years. He signs henceforth as +A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as Aubrey B. + +In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon his +_Salome_ designs, as weary of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques as of the +_Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque mark” +become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate--the V quite +departed from his signature. + +I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as he +called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most +amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on +forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it! + +[Illustration] + +From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship +by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at twenty-one except +to a small artistic circle. The _Bon Mots_ grotesques, mostly done in +the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, _Sydney Smith +and Sheridan_, in the April of 1893; the second volume at the year’s +end, _Lamb and Douglas Jerrold_, in December 1893; and the third, the +last volume, _Foote and Hooke_, in the February of 1894. The _Morte +d’Arthur_ began to be published in parts in June 1893. The feverish +creation of the mediæval designs in the late part of 1892 alongside of +the _Bon Mots_ grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s enthusiasm, and his +style evaporated with the growth of his weariness--by mid-1893 he was +finding the _Morte d’Arthur_ “very long-winded.” And what chilled him +most, he found the public indifferent to both--yet Beardsley knew full +well that his whole interest lay in publicity. + +It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. This +is a larger question and a serious question--but it _is_ a question. +It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as +well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to that. +But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed +his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism of the +_Morte d’Arthur_, by that time he came near to the end of the book +he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created for it; so also +his next development was as rapid, and by the time he is at the end of +his new Japanese phase in _Salome_ we shall see him again advancing so +rapidly to a newer development of his style that he grew weary of the +_Salome_ before he completed it, and threw in a couple of illustrations +as makeweight which are utterly alien to the work and disfigure it. And +yet these two drawings were made immediately after working upon this +_Salome_, and were thrown in only out of a certain sense of resentment +owing to the suppression of two designs not deemed to be circumspect +enough. But Beardsley did not refuse to make new drawings in key +with the rest--he had simply advanced to a new style quite alien to +_Salome_, and he found he could not go back. This will be clearer when +we come to the _Salome_. + +So precisely with the _Morte d’Arthur_; even the last decorations he +made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in _The Yellow Book_. + + * * * * * + +Before we leave the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the difficulties with +Beardsley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors +are often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps +to the ladder of Fame--and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M. +Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to +bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with +his song wholly unsung--there would have been for him no _Studio_ +“réclame,” no _Yellow Book_, no _Salome_, no _Savoy_. Dent, employing +with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an +edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal _Morte d’Arthur_ which is a +triumph for English bookmaking--he gave us the supreme edition that +can never be surpassed by mortal hands--he did so in a form within the +reach of the ordinary man--and in the doing he made the much vaunted +work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear second-rate, +mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires. + +[Illustration: HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”] + +[Illustration: THE PEACOCK SKIRT + +_from “Salome”_] + + + + +VI + +THE JAPANESQUES + +Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-One + +“SALOME” + + +Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the +edge of manhood. + +We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have +paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He +really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial +fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this +mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical +challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the +thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs +of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque _Caricature of +Whistler_ on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time. + +Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his +visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put +down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of +the early part of 1893--at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that +its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, +and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and +craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the _Salome_ founded frankly +upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by +Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of +Whistler have been delayed for two years? + +But--as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this +time revealed to the seeing eye--it was now to the work of the better +Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan. +The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable +for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach. +His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by +these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such +Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their +wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It +was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints +by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features +and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his +Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the +sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add +to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on. + + * * * * * + +It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to +publish the _Morte d’Arthur_ in parts in the June of 1893, as it had +called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane +now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition +of Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The +young fellow leaped at it--not only as giving him scope for fantastic +designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing +over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin +Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice, +founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley +had made--either on reading the French edition, or on reading the +widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in +the February of 1893--illustrating the lines that raised so hot a +controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé +ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several +illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the +birth of _The Studio_ in the April of 1893, soon thereafter. + +Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his +back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness +he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before, +was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for +_Salome_. + +Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the +Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing +house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day--they +were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant +support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on +producing _belles lettres_ in an attractive and picturesque form. +This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns. +The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints +repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack +publishers. + +On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather +on trust--the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Bon Mots_ were far from what +they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that +Beardsley was but little known. + +It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the +true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar +Wilde--but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias +as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than +Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King +Herod--but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and +did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s +play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play. +Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would +conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock +Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed +was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the _Morte +d’Arthur_, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes +as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his +imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play--and he proceeded +to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that +pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street +jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the +rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his +beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power. + +It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if +reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, +to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have +been hard put to it to explain--it was a sort of philistine literary +or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact +of line is perhaps more obvious in the _Salome_ drawings than in the +_Savoy_, since the _Salome_ designs are largely line unrelated to mass, +there are even so-called critics to be found who place the _Salome_ +drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day! + +Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but +happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his +line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius +thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the _Salome_ +drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line +condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged +application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, +the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last +surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded +itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite +a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear +sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional--grave or gay. +But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor +when he completed, the _Salome_, wherein his line is yet hesitant, +thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is +stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. +Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies +the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the _Salome_ against the +genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It +is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture +the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In _Salome_ he got +all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in +_The Stomach Dance_, the finest as it is the only really grossly +indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese +line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the +_Salome_ he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of +1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered +that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen +worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is +in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of +arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the +_Salome_ designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal +the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He +was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese +conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with +feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and +by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for +the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness--the +groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep +of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective--all are +gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is +secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the _Morte d’Arthur_, +and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the +mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and +hand--neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley +laid down the book of _Salome_ he had completed it with a final +decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley +closed the book of _Salome_ he had found himself. His last great +splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he +sat down and drew the exquisite _Burial of Salome_ in a powder-box in +the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was. + +_Salome_ finished, however, was not _Salome_ published. Elkin Mathews +and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without +certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two +gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public +recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be +“difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me +amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly +pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward, +and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who +would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or +indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that +Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations +on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made +from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little +done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus +the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum--however much +they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously +puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were +passed by! By consequence, the _Title Page_, and _Enter Herodias_ +were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I +was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings +that were deliberately and grossly obscene, _The Stomach Dance_ +appeared without change--was accepted without demur by the public +and in silence by the censorious--indeed the lasciviousness of the +musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the _Toilette of +Salome_, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction, +had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very +second-rate design of _John and Salome_, and in place of the two +had been inserted the wretched _Black Cape_ and Georgian _Toilette_ +which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the +fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a +strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared +to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and +cheap conceit--for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt +to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his +supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting +or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been +the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public +thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The +public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, +and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young +fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any +case, the mediocre _Black Cape_ and the better Georgian _Toilette_, +quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were +an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so +greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will +thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to +complain of stone-throwing by the crowd. + +[Illustration: THE STOMACH DANCE + +_from “Salome”_] + +The interpolated _Black Cape_ and the _Second Toilette_ we may here +dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they +are wholly outside the _Salome_ atmosphere. Of the pure _Salome_ +designs, incomparably the finest are _The Stomach Dance_ and the +_Peacock Skirt_. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, +that he considered the best drawings to be _The Man in the Moon_, the +_Peacock Skirt_, and _The Dancer’s Reward_--it should be noted by +the way that Beardsley showed by his _Book of Fifty Drawings_ that +his title was _The Man in the Moon_ not as the publishers have it, +_The Woman in the Moon_. But it is in _The Climax_, one of the less +noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride--for +though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to +be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as +compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his +flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the +same design, drawn but a year before and shown in _The Studio_ first +number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards +ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with +the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs +in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown. + +We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely +censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be +on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to +the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time +of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to +carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be +produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man +should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence +of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. +Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow +that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening +effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an +utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to +such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the +enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour +after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact +position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a +living wage? + +Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen +and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given +the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between +his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was +compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust +upon him, in having accepted long contracts--or rather contracts that +took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his +commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have +fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him, +passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step +back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted +at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can +the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then +could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of +the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the +_Salome_ drawings for instance have appeared in the _Morte d’Arthur_? +But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high +achievement would have suffered--and Death was beckoning to him not +to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the +artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it +in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement +of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the +letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating +a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone +forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by +doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure? +Of the 544 or so decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_, several are +repeated--some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate, +just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for +the _Morte d’Arthur_, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get +a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 +for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings +a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 +would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what +he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not +permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain +usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist +to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know +the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of +flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up +self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to +pay his pound of flesh.... + +Even before Beardsley was done with _Salome_, he had exhausted the +Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has +to evolve a _Title-page_, a _List of Contents_, and a _Finis_; and +we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of _Salome_, +weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield +his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of +his _Morte d’Arthur_ designs again, he was about to burst into a new +song as hinted at by the last three designs for _Salome_. An artist is +finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance. + +[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”] + +About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley +wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new +book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,” +which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said: +that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a +new venture about to appear. For _The Yellow Book_ is the only contract +that emerges out of this time. + +It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this +time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they +took their scheme to John Lane. + +Whilst at work on the _Salome_, Beardsley began the long series of +decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, +forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews +and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as +_The Keynote Series_ of novels, published on the heels of the wide +success of _Keynotes_ by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist +stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time. + +And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art +Club. + +Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists +and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother +and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after +their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his +sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental +roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought +their little home--a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street. + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III] + + + + +VII + +THE GREEK VASE PHASE + +New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-One to Twenty-Three + +“THE YELLOW BOOK” + + +It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister +Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home +in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance +decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much +talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds +today! + +Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London. +Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother, +were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care +to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play +the host--and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities +were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young +man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his +“tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white +forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for +it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed. + +Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running +from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs +of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at +her dressing-table known as _La Dame aux Camélias_. The couch in his +studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much +of his all too short life lying upon it. + + * * * * * + +When Beardsley began the _Salome_ drawings at twenty-one he was, as +we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese +masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the +craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces +was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque +features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work +upon the _Salome_ designs he was much at the British Museum and was +intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum +is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in +their line and mass fascinate Beardsley--not only was he struck by +the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered +by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius +which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of +the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye +towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified” +by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it +was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered +erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly +intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs +upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris, +appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they +had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his _Salome_ +drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr +peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it +behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to +make him famous. + + * * * * * + +[Illustration: LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS + +_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III_] + +On the 15th of April 1894 appeared _The Yellow Book_. It made Beardsley +notorious. + +In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl +with the 3rd, the last, volume of _Bon Mots_; and _Morte d’Arthur_ +was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say +that _Salome_ made Beardsley famous. _Salome_ was an expensive +book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but +ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and +_Salome_ passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But _Salome_ did lead +to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public +eye. + +Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing +a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather +together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that +had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the +so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe +or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of +_The Yellow Book_ developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich +in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to +make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort +of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes--to answer in the pictorial +realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have +fired a publisher. _The Yellow Book_ quarterly, however, was a very +different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art +of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley +dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It +was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the +literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne +witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and +himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth +Club, founded the much discussed _Yellow Book_.” This quarterly, to +be called _The Yellow Book_ after the conventional name of a “yellow +back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each +number--not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a +magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the +one on the other. + +Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the _Salome_, as +we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them +and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of +1894, the _Salome_ off his hands, that _The Yellow Book_ was planned in +detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery +ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the +expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning +to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near +at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the _Salome_ into the wastepaper +basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime +flung aside the _Morte d’Arthur_ Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now +gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it--through books--and +he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of +his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with +flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done--employing +line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and +enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the +_Morte d’Arthur_ now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking +subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was +cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan +and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of +social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world--he +took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of +the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts; +its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than +the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little +insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his +own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own +class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience +whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else--but we are coming to +that. + +It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German, +Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic +weekly, _Pick-Me-Up_, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a +monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that +it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the _Graphic_ +and _Illustrated London News_.” Struck by some article attacking the +art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly +review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called _St. +Paul’s_. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the +general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an +opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make +some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac--(remember, _St. +Paul’s_ was to begin as a monthly!)--and to illustrate the subjects +to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, +Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “_Man that holds +the Water_ _Pot_” and the “_Music_,” but the paper did not appear +in January--indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and +fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably +meant for Dent’s _Bon Mots_--however they may have been intended for +_The Fashions_ and _The Drama_ pages of _St. Paul’s_. He made in all +four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not +greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I +“might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value, +however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of +1894--they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked +increase of power over line--they end his _Salome_ Japanesque phase. + +It is somewhat curious that, whilst _The Man that holds the Water Pot_ +is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the +fourth drawing he made for _St. Paul’s_ seems to have been missed by +all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of +it! + +Before we leave _St. Paul’s_, it is interesting to note that at this +time the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by +the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental +headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for _St. Paul’s_ and other +papers. + +[Illustration: MESSALINA] + +It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the _Poster for the +Avenue Theatre_ which really brought him before a London public more +than anything he had so far done--a success, be it confessed, more due +to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the Avenue +Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which could +not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. Needless +to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw was +to float into the public ken with his play of _Arms and the Man_ at +this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house that from +its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross Bridge, it was +cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost Seagulls.” I shall +always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster with Shaw’s rise +to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being called before +the curtain at the end of _Arms and the Man_, some man amongst the +gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s ready Irish wit +brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the darkness, his lank +loose figure waited patiently until complete silence had fallen on +the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I agree with that +gentleman in the gallery, but”--shrugging his shoulders--“what are we +amongst so many?” + +Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s _Plays_ appeared about the +April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of +a wide public. + + * * * * * + +Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley. + +It was the publication of _The Yellow Book_ in the mid-April of 1894 +that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow +circle so far interested in him. + +London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, or +at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room +was sprinkled with the latest books--the well-to-do bought pictures and +wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves on their +literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London white in a +night, so _The Yellow Book_ littered the London drawing-rooms with +gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand. It “caught on.” +And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the crest of its wave +of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. After all, everything +that was outstanding and remarkable about the book was Beardsley. _The +Yellow Book_ was soon the talk of the town, and Beardsley “awoke to +find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured his work; and soon he +was himself caricatured by “Max” in the _Pall Mall Budget_; whilst the +Oxford undergraduates were playing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like. +But it was left to Mostyn Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque +on any poem in our tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus: + + ’Twas rollog; and the minim potes + Did mime and mimble in the cafe; + All footly were the Philerotes + And Daycadongs outstrafe.... + + Beware the Yellow Bock, my son! + The aims that rile, the art that racks, + Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun + The stumious Beerbomax! + + * * * * * + + Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod, + The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue, + Came piffling through the Headley Bod, + And flippered as it flew.... + +[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF + +_from “The Yellow Book” Volume III_ + + PAR LES DIEVX + JVMEAVX TOVS + LES MONSTRES + NE SONT PAS EN + AFRIQUE] + +As one turns over the pages of _The Yellow Book_ today, it is a +little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. +Indeed, London’s passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic +weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But it _was_ a sensation. And that +sensation flung wide the doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He +enjoyed his fame with gusto. He revelled in it. And the ineffable and +offensive conceit that it engendered in the lad was very excusable and +understandable. He was lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere +and enjoyed every ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good +fortune that his fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours, +was enhanced by an increase of health and strength that promised +recovery from the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and +waking. His musical childhood had taught him the value of publicity +early--the whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means +and at every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and +loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes +he even felt a little ashamed of it--and of his Jackals. But his vogue +now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody--and +he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained. + +It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even at +the publishing of the second volume of _The Yellow Book_ in July there +was that which happened--had he had prophetic vision--that boded no +good for the young fellow. + +The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane fell in, +and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane in sole +possession of The Bodley Head--and _The Yellow Book_. + +The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head +considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The +Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a +twelvemonth was out. + +It was on the designs of this second volume of _The Yellow Book_ of +July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last +time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; for, +in the _Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf +Club_ on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given place +to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.” + +Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his +work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had +no need to work--were above work. He liked to pose as one who did +not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly +appeared, he won an increase of notoriety--or obloquy, which was much +the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was +to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that +scared him--and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip. +Meanwhile the Christmas number of _Today_ produced his very fine +night-piece _Les Passades_. + +[Illustration: NIGHT PIECE] + +Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue--as playwright and wit and +man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the _Salome_, with its +erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a +false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never +were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer +of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented +Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley +delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what +was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that +Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young +talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It +came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites to go over +to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship, +and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified +his condescension to that end--but the gross patronage of Wilde on +the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had +flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an +intimate--he never again sought to bask in the radiance. + +To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a +novel called _The Green Carnation_ of which Wilde and his associates +were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination. +The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s +intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even +if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very +well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to +pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He +sprang at opportunity--and struck hard. With the reckless courage +so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he +struck--and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a +leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the +healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his +vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening +public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at +a state of elegant decay. + +Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which brought +Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde but to +bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social pariah. +On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and charged at +Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial; and on the +3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary +public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April amidst the wild +enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested the same evening. + +On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow Street with +a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch during the +fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde and Taylor +were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, on the +26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. After a +case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed and the +prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again refused. A +week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail for £5,000; +and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor was put on +trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May the 20th, +and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed. The +following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began at the Old +Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” and with +Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. + +The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. The +fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of mark with +like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general scare set +in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but it also caused +a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a short while +before been in truculent vogue.... + +John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume III of +_The Yellow Book_ in October 1894 and volume IV in the January of +1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number, volume +V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number bound, +when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook society. +The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend of Oscar +Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the writers of _The +Yellow Book_; but whatever the cause, John Lane who was in America +was suddenly faced with an ultimatum--it was said that one of his +chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened that without +further ado either he or Beardsley must leave _The Yellow Book_ at +once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not alone but +had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her vogue, +with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits of the +storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John Lane in +his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet was +a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own +business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision +could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s +drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, and +anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. It +may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship was +solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a most +unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic +in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts of moral +cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley _The Yellow +Book_ was doomed--it at once declined, and though it struggled on, it +went to annihilation and foundered. + +This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant +that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John +Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in +deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it +might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite +pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But +Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in +that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be +thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made +responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly +detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself. + +His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ was very bitterly resented by +Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height +of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him +by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did +with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must +be confessed that _The Yellow Book_ at once became a stale farce +played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the +scene-shifter--_Hamlet_ being attempted without the Prince of Denmark. + +The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even +more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment +at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an +intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking, +Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude +towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous +price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at +least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in +the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his +very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable +personal charm that he possessed in no small degree. + +[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL + +_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I_] + +His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ placed Beardsley in a very awkward +financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings for +_The Yellow Book_ must have been but small at best; and it is a mystery +how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and +that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man +of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been +dangerously staunched by his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_. + +The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for +volume V of _The Yellow Book_, printed for April, but suppressed at +the last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and +craftsmanship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a +new craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves +in the later _Yellow Book_ designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895, +at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an +interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was +about to astonish the world. + + * * * * * + +_The Yellow Book_ phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what +went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine +firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous _Lady +Gold’s Escort_ and _The Wagnerites_ are the type, and of which The +Nightpiece is the triumph--and a very thin delicate line, generally +for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn +head--of which the _Mrs. Patrick Campbell_ is the type and _L’Education +sentimentale_ a variant--whilst the three remarkable _Comedy-Ballets of +Marionettes I, II, and III_, show white masses used against black. + +Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in mid-1894 +in the July volume, No. 2, of _The Yellow Book_. The _Plays of John +Davidson_, several _Madame Réjanes_, the fine _Les Passades_, the +_Scarlet Pastorale_, and the _Tales of Mystery and Wonder_ by Edgar +Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 _Yellow Book_ phase. + +But in the third volume of _The Yellow Book_, the fanciful and +delightful portrait of _The Artist in bed_, “_Par les dieux jumeaux +tous les monstres ne sont pas en Afrique_,” and the famous _La Dame +aux Camélias_ standing before her dressing table, advance his handling +in freedom and rhythm; as does the exquisite _The Mysterious Rose +Garden_, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of +Biblical illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the +_Annunciation_”--indeed he could not understand the objections of the +prudish to it and resented its being misunderstood! The _Messalina with +her Companion_ is of this later _Yellow Book_ phase; and the _Atalanta +without the hound_ of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example of +it. + +The beautifully wrought _Pierrot Invitation Card_ for John Lane; the +remarkable wash drawings _A Nocturne of Chopin_ from the suppressed +Volume Five, and the _Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47_ of _The Studio_, +all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, show +Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the +double-page _Juvenal_ of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair, +he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change, +as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that +followed Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_; for, being +commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for _An Evil +Motherhood_, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected _Black Cape_, of +the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only +under the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that +Beardsley made the now famous design of the _Evil Motherhood_ in which +he entirely breaks from _The Yellow Book_ convention and craftsmanship, +and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period. + +[Illustration: THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN + +_from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV_] + +It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ +that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s +_Posters_ for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a +mediocre poster for _The Pseudonym Library_, a woman in a street +opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest _Poster_ he ever +designed--a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in +black and purple, for _Christmas Books_--all three of _The Yellow Book_ +phase. + + * * * * * + +There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from _The Yellow +Book_, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s +life--an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a +curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by. + +I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and +it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to +criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in +the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for +it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying +what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d +campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient +philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and +conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full +career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, +if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy +opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against +modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great +magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted +that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of +Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. +I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English +Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was +ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and +Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples +of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and +Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff +Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists +at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. +Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so +far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” +in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not +as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his +art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and +Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were +not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken +English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through +borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision. +In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British +genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being +“effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”--which was not at all typical +of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very +brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters. + +[Illustration: DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD] + +Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him, +cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply; +and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously +hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition +of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the +Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of _St. Paul’s_; and the editor, +Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to +its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but +contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus: + + 114 Cambridge Street + S. W. + June 28th + + SIR, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, + or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic + surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I + may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am + “sexless and unclean.” + + As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if + he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it. + + Yours &c + Aubrey Beardsley + +This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic +delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched. + +I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to +answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be +published--that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in +seeking self-advertisement--but I was the last man in the world to +allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to +Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw +at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown +before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword +and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired +to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by +cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with +“Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his +naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply +at the same time, as follows: + +A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. + + SIR, + + When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, + his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his + untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy + bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove + descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to + establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal + confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking + his morning bath--a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling + thrill of novelty if he persist in it. + + Yours truly + Hal Dane. + + July 3rd 1895 + +The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the +fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to +advertisement--the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a +weapon for wounds. + +Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt--before giving +out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s +“masterpiece”--on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be +too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed +to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on +me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that +Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys +more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his +mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention +of mine to lash _at him_ but at Harry Quilter--at the same time perhaps +he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I +thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts +to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, +when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as +it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the +years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley +trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published +were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to +Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid +his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to +employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his +line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere +advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, +Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told +me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him +a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at +Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy +whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly +when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who +had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group +that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly +agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more +than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton +lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died +about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of +craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the +containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired +the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered +Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as +masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but +both men could make line “sing.” + +In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: +and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own +significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him +before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the +day of bitter regret was at hand. + + * * * * * + +Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894 +or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with +oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The +Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_; +he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The +Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently +tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; +and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the +unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. +“I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints, +and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that +produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.” + +[Illustration: THE SCARLET PASTORALE] + +It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_ +in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement +for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first +appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a +wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome +prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, +Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men +in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, +and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was +essentially “in the small.” + +For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured +intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his +dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, John Lane whilst in America during +the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much +resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the +flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it +out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his _Lady +Gold’s Escort_ and his _Wagnerites_.... The decadent fad can’t long +stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant +wonder that the _Daily Chronicle_ asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. +Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art +bitterly offended Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but +who still more resented this desire to show him as being really +“quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of +the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have +satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested, +not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused +of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling +together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the +vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to +try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist--he was none. +A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.” + + * * * * * + +At a loose end, on his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley +drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and +began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling _Venus and +Tannhäuser_--it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as _Under +the Hill_--a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He +completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings +for _The Yellow Book_, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to +create his great style and supreme achievement in art. + +The smallness of the page of _The Yellow Book_ had galled him by +compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size +of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him; +it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and +flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was +kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid +as though he knew he had but a short way to go. + +[Illustration: ATALANTA] + +_Baron Verdigris_ was the transition from the _Morte d’Arthur_ phase +to the _Yellow Book_ or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as _The Fat +Woman_ was the transition from his Greek vase stage; _Black Coffee_ the +end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of _The +Yellow Book_ page and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley +was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of +detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own. + +He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street, +with his sister, when expelled from _The Yellow Book_. It was about +this time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent +movement and became a Roman Catholic priest--the friendship soon became +more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was to have +a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published Beardsley’s +letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and were soon +very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate +insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this time. +Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,” from +which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was from the first +bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes and artistic +temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, soon +we find Gray priming the young fellow with arguments to refute his +“Anglican” friends. + + * * * * * + +The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with _The +Yellow Book_, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health +began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to +his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it. + +Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or +whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from _The +Yellow Book_ and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at +114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St. +James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon. + +He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so +ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man. + +And _The Yellow Book_ went on without him, to die a long lingering +ignoble death. + + * * * * * + +Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley +Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook +his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the +making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of +1895--and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank +in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original +art of astounding power. It was the proof of the _Venus between +Terminal Gods_. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite +_Mirror of Love_, wrought just before the _Venus between Terminal +Gods_. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom +of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation. + +[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS. 1 AND 2_] + + + + +VIII + +THE GREAT PERIOD + +Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four + +“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES + +1. “THE SAVOY” + + +It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even +the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good +fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That +fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for +his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his +art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or +put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve +his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show +sympathy, far less to help. + +But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to +venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man +who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For, +at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday, +Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement. + + * * * * * + +In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought +out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a +providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny--a man who +proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor +and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this +fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to +this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe +the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work. +Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey +Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung. + +Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley +lying on a couch--“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.” +Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to _The +Yellow Book_ which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the +fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely +to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme +for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for +Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons. +A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more +than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art. +The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and +in their keen interest in the erotic emotions--Arthur Symons had not +hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet +of a Night.” + +Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of _The Savoy_ for +the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to +Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable +his work to be produced on a larger scale. + +[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”] + +The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and he +was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement. +What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of +his art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of +his publisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work +whatsoever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of +Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see +working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made him a +free man. + +The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives +us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from _The +Yellow Book_ in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for +Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two +drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him +into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age--these drawings, +clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one +hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly _Venus between +Terminal Gods_, designed for his novel of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, +better known as _Under the Hill_, and the exquisite _Mirror of Love_, +or as it was also called _Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of +a Mirror_. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and +utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill +is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the +different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew +subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm, +orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two +masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of +sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom. + +The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a +fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious +figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to +be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the +north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, +gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to +London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature +and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the +life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and +set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its +narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of +questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at +the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean +and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such +rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there +drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the +original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation +of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman +held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and +resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought +and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put +up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained +door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his +henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed +their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his +daring _coup_ with Burton’s unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_, which was to +be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing +Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a +London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the +country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it +clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work +would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an +ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced +her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully +delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the +bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible +for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday +morning--returned to town with the scrip--and spent the rest of the +evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing +frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or +eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the +Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for--it +is gossiped--some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the +bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the +doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with +a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money +into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for +this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning +correspondence. It had been touch and go. + +[Illustration: THE MIRROR OF LOVE] + +Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine +editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came +about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers +with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from +him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith +to usurp _The Yellow Book_. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly +humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable +flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and +Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more--or at any +rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an +“exaggeration” to his own advantage--Beardsley’s bank-books alone can +verify or refute it--he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley +from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free +from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what +song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that +he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth +Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had +to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley +should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he +won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every +appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a +show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful +way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair +means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill. +He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when +Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers +was the most loyal and devoted friend he had. + +[Illustration: A CATALOGUE COVER] + +A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, +_M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as +he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal +Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; +as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place +in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a +subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and +interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception +to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come +under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, +Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room +painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the +walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey +Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his +brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and +very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and +has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be +noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power +of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great +palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy +and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at +Walton-on-Naze....” + +You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world +his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious +mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for +ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was +Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s +life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the +humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a +good friend as well as a publisher.” + +Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which +was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one +of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public. +There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be +published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to +exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow +was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his +novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to +illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare +craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication. + + * * * * * + +Disgusted with _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley put his immediate past +and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his +beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest +achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated +this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now +opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the +early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again +begun to dog his steps. + +Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed +to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley +in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from +money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with _The Savoy_ due to +appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th +century, and at once his art burst into full song. + +Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered +Beardsley immersed in his work for _The Savoy_; but finds him now more +concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard +at work upon his obscene novel _Venus and Tannhäuser_, the so-called +_Under the Hill_, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the +inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and +scribbling phrases as they came to him. + +[Illustration: ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)] + +[Illustration: THE ABBE] + +The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a +city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city +he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk +for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked +violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of +the Prudential.” + +It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his +master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, +his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world +of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature +proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial +type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary +gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, +let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university +magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay +art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. +He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of +bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise +proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound +sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is +precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial +minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product +not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city +and scholastic circles. + +_Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_, +and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to +understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons +could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any +say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without +cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured +stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The +real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another +matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling +in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish +it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground +press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the +real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would +be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour +to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant +erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only +value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing +but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with +an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite +as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to +express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the +real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any +rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the +world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw. + +[Illustration: THE FRUIT BEARERS] + +[Illustration: A CHRISTMAS CARD] + +As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us +Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy +images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing--better +uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for +literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical +essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and +art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of +using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a +pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of +mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined +English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” +than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” +“reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” +and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl +with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever +were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”--what Tree used wittily to +call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other +at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic +phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, +and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of +cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” +“Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and +refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet +little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant +chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat +old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a +sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and +the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings +of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the +constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary +achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that +publication is impossible. + +This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate +or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we +read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had +been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, +unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour +of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved +Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows +so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals +no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that +vex the age--he is concerned solely with his health or some business of +his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion +shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of +any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling +fellows, not a sign! + +It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that +he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned +him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid +contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that +others published. + +In _Under the Hill_ Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art +except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul, +so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé--it sounded more real to +him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley--a +hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or +generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable +of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on +satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome +garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings +over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind +as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being +nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament--it explains +his art, his life, his vision--and it proves the cant of all who try to +excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, +he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as +being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it. + +[Illustration: THE THREE MUSICIANS + +_from “The Savoy” No. 1._] + +[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”] + +The story of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, bowdlerised as _Under the +Hill_--by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for +even Beardsley feared to _write_ the Mons Veneris,--he seemed undecided +as to which to call it--the story was without consequence, without +cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of +little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and +desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life +burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons +that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly +coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe. +He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except +in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never +walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night +fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life +that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one +was there--to flit awhile into the room where the children danced--the +sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the +inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes. +He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a +phrase--he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like +a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits +to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of _The +Three Musicians_ with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the +old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies, +as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the _translation from +Catullus_. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse +rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in +literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand +the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make +literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional +act--he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because +he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument +for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to +order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of +all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe +whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was +more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It +was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings--it was +a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the +aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the +eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were +obsolete, a dead language--he is more concerned with dead words than +with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot +make it alive even for himself--he cannot fulfil a character in it +or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street +of fine clothes--there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He +is not greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly +concerned with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this +akin to Oscar Wilde. + + * * * * * + +It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques +Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable +friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the +picture he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to +Beardsley’s infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see +the author of one of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, _La Dame aux +Camélias_--Alexandre Dumas, fils. + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO. 1_] + +[Illustration: THE BILLET-DOUX] + +Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley +in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of +Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm. + +Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be +“unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an +affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully +common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all +except in the atmosphere of its workshop. + +He was now working keenly at _The Savoy_ drawings and the illustrations +for his bowdlerised _Under the Hill_, to be produced serially in that +magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the +rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed, +in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for _The Yellow +Book_, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of +the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for _The Savoy_, +being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for +December, _The Savoy_ eventually had to be put off until the New Year; +meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the +famous sequence of masterpieces for _The Rape of the Lock_, announced +for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March. + +In January 1896 _The Savoy_ appeared, and made a sensation in the art +world only to be compared with the public sensation of _The Yellow +Book_. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward +with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like +beauty of the superb Title Page--the two black-masked figures in white +before a dressing table--the deft witty verses of the naughty _Three +Musicians_, the _Bathers on Dieppe Beach_, the three sumptuously rich +designs of _The Abbé_, the _Toilet of Helen_, and _The Fruit-bearers_ +for the novel _Under the Hill_ which began in this number, capped by +the stately _Christmas Card_ of _The Madonna and Child_ lifted the new +magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year. + +The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest, +with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which +Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him +to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from +it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his _Morte +d’Arthur_ experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation +even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the +artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath +from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared +the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to _The Rape of the +Lock_--masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the +first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, _The New +Star_--with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of _The Dream_, the +exquisite _Billet-Doux_, the _Toilet_, the _Baron’s Prayer_, and the +magnificent _Rape of the Lock_ and _Battle of the Beaux and Belles_. + +[Illustration: THE TOILET] + +[Illustration: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK] + +The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning +to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming +nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an +extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces--we find +silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, +each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to +and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a +freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his +design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In +the two drawings of _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Battle of the Beaux +and Belles_ it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the +white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the +single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the +muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and +satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially +as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the +cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of +the thing. + + * * * * * + +By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s +life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the +February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous +scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable +time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon +that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended +in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his +state--he was about to learn the dread verdict. + +The second number of _The Savoy_ appeared in April, as a quarterly, +and its charming cover-design of _Choosing the New Hat_ screened a +sad falling off in the output of the stricken man--for the number +contained but the _Footnote portrait of himself_; the _Third Tableau +of “Das Rheingold”_ which he had probably already done before going +to Brussels; a scene from _The Rape of the Lock_; and but one +illustration to _Under the Hill_, the _Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima_; +whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. +II--in all but four new drawings! + +Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next--the +third--number of The Savoy to appear in July, _the driving of Cupid +from the Garden_, and worked upon the poem of the _Ballad of a Barber_, +making the wonderful line drawing for it called _The Coiffing_, with a +silhouette _cul-de-lampe_ of _Cupid with the gallows_; but his body was +rapidly breaking down. + +On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the +letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which +Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this +day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change, +wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning +to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread +he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand +within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to +start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his +wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking +stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It +is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the +Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side +if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that +“_Note_” for the July _Savoy, No. 3_, announcing the end of _Under the +Hill_--Beardsley has made his first surrender. + +[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES] + +[Illustration: THE BARON’S PRAYER] + +So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last +restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the +terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had +to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the +fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write +as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition +to alien peoples--it was London that found him, London that raised +him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley +himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It +was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the +bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for +the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but +it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though +Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual +home with him--clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture +and to his books and the inspiration of his genius--the engravings +after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he +clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was +never happy at his work. + +By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom; +where he set to work on illustrating _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_ +as a Christmas Book--for which presumably was the fine _Ali Baba in the +Wood_. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his +“entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he +bends all his powers on illustrating _Lysistrata_! and in this July of +1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings +for the _Lysistrata_ as would have made any man’s reputation--but alas! +masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately. +However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe, +and the plagued man had to prepare for another move--it is a miracle +that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented +body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay +lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately +the world at large can never look upon--the _Lysistrata_. It is almost +unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite +art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he +drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for +publication--that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to +the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order--they utter +the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion--their very +mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself +full well that the work was masterwork--“I have just completed a set of +illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things +I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, +who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic +Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the +_Lysistrata_ should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that +Beardsley reached the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes through the French +translation of Maurice Donnay--he was so anxious to assert that the +purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in +book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The _Lysistrata_ finished, he +turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the _Sixth Satire +of Juvenal_. + +But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off +hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad +state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made +his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the +mischief.” Beardsley found relief--in the _Juvenal_ drawings! “I am +beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for +the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe. + +[Illustration: THE COIFFING] + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 4.] + +With the July number, _No. 3_, _The Savoy_ became a monthly magazine; +and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse +Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost +passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the +_Lysistrata_ sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August +_Savoy, No. 4_--but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this +beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze +curtain, in the same month that he drew the _Lysistrata_ sequence, and +that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives +the world a hint of what it lost. + +August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two +Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the _September +Savoy, No. 5_, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the +uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of _The +Woman in White_ which he had made from the _Bon Mots_ line drawing long +before--there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps +lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design +showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white. + +It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after +signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work +with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his +drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three +drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but +they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were +most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they +should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the +issues of _The Savoy_ so as to prevent a sense of monotony--we shall +see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at +the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with +the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature. +Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur +Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from +month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at +least one. The full signatures on the _Death of Pierrot_ and the _Cover +for the Book of Fifty Drawings_ are the last signatures in full; and +both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are +about to see. + +Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent +business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of +the bleeding from the lungs--a train journey always upset him. He had +to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a +state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe +as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing +cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.” + +The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic _Death of +Pierrot_ that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now +brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design, +so the powerful _Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ had to be used +as a cover for the October _Savoy No. 5_. The _Death of Pierrot_ is +wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the +sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual +literary beauty of its written legend. + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 7.] + +[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”] + + +September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s +winter. + +It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices +at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the +first offices of _The Savoy_ at Effingham House, Arundel Street, +Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade +that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already +done, and their publication in an _Album of Fifty Drawings_, to appear +in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his +suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the +end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the _Death of +Pierrot_. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the _Cover +for A Book of Fifty Drawings_. The fifty drawings were collected and +chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes +it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September, +the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive _Bookplate of the +Artist_ for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the +Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm, +however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely +to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path +in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the +extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have +upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade +greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on +view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort. + +The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful _Cover for the +November Savoy, No. 7_, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the +book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of +“Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful +translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing _Ave +atque Vale_ or “Hail and Farewell” for the _Carmen C I of Catullus_, +whilst the third illustration for the November _Savoy_, the small +_Tristan and Isolde_, shows his interest maintained in the musical +sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended +to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October, +Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s _Das +Rheingold_, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he +himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of _Tannhäuser +returning to the Horselberg_, was trying to induce Beardsley at this +time to illustrate the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ for him. The month of +October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire +with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber +from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly +ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am +quite paralysed with fear,” he cries--“I have told no one of it. It’s +so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer +ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet +before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a +long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s +bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress +made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to +start on her American theatrical tour. + +[Illustration: HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS] + +[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”] + +November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was +to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that +ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the +achievement of this great period of his art--he writes that he has +just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet +of Ernest Dowson’s, _The Pierrot of the Minute_” which was published +in the following year of 1897--a grim irony that a boredom should have +brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work, +he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November +a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to +avail anything.” + +There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to +illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one +design in particular of the several good designs in the _Pierrot of +the Minute_, that “_cul-de-lampe_” in which Pierrot, his jesting +done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing +wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework--a +tragic comment on the wonderful _Headpiece_ when Pierrot holds up the +hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, +blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of +human hands. + +It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on +Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the +appearance of his own _Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line_, +“an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some +reason difficult to plumb--it is neither good nor bad, and certainly +not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this +time for the _Book of Fifty Drawings_. It is a pathetically tragic +thought that the November of the exquisite _Pierrot of the Minute_ was +for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room +for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the +belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about +the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, +a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know +what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that +my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now +since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be +with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains +bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed +state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.” + +It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the +published prints for the cover and the title-page of _Evelina_--of his +“own early designing.” + +The _Savoy_ for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon +drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that +now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time. + +It was soon clear that the days of _The Savoy_ were numbered and the +editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the +last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public +support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, +spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it +a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest +and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful _A Répétition of Tristan +and Isolde_--and he flung into the number all the drawings he now +made or had made for _Das Rheingold_, which included the marvellously +decorative _Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold_, that +“sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated +his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book +for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the +unimportant fragments _Flosshilde_ and _Erda_ and _Alberich_, which he, +as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote +of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two +portraits of musicians, the _Mendelssohn_ and the _Weber_; he somewhat +fumbles with his _Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar_ from that _Don +Juan_ of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives +us the _Mrs. Margery Pinchwife_ from Wycherley’s _Country Wife_; he +very sadly disappoints us with his _Count Valmont_ from Laclos’ _Les +Liaisons Dangereuses_ for the illustration of which Beardsley had held +out such high hopes; and he ends with _Et in Arcadia Ego_. + +[Illustration: A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”] + +[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE] + +It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for +_The Savoy_ that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number +announces that _The Savoy_ is in future to be half-yearly and a much +higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on +Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out. + +Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the +appearance of _The Book of Fifty Drawings_ which he had completed +in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design--an +afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance +copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896. + +The December _Savoy_, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload +all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the +idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, _Les +Liaisons Dangereuses_ by Laclos, and Stendhal’s _Adolphe_.... + +On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing +himself for _The Idler_”--the interview that appeared in that magazine, +shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897. + +About Christmas his edition of _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ was taking +shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the +170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to +each of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s +enthusiasm. At this Yuletide appeared _The Book of Fifty Drawings_, +in which for the first time were seen the _Ali Baba in the Wood_, the +_Bookplate of the Artist_, and the _Atalanta in Calydon_ with the +hound. This book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own +estimate of his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty +best drawings; it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did +not always know what was his best work. It is interesting to note that +Beardsley includes the mediocre and commonplace _Merlin_ in a circle, +yet omits some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting +in that Beardsley not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his +early work, but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant +that he would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it, +certain definite drawings--he particularly forbade anything from +the _Scrap Book_ then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected +Ross’s malicious thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to +exchange good, and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces +and inadequacies. And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my +presence solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley +was dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the +temptation until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous +betrayal. However that was not as yet.... Evidently, though the fifty +drawings were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed +one October drawing for something thrown out, for the October _Ave +atque Vale_ appears; and it may be that the _Atalanta in Calydon with +the hound_, sometimes called _Diana_, and the Beardsley _Bookplate_ +together with the _Self-portrait silhouette_ that makes the Finis to +the Iconography, may have been done as late, and replaced other +drawings. Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to +the man who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very +beginning--Joseph Pennell. It was the least he could do. + +[Illustration: ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND] + +[Illustration: BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE] + +December had begun with more hope for Beardsley--his lung gave him +little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than anything +else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he felt +he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made +him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in +London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would be +“abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.” +And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he was +becoming quite hopeful again when--taking a walk about New Year’s Eve +he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a dreadful state” +before he could get any help. And he began the New Year with the bitter +cry: “So it all begins over again. It’s so disheartening.” He had +“collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to take him to some +more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved. + + * * * * * + +So ended the great _Savoy_ period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated to +the span of twelve moons. + + + + +IX + +THE GREAT PERIOD + +ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE + +1897 to the End--Twenty-Five + +II. THE AQUATINTESQUES + + +So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley was +now twenty-four and a half years of age--the great _Savoy_ achievement +at an end. + +The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897 came in +amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of carrying on +_The Savoy_ had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition was so serious +at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier View to a house +called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where the change seemed +to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He was very funny +about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little from the name of +this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his +Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he writes whimsically. +He began to find so much relief at Muriel, notwithstanding, that he was +soon planning to have rooms in London again--at Manchester Street. + +[Illustration: THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY] + +By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was “sketching +out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with Boussod +Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his _Frontispiece_ for +Theophile Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, for which he was now +making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style of +the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done--scant wonder +that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after reproduce his +works!--he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous _Bookplate +for Miss Custance_, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, and he also +designed the _Arbuscula_ for Gaston Vuillier’s _History of Dancing_. +For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in Beardsley’s +keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by death one of +the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they hold, the +subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that suffuses +them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering display of +Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he should +have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man. + +Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding had +almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious +bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully, and +made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two afterwards +he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sunshine makes +the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire and dreads +to go out. “At present my mind is divided between the fear of getting +too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough sunshine, +or rather warmth near home.” But the doctors had evidently said more +to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided now and in +future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of February saw +his doctor take him out to a concert--a great joy to the stricken +man--and no harm done. + +In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to draw. +He also started a short story _The Celestial Lover_, for which he was +making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March turned +cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed a serious +lip over his promise to let him go up to town--to Beardsley’s bitter +disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South--if only even +to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in his room +were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months now.” Yet a +day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in all directions +are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with cold winds, and +bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted fellow amongst +the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh how tired I am +of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made pair of boots.... +I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved bitterness.” The +move to London for the South was at last decided upon, for the first +week in April--to the South of France by easy stages. He knew now that +he could never be cured, but he hoped that the ravages of the disease +could be prevented from becoming rapid. + +On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even more +eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought to have +the right to beg for a few months more of life--“Don’t think me foolish +to haggle about a few months”--as he has two or three pictured short +stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, Wednesday the +31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church--on +the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the Sacrament which had to +be brought to him, to his great grief, since he could not go to the +Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for near upon a twelvemonth. +From this day of his entering the Church of Rome he wrote to John Gray +as “My dear brother.” + +There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art from +his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual +upheaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going +through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been +drawing the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, or indeed steeping +in that novel at all, or drawing the _Arbuscula_. For months he has +been led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church; +yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on _Under +the Hill!_ and drawn the designs for _Lysistrata_ and the _Juvenal!_ +not five months since he has drawn his _Bookplate!_ And by the grim +irony of circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same +month that there appeared in _The Idler_ his confession: “To my mind +there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have +the sun shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March _Idler_ +by Lawrence, one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the +framework and then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in +the details, was as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend +John Gray, written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just +departing. That interview will therefore remain always as an important +evidence by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It +is true that he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having +despatched it, was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I +have not said too many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute +to the complexity of the human soul that the correspondence with the +poet-priest John Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are +hidden from us, was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to +Rome, he was lending him books and interesting him in books, side by +side with lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their +fellowship with the saints. + +Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a week +after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, staying +a day or two at the Windsor Hotel--a happy halt for Beardsley as his +friend John Gray was there to meet him--and crossed to France, where +on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel Voltaire, quai +Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted mother. +Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. He loved to +be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in May he was +reading _The Hundred and One Nights_ for the first time, and inspired +by it, drew his famous _Cover for Ali Baba_, a masterpiece of musical +line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure resplendent +with gems--as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous design.” + +Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the prospect +of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sunshine. He +felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he was soon +able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again--perhaps it had been +better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to the sun. There +was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beardsley’s return +from America and their early meeting. He could now write from a café: +“I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though he could not get a +sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove which, being shut +off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a sitting-room and +thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room--he could forget he +was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a lift, the waiters +would carry him up stairs--he could not risk the climbing. And the +bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal joy to him. + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”] + +With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping +better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his +new religion; reads works of piety, and--goes on his way poring over +naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out of +his room awhile--talks even of getting strong again quite soon. + +But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for +Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of +his room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the +following day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him. +A month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised; +and Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its +picturesqueness--indeed St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to +inspire him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself +breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the air +was to make a new man of him. + +The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had secured +him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celebrities. And +the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St. Germain, +upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cautioned care. + +Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye, +where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue +de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May +drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was +giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch by +assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet--if he +went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth and the +South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St. Germain. +However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a walk in the +forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s creaking body. +The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of the lungs started +again and made him wretched. The arrival of his sister, however, was a +delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his delicious waggery that +she showed only occasional touches of “an accent which I am sure she +has only acquired since she left America.” His health at once improved +with his better spirits. + +Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living +genius of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s _Evan +Harrington_; it was about the time that the _Mercure_ published in +French the _Essay on Comedy_ which started widespread interest in the +works of Meredith. + +By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; “everyone in the hotel +notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sitting +out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and +lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled +again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a +journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised +to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised +by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley +decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the means +forbade. + +[Illustration: ALI BABA IN THE WOOD] + +Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high hopes, +Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence he wrote of +his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in the rue Halle +au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that he was out and +about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz Thaulow’s family +welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of his improved health, +it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best of all blessings, +he was now able to work. It was in this August that he met Vincent +O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty-fifth birthday. +Before the month was half through he was fretting to be back in Paris +for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He found this Hotel +rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more sheltered lodgings +in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado, hoping that Dieppe +might still know a gentle September. Though the weather remained wet +and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to Paris. His London doctor +came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered him vastly with hopes of a +complete recovery if he took care of himself, and advised Paris for the +early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was for Paris, turned his back on +Dieppe with a pang--he left many friends. However, late September saw +him making for Paris with unfeigned joy, and settling in rooms at the +Hotel Foyot in the rue Tournon near the Luxembourg Gardens. + +His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again from +a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doctor +considered him curable still; he might have not only several years of +life before him “but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching heat +of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the +chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much +out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was--reading +the _Memoirs of Casanova!_ But he had grown cautious; found that seeing +many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and inspiring book.” +But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake solemn heads--all +the talk was henceforth of the South of France. “Every fresh person +one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh objections to the places +we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger late in Paris; but +what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put aside on account of +its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of it show it horribly +“Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cœur sent him a bottle of +water from Lourdes. “Yet all the same I get dreadfully nervous, & +stupidly worried about little things.” However, the doctors sternly +forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly, with fogs; and +Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November saw his mother +taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in the rooms at +the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his last place of +flitting. + +Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have ever +been since my school days”; but the fogs that drove him forth made him +write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved so well: +“If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go down hill +rather quickly.” + +At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque place. +Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied again and +was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eating well; +was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement in him, to +his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustrations for Ben +Jonson’s _Volpone_, and was keenly interested in a new venture by +Smithers who proposed a successor to _The Savoy_ which he wished to +call _The Peacock_. + +[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”] + +The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier and more +peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.” + +So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the _Cover of +Volpone_ one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever brought +splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book. He also +made a pen drawing for the _Cover of a prospectus for Volpone_, which +was after his death published in the book as a _Frontispiece_, for +which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning +which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear +in the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had +developed and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All +the same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs, +or so it seems to me, as a Title Page, since _Volpone_ is lettered on +a label upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor +would have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at +all; for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole +style of the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction +on the _Prospectus_. But in this _Prospectus Cover for Volpone_ his +hand’s skill reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his +body’s sorry state--its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical +severity. And all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are +there, the white robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands +raised palm to palm suppliant-wise--the dark polished wood of the gilt +doorway--the fabric of the curtains--the glitter of precious metals and +gems. + +In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete list +of drawings for the _Volpone_,” suggested its being made a companion +volume to _The Rape of the Lock_, and asked Smithers to announce it +in _The Athenæum_. Besides the now famous and beautiful _Cover_, he +planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of _Volpone_ +to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did execute +are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals that +the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, _Volpone +and his treasure_, but that is to be in line and wash--obviously in +the style of _The Lady and the Monkey_--yet strangely enough, the +remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! And +it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus +in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate +and line version of the _Frontispiece_--and that it is not to appear +in the book. We have the line drawing for the _Prospectus_--and we can +only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated +in the manner of _The Lady and the Monkey_ or the _Initials_. That, in +this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling +in face of the fact that the _Initials_ were in the new method, line +with pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely +states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month, +that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything he +had yet done, which the _Initials_ certainly were. + +On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” sending +the _Cover Design for Volpone_ and the _Design for the Prospectus +of Volpone_, begging for proofs, especially of the _Design for the +Prospectus_, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs of +the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for Beardsley’s +Christmas cheer. The beautiful _Miniature_ edition of _The_ _Rape of +the Lock_, with Beardsley’s special _Cover-design in gold on scarlet_, +had just been published--the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley called them. + +However, these 24 designs for the _Volpone_ were never to be. But we +know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on the +19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new magazine +of _The Peacock_ projected by Smithers, of which more later. Whilst +delighted with the idea of editing _The Peacock_, Beardsley expresses +fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put the +_Volpone_ into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so, +that there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the +_Initials_ with this letter, for he underlines that _Volpone_ is to +be an important book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that +Beardsley is now sending him--indeed the _Initials_ were, alas! all +that he was ever destined to complete--the 24 illustrations were not to +be. That these _Initials_ were the designs sent is further made clear +by the remark that the new work is a complete, “a marked departure as +illustrative and decorative work from any other arty book published +for many years.” He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he +has left behind him definitely all his former methods. He promises the +drawings to be printed in the text by the first week in January, and +that they shall be “good work, the best I have ever done.” + +On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers, +urging on the production of the _Prospectus for Volpone_; and it is +interesting to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in +line and wash, in his aquatint style, of _The Lady and the Monkey_, +was originally intended for the _Volpone_ and not for the set of the +_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ in which it eventually appeared; but was cast +out of the _Volpone_ by Beardsley as “it will be quite out of keeping +with the rest of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was +clearly the method he had intended to employ for his illustrations. + +What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed for +the illustrations to _Volpone_ only _The Lady and the Monkey_ and the +_Initials_ can hint to us--he was never to create them. + +The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the place, +the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued fellow; and +again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depression left him. +He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold or chill; indeed +his only “grievance is mosquitoes.” He would weigh himself anxiously, +fearful of a set-back at every turn. + + * * * * * + +Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career--a fact +that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley +has noticed--was the very brief period of the public interest in him. +Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound--with _The Yellow +Book_; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the +last number of _The Savoy_ he had vanished from the public eye almost +as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings; +and his failure to keep the public interest with _The Savoy_, and all +its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie +in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire +whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what +new books he was producing. The _Book of Fifty Drawings_ seemed to +have written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better +cause to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to +continue _The Savoy_ in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; +but Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture--it +had all ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the +public homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought +it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper +cutting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about +that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called _The Peacock_, +to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of _The Savoy_; and +had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s +flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the name +of _The Peacock_ to _Books and Pictures_, which sounded commonplace +enough to make _The Peacock_ appear quite good when otherwise it seemed +somewhat pointless. + +[Illustration: INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”] + +Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly in +reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the editor of +his new magazine _The Peacock_ and should design the cover and whatever +else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one unswerving +condition, and but one--that “it is quite _agreed that Oscar Wilde +contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously or +otherwise_.” The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s detestation +of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public eye, is the +more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the Church of Rome +with much publicity. Beardsley would not have Wilde in any association +with him at any price.... Before Beardsley leaves the subject of +_The Peacock_ he undertakes to design “a resplendent peacock in +black and white” and reminds Smithers that he has “already some fine +wash drawings” of his from which he can choose designs for the first +number of the magazine. So that we at least know that this first +number of _The Peacock_ was to have had a resplendent peacock in +black and white for its cover, and that it was to have been adorned +with the superb decorations for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, the supreme +artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent skill. He outstripped +in beauty of handling even his already exquisite craftsmanship: and +it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that he was to die +before he had given the world the further fulfilment of his wondrous +artistry--leaving us wondering as to what further heights he might have +scaled. + +Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in his +“aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement. + +We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers +was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off +Bond Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the +_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, at Beardsley’s request, which had been +beautifully reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley +himself realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a +mark in watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings. + +But the gods had willed that it should not be. + +Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to +the planning of his prospectuses--he watched over them with fatherly +anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part +he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was +art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture of +_The Peacock_, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon +which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals +in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers, should +not be produced “unless you have piles of stuff up your editorial +sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis his +ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions of +the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for +the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns +of _The Yellow Book_ and even _The Savoy_. “The thing,” he writes, +“must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas +about everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little +backbone-less babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical +infinitely more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory +genius (especially when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives +in more detail his mature attitude towards literature: “On the literary +side, impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness +should be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount. +Let verse be printed very sparingly.... I should advise you to let +Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together +a staff. Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something +to say.”... And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and +antipathies in art--“On the art side, I suggest that it should attack +_untiringly and unflinchingly_ the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval +business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of what +picture making should be.” + +There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed, his +limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of +eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn +confession of his artistic faith. + + + + +X + +THE END + +1898 + + +Yet the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man with +relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” It +kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine again, +and his hopes were reborn. + +So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, with +Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests. + +In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by +the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked +like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives +on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have +known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind +come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s +life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left +his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he +arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of +being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed--a bad omen +for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost +heart--he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any +further to clamber out of it. + +[Illustration: THE DEATH OF PIERROT + +“_As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon +tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the +comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with +much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of +Bergamo; whither, we know not._”] + +The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon +a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his +designs and decorations for the _Volpone_, and remembering the pushing +forward of the _Prospectus_ that he had urged on the publisher, +he had fallen back on the pencil--as the elaborately drawn _Initial_ +letters show--for each of the scenes in _Volpone_, employing pencil +with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked +his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams +he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be +abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of _The Savoy_ he had come +nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers +in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were +when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had +found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as +were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase +in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his +imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, +and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere +and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the +sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or +white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his +skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the +fragile body failed him--at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his +bloodless fingers--his work was done. + +As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before +he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the +Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard +Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to +fulfil--even had he had the will--for “the written word remains,” and, +printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven: + + Jesus is our Lord & Judge + + Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad + drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that + is holy--all obscene drawings. + + Aubrey Beardsley. + In my death agony. + +But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter +repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting +theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist +lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made +no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He +faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last +words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a +marvellous achievement--and he did so without stooping to any attempt +at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the +truth--and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on +to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius +might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort +as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were +they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes--indeed, almost +before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not +only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together +for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well +Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to +their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship. + +On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and +seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body +was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity. +The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian +throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, +together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the +end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.” +So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds +from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the +Cross--it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a +grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an +arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last +walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.” + +Hail and Farewell! + +[Illustration: AVE ATQVE VALE] + + + + +A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY ACCORDING TO THE STYLE +OF HIS SIGNATURE + + +PUERILIA + +Mid-1888 he comes to town + + +JUVENILIA + +Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement + + +FORMATIVE PERIOD--BURNE-JONESESQUES + +Mid-1891 to Mid-1892 + +During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three +initials A. V. B. + + +MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES + +The _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Bon Mots_ + +Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”--the _stunted_ mark. + +In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending +of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of +his signature. He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in +ill-shaped “rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque +mark,” even sometimes when he does employ it. + + +“SALOME” + +Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes longer, +more slender, and more graceful. + + +“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD + +This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this +_Yellow Book_ period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque +mark” for the last time. + + +THE GREAT PERIOD + + I. “_The Savoy_” and II. “_The Aquatintesques_” + Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 1897 + +From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, right up to +the end--the only difference being that in the last phase of the +_Aquatintesque line and wash_ work with the few line drawings of this +time, that is from Mid-1896, he signs as a rule only the initials A. B. +in plain block capitals, but now usually _in a corner of his design_, +either in or without a small square label. + + + + + “AUBREY BEARDSLEY” + HAS BEEN DESIGNED + BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY + AND PRINTED UNDER HIS + SUPERVISION BY THE + VAIL-BALLOU PRESS + BINGHAMTON + NEW YORK + + + + + Transcriber's Notes: + + Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed. + + Italics are shown thus: _sloping_. + + Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained. + + Perceived typographical errors have been changed. + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 *** |