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Aubrey Beardsley | Project Gutenberg
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<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 ***</div>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover">
</div>
<h1>
AUBREY BEARDSLEY</h1>
<p class="c less sp">THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,</p>
<p class="c less sp">THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
</p>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f1">
<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="aubrey">
<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</p>
<p class="caption"><i>by F. H. Evans</i></p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<div class="bbox">
<p class="c lsp big">
AUBREY</p>
<p class="c lsp big">
BEARDSLEY</p>
<p class="c sp">
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,</p>
<p class="c sp">
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE</p>
<div class="figcenter1">
<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="decoration">
</div>
<p class="c sp p2 lsp xlarge">
HALDANE MACFALL</p>
<p class="c sp p6">
NEW YORK</p>
<p class="c sp large">
SIMON AND SCHUSTER</p>
<p class="c sp">
MCMXXVII
</p>
</div></div>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="c sp more lsp p2">
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.</p>
<p class="c sp med lsp p2">
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="c sp large">
TO</p>
<p class="c sp large">
EARL E. FISK</p>
<p class="c sp less p1">
THIS SMALL TRIBUTE</p>
<p class="c sp less">
TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP</p>
<p class="c sp p1 large">
H. M.
</p>
</div>
<p class="narrow p6">“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am
not grotesque I am nothing.”</p>
<p class="narrow">“I may claim to have some command of
line. I try to get as much as possible out
of a single curve or straight line.”</p>
<p class="c sp more">[AUBREY BEARDSLEY.]</p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="ph2">CONTENTS</p>
</div>
<table>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdl">FOREWORD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#cf">17</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c1">I:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">BIRTH AND FAMILY</td>
<td class="tdr">23</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c2">II:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL</td>
<td class="tdr">27</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">“THE PUERILIA”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c3">III:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK</td>
<td class="tdr">35</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c4">IV:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP</td>
<td class="tdr">42</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c5">V:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST</td>
<td class="tdr">58</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to Twenty-one</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c6">VI:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">THE JAPANESQUES</td>
<td class="tdr">95</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-one</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">“SALOME”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c7">VII:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">THE GREEK VASE PHASE</td>
<td class="tdr">113</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-one to Twenty-three</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">“THE YELLOW BOOK”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c8">VIII:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">THE GREAT PERIOD</td>
<td class="tdr">159</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">“THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-three to Twenty-four</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">I. “THE SAVOY”</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c9">IX:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">THE GREAT PERIOD</td>
<td class="tdr">234</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">1897 to the End—Twenty-five</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">II. THE AQUATINTESQUES</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c10">X:</a></td>
<td class="tdl">THE END</td>
<td class="tdr">260</td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdlp">1898</td>
<td class="tdr"></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"></td>
<td class="tdl">A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY   </td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#c11">269</a></td></tr>
</table>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="ph2">ILLUSTRATIONS</p>
</div>
<table class="less">
<tr>
<td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY <i>by F. H. Evans</i></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f1"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f3">25</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">HOLYWELL STREET</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f4">33</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">HAIL MARY</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f5">60</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f6">67</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f7">71</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“OF A NEOPHYTE....”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f8">85</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f10">92</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE PEACOCK SKIRT</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f11">94</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE STOMACH DANCE</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f12">103</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">TITLE-PAGE OF “SALOME”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f13">108</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f14">112</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f15">115</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">MESSALINA</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f16">121</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f17">125</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">NIGHT PIECE</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f18">129</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f19">136</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f20">139</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f21">143</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE SCARLET PASTORALE</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f22">149</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">ATALANTA</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f23">153</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NOS.</i> I <i>AND</i> II</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f24">158</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f25">161</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE MIRROR OF LOVE </td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f26">165</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">A CATALOGUE COVER</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f27">169</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f28">173</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE ABBÉ</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f29">175</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE FRUIT BEARERS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f30">179</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">CHRISTMAS CARD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f31">181</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE THREE MUSICIANS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f32">185</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f33">186</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> I</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f34">189</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE BILLET DOUX</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f35">191</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE TOILET</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f36">195</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE RAPE OF THE LOCK</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f37">197</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f38">201</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE BARON’S PRAYER</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f39">203</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE COIFFING</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f40">207</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> IV</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f41">209</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> VII</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f42">213</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f43">215</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f44">219</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f45">220</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f46">223</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">FRONTISPIECE TO “THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f47">225</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f48">229</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f49">231</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f50">235</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f51">241</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">ALI BABA IN THE WOOD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f52">245</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f53">249</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f54">255</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE DEATH OF PIERROT</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f55">261</a></td></tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">AVE ATQUE VALE</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#f56">270</a></td></tr>
</table>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="cf">FOREWORD</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap large">About</span> the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in
Hampstead Church—the gift of the American admirers of the dead
poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and
Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by—and
there had forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion
the literary and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation
came pouring out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man
broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard,
stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping
dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on taking
a short-cut out of God’s acre. There was something strangely
fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the
mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately
dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried
his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrists
showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid cadaverous face grimly set
on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his
feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his
“tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his
forehead in a “quiff” almost to his eyes—then he stumbled on again.
He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the
sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken—he
was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.</p>
<p><i>The Yellow Book</i> had come upon the town three months gone by.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a night.
He was the talk of the town—was seen everywhere—was at the topmost
height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was out
he was to be expelled from <i>The Yellow Book</i>! As he had come up, so
he was to come down—like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out of
the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and for
some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed
young dandy—fling him from <i>The Yellow Book</i>—and dim for him the
splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight.
Within a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was
to drop out of the public eye almost as though he had never been.</p>
<p>But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered
there—and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered there—this
young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year or so the
masterpieces of his great period—the drawings for a new venture to
be called <i>The Savoy</i>—and was soon to begin work on the superb
designs for <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, which were to thrust him at a stroke
into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years were run
out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave.</p>
<p>As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the
dead, so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be—one long struggle
to crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that
yawned for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being
dragged back to it again and again by unseen hands—was to spend his
strength in the frantic struggle to escape—he was to get almost out of
sight of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to
find himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge
of the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
plays with a mouse—with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of
the grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high
road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we,
who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that
were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this
agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical
things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very
breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise
that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the
skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room. For,
realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and
charm of <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>. Surely the hideous nightmares that
now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject for
bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his
facile pen!</p>
<p>Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of
manhood, and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into
each twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows—he
knew that he had but a little while to which to look
forward, and had best live his life to-day. And he lived it like one
possessed.</p>
<p class="r"><span class="smcap large">Haldane Macfall.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></span></p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="c sp">
<span class="xlarge lsp">AUBREY BEARDSLEY</span><br>
<br>
<span class="less">THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,<br>
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE</span><br>
<br>
1872-1898<br>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c1">I</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">BIRTH AND FAMILY</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">To</span> a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something
in the city,” of the name of Beardsley—one Vincent Paul Beardsley—and
to his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of
the family of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first
day of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the
army surgeon at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child,
a boy, whom they christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing
that in a short hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie
a-dying, having made the picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous.</p>
<p>Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption
that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does
not appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive,
stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the chronicles
and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades away,
departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his work
of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it be that
so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us wondering
by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called to
the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name and
raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it should
stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of the age.
For, when all’s said, it was a significance—if his only significance—to
have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying at twenty-five,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording tablets of the
genius of his race in the indelible ink of high fulfilment. However, in
the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a brief moment into the limelight
and is gone, whether “something in the city” or whatnot, does
not now matter—his destiny was in fatherhood. But at least it was
granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to him, that, from
whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he should live
to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son, who, as at the
touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line into very
music—the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age....</p>
<p>As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright
personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with unceasing
vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and
character—therefore the man’s—in so far as the moulding of mind
and character be beyond the knees of the gods—a mother whose affection
and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful
sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world
of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy
inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as a
girl.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f3">
<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="aubrey">
<p class="caption">SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY</p>
<p class="caption">(<i>Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy</i>)</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c2">II</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">THE “PUERILIA”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">Of</span> a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road,
Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class
home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred
and cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably became
a forcing-house to any intelligent child—and both children were
uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or
three years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as
things turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely
a healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward
spirit.</p>
<p>It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over
the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Caldecott
which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s
life—yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest illustrators
that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure test
of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their children are
given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the somewhat
empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given Kate
Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons
in drawing and in “seeing” character in line and form, and in the
wholesome joy of country sights and sounds.</p>
<p>A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing
his pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span></p>
<p>Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced lessons,
but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or drawing
or decoration.</p>
<p>The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s
heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell disease
which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was sent to
a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years. Here the
child seems to have made his chief impression on his little comrades
and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an extreme reserve—which
sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled waters.
However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat of
consumption; and a change had to be made.</p>
<p>At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a
couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a profound
influence over his future.</p>
<p>In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled
in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age so
skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an infant
prodigy—the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s
knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy
in the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologising
for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the
plea that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feeling
for sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the
years to come, he was to give forth line that “sings” like the notes of a
violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation-cards
in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
not, the little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite considerable
sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome
things. As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched
and unpromising stuff.</p>
<p>A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it
absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to
send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where
the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the
very loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history,
eagerly reading Freeman and Green.</p>
<p>In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School;
and in the January of 1885 he became a boarder.</p>
<p>Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half
years at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King,
greatly liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by
letting him have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey
Beardsley was happy as the day was long. His “quaint personality”
soon made its mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday,
he wrote a little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The
delicate boy, as might be expected, found all athletic sports distasteful
and a strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to
be found with a book when the others were at play. His early love for
Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Restoration
dramatists, was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read
“Erewhon” and “enjoyed it immensely,” though it had been lent to
him with grave doubts as to whether it were not too deep for him. His
unflagging industry became a byword. He caricatured the masters;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
acted in school plays—appearing even before large audiences at the
Pavilion—and was the guiding spirit in the weekly performances at
the school got up by Mr. King and for which he designed programmes.
His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a kindly attitude towards the
lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively encouraged his artistic leanings,
as Mr. King his theatrical.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these
“puerilia” have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as revelations
of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain unvarnished
truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have
been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Probably
his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as
the grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley
himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on
reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every
means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging
good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether
incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such
unutterable trash.</p>
<p>Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind
at school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of
the “Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giving
amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays.
By the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he
had a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it,
very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong
meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad
was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile reader—but
such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the
dog-Latin of a public school classical education.</p>
<p>Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that
Aubrey Beardsley drew the designs for the “Pied Piper” before he
left the school in mid-1888—though the play was not performed until
Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December
the 19th 1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen
and wash drawing of <i>Holywell Street</i> was made in mid-1888 before
he left the school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red
hair—worn <i>á la Bretonne</i>,” which I take it means “bobbed,” as the
modern girl now calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work,
but writes verse and is very musical. His “stage-struck mood” we have
seen encouraged by his house-master, Mr. King.</p>
<p>C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at
Brighton; and at one of these is played “<i>L’Enfant Prodigue</i>” without
words—it was to make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley.</p>
<p>There is no question that <i>L’Enfant Prodigue</i> and the rococo of
Bright Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beardsley;
and he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked mediævalism;
he was to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to
Pierrot and the bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion.</p>
<p>Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress,
though how exactly he fitted the red hair “<i>a la Bretonne</i>” to his theory
of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the
wearer, would require more than a little guesswork.</p>
<p>The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it
came to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a
marked personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely
proud of him. But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888,
on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding
farewell and leaving for London, straightway to become a clerk in an
architect’s office.</p>
<p>At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his
“puerilia”—or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but
these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant,
inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the “Pied
Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing
of <i>Holywell Street</i>. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him
a month or two false—it is difficult to see why Beardsley should
have made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London
that he had not yet learnt to frequent—but even granting that the
<i>Holywell Street</i> was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley
to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in the <i>Holywell Street</i>
(1888) there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley
leaves his school and his “puerilia” cease—he enters at once on a
groping attempt to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his
ideas and impressions. So far, of promise there has been not a tittle—one
searches the “puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign—but
there is none.</p>
<p>In the <i>Holywell Street</i> there <i>is</i> the sign—and a portent.</p>
<p>It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic
wayfaring.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f4">
<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="holywell">
<p class="caption">HOLYWELL STREET</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c3">III</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">At</span> sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall
dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to
live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood
Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk
in the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an
Insurance office.</p>
<p>The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and
shy and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent
young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat solitary
figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first little Pimlico
home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly appreciative,
sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of his devoted
mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother and sister
was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite unimportant,
an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the end of his
day’s drudgery in the city, and—with the loud bang of the hall-door—shut
out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and
sister were happy in their own life.</p>
<p>But it is that <i>Holywell Street</i> drawing which unlocks the door. It
is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy old
ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row—that made
an untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
le Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych—was
the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the
toes of Prime Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with
equal absence of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes,
its fantastic jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions—and
its devotion to books—was nearing its theatric end. In many
ways Holywell Street was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow
spent every moment he could snatch from his city office in such fascinating
haunts as these second-hand bookshops.</p>
<p>We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A
Brown Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton;
and that before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act
comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.”</p>
<p>A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the
National Gallery to browse amongst antique art.</p>
<p>His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate
health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his
behalf from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening
he really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night
by consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London
was filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with
any sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices
to hear good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even
dreamed of pursuing an artistic career.</p>
<p>The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred
Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged
Beardsley’s artistic leanings.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
Beardsley had only been a year in London when he retired from
the architect’s office and became a clerk in the Guardian Insurance
Office, about his seventeenth birthday—August 1889. Whether this
change bettered his prospects, or whatsoever was the motive, it was
unfortunately to be the beginning of two years of appalling misery
and suffering, in body and soul, for the youth. His eighteenth and
nineteenth years were the black years of Aubrey Beardsley—and as
blank of achievement as they were black.</p>
<p>From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in
Beardsley’s career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the
Guardian Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed
by a violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres
and operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and
what strength remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly
position at the Insurance Office in the city.</p>
<p>The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to
breaking down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his
racked body compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him
of the solace of the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a
business life which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured
that he might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking
him in the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength
and energy were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless
disease which mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He
forsook all hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the
plagued youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon—it was
enough to have broken the courage of the strongest man.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
Beardsley’s first three years in London, then, were empty unfruitful
years. From sixteen to nineteen he was but playing with art as a mere
recreation from his labours in the city as his fellow-clerks played
games or chased hobbies. What interest he may have had in art, and
that in but an amateurish fashion, during his first year in London, was
completely blotted out by these two blank years of exhausting bodily
suffering that followed, years in which his eyes gazed in terror at
death.</p>
<p>His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite
eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed
to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his
disease led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the
diagrams led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo—especially
the human fetus—with which he repeatedly and wilfully
disfigured his art on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a
dirty-minded schoolboy.</p>
<p>Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian
Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones
and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside,
whither he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures—to
Beardsley the supreme treasure.</p>
<p>It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that
Cheapside bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional
visitor, but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became
an almost daily frequenter.</p>
<p>The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside,
which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so well—indeed
the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth—was but
a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to
London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of
one of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans.
Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as
at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won
into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in
him. They also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to
Frederick Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to
owe two of the finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at
the height of his achievement and his vogue.</p>
<p>Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship
in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time
and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly
a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth
craved in exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of
Beardsley did more for his development at this time than it is well
possible to calculate. At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next
to Beardsley a young clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley
made many visits to picture galleries and the British Museum, and
both youngsters haunted the bookshop in Cheapside.</p>
<p>“We know by the <i>Scrap Book</i>, signed by him on the 6th of May
1890, what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that
time, and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of
this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the
pictorial idea—only an increasing sense of selection—that is all. His
“juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but
there begins to appear a certain personal vision.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
<p>From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books—saw life only
through books—was aloof from his own age and his own world, which
he did not understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather
vulgar to understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his
daily toil, he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere
with Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle
de Maupin, Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux
Camélias, as his intimates. He sketched them as yet with but an amateur
scribbling. But he dressed for the part of a dandy in his narrow
home circle, affecting all the airs of superiority of the day—contempt
for the middle-class—contempt of Mrs. Grundy—elaborately cultivating
a flippant wit—a caustic tongue. He had the taint of what Tree
used to whip with contempt as “refainement”—he affected a voice
and employed picturesque words in conversation. He pined for the
day when he might mix with the great ones as he conceived the great
ones to be; and he sought to acquire their atmosphere as he conceived
it. Beardsley was always theatrical. He noticed from afar that people
of quality, though they dressed well, avoided ostentation or eccentricity—dressed
“just so.” He set himself that ideal. He tried to catch
their manner. The result was that he gave the impression of intense
artificiality. And just as he was starting for the race, this black
hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made him despair. In
1890 had appeared Whistler’s <i>Gentle Art of Making Enemies</i>—Beardsley
steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself to
form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic
ambition.</p>
<p>As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration
had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
mid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from
him, his courage returned with health—and his belief in himself. So
far he had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided
to make an effort to become an artist.</p>
<p>The sun shone for him.</p>
<p>He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured
an introduction to Burne-Jones.</p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c4">IV</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">On</span> a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth
birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.</p>
<p>Beardsley being still a clerk in the city—his week-ends given to
drudgery at the Insurance Office—he had to seize occasion by the
forelock—therefore Sunday.</p>
<p>The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life
in his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened
his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave;
and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic
endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long
North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the
promise of renewed health.</p>
<p>We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to
show Burne-Jones—we have seen what he had gathered together in
the <i>Scrap Book</i> as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done
little to add to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic
skill from the wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at
this time—a sorry thing which he strained every resource to recover
from Robert Ross who maliciously hid it from him and eventually
gave it to the British Museum—an act which, had Beardsley<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
known the betrayal that was to be, would have made him turn in his
grave. But that was not as yet. We know from a fellow-clerk in the
city that Beardsley had made an occasional drawing in wash, or toned
in pencil, like the remarkably promising <i>Molière</i>, which it is difficult
to believe as having been made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones,
were it not that it holds no hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was
now to dominate Beardsley’s style for a while.</p>
<p>Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with
his quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took
him to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in
high spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth
to pour forth from his hands for a couple of years.</p>
<p>Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy—the solemnities
reigned, and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was
not concerned with serious fresco—’tis even whispered that he suspected
naughtiness.</p>
<p>As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house
opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great world
of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit to Burne-Jones
was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic conventions
of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his whole
previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once he became
intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so far
shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the
old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas
cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as
indeed was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm,
now that he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
whereon to found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his
18th century loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had
become the keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and
Burne-Jones, but his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of
the great Teutonic sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung
saw him back at his beloved operas and music again.
Frederick Evans, who was as much a music enthusiast as literary
and artistic in taste, saw much of the young fellow in his shop in
Cheapside this year. He was striving hard to master the craftsmanship
of artistic utterance.</p>
<p>Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was
the Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered
London as she had conquered France—if rather a pallid ghost
of Japan. The London house became an abomination of desolation,
“faked” with Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture.
There is nothing more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations,
no matter how beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers
sent out the word and it was so.</p>
<p>It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued
Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of
pure line by the Japs—he saw prints in shops and they interested
him, but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing,
and use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a
sort of bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types
with English types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard
of perspective and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery
which appealed to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting
in the grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span></p>
<p>Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F.
Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting
Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes
most of its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged
with his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form
and furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever
to Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was
confined to smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and
gold leaf. It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square
upright shafts of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief
impression of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages
the Japs make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent
Whistler may have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple
Menpes’s word for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it
“should be as simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler
and Wilde’s war against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of
the crowded Victorian drawing-room brought in a barren bare type
of room to usurp it which touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in
preciousness, in dreariness, and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s
blue and gold-leaf scheme, carried out all over this pretentious room,
may have done to better its state, at least it must have rid it of the
brown melancholy of the stamped Spanish leather which Whistler
found so “stunning to paint upon.” It is probable that this contraption
of pseudo-Japanese art, to which the rare genius of Whistler was
degraded, did impress the youthful Beardsley in this his imitative
stage of development, owing to its wide publicity. The hideous slender
straight wooden uprights of the furnishments of which the whole
thing largely consisted, were indeed to be adopted by Beardsley as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
the basis of his drawings of furniture a year or two afterwards, as we
shall see. But in some atonement, the superb peacock shutters by
Whistler also left their influence on the sensitive brain of the younger
man—those peacocks that were to bring forth a marked advance in
Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of years later when he was
to give his <i>Salome</i> to the world.</p>
<p>It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a
fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father—as quickly to vanish
again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls
for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking
and he and his “pater” alone in the house.</p>
<p>Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become
secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he
edited a little magazine called <i>The Bee</i>; and it was in the November
of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his <i>Hamlet</i> in which
he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.</p>
<p>It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on
Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one
of note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting
and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling
for line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly
working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some
six months after the summer that had brought hope and life to
Beardsley out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer
Vallance, one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went
to call on the lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half
the urgings of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known
the boy when at Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
at Charlwood Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away
wildly enthusiastic over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at
his demand. It is to Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and
then turned the lad’s ambition towards becoming an artist by profession—an
idea that up to this time Beardsley had not thought possible
or practicable.</p>
<p>Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s
enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he
overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled us
in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile “puerilia”—the
<i>Pied Piper</i> stuff—which one cannot believe that Beardsley
would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque <i>Hamlet</i> from
the <i>Bee</i> just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques.
He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had
not done anything better than the <i>Hamlet</i>. Then there was the <i>Scrap
Book</i>! However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won
so powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal
friend as Aymer Vallance.</p>
<p>On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the
winter was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross
and Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert
Ross wrote of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any
case his record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed
with the personality of the youth—Ross was always more
interested in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for
his was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the
antique dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a
powerful friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
doors of fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a
kindly man enough; and he had not only come to have considerable
authority on matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the
great, but with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures.
Ross, with his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was
fascinated by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy
youth whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of
being <i>ebouriffé</i> as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was
brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely
high and narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the
impression of being brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better
as “tortoise-shell”—it was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as
his voice and manner. The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was
always cadaverous. The young fellow seems gradually to have thawed
at this forgathering at Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company,
and was soon found to have an intimate knowledge of the
British Museum and National Gallery. He talked more of literature
and of music than of art. Ross was so affected by the originality of the
young fellow’s conversation that he even attributed to Beardsley the
oft-quoted jape of the old French wit that “it only takes one man to
make an artist but forty to make an Academician.”</p>
<p>It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of
Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting—what precisely
did Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under
his arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were
in the portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the <i>Procession
of Joan of Arc</i> in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
a work which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with
any merit from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced
to part for all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a
pen-and-ink replica from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the
May of 1892. The youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his
own work than had his admirers.</p>
<p>It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his
twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic promise,
to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace <i>Procession
of Joan of Arc</i> could stand out at the forefront of his career, and was,
as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order to get him public
recognition—in which it distinctly and deservedly failed. He himself
was later to go hot and cold about the very mention of it and to be
ashamed of it.</p>
<p>We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,”
his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley
could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his
rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking for
him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship
of that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom
he loved to glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is
canting and stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged
down. Nothing of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste
drew about him, he was not compelled into, the company of the erotic
and the precious in craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small
share in opening wide the doors to him.</p>
<p>But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a curious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval
atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now
drifted him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour,
his art and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement
at best. It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially
the French writers—it was their challenge to the past—it was their
very inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism,
that brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise
have remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship.
He was to run riot in eroticism—he was to treat sex with a marked
frankness that showed it to be his god—but it is only right to say that
the artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he
has as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist
of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual
moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this
mood nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works
that any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of
degree. And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the
race. It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the
measure in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not
that he is alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.</p>
<p>Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit—it
was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being
of the middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class—he was
one of the most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging
smile he had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the
loneliness of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and
opened the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated
his work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and
thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss
criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or
patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on
it, as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When
he was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming
and witty companion.</p>
<p>Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley
after a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again,
and is said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily
repelled. However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the
ambition growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance
and his friends, to dare all and make for art.</p>
<p>Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember
that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed
mimic of Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall
soon see a very different reception of the youth by a very different
temperament. Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic,
gave the young fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that
Beardsley “had learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit
by the training of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley
came back in high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being
kicked down the steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.</p>
<p>This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday;
and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
de Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged
him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un
jeune artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”</p>
<p>Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all
intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones
and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor
Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went
on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling
was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on
his art—the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios
talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And
it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor
Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly
influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is
spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism
is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and
Burne-Jones at this very time—Whistler had published his <i>Gentle
Art of Making Enemies</i> in 1890, and London had not recovered from
its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used
to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times,
but his eager eyes were quick to see.</p>
<p>However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an
occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city
and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery,
the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.</p>
<p>And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth
now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most impressionable
age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The generous<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>
soul of Vallance little understood Morris—or Beardsley; but
his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted
boy’s cause.</p>
<p>Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves
of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of
all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not
made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement.
Next—and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting
fact—Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen
of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their
content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick
Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never
realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse—probably
not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness
of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important
to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step
further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley
was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his
long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether
fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness
that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was
therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a
pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with
his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his
senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley
knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much
about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid.
They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would
only have understood the society of the great—his idea of it was
an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate
manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar,
who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without
picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him—only
doing it with an air and dressing well for the part.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence
of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done
into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years
of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and
you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest
of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the
age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy—they even
lack manhood—they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelligence.</p>
<p>However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his
troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott
books—he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then
anxious to produce—<i>Sidonia the Sorceress</i>. Vallance leaped at the
chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once persuaded
Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all
being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892,
his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way
to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received
the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to
swallow a ridiculous pill.</p>
<p>We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
mediocrity—a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on
the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter
unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques
for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what
the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know—and to achieve.
Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show
to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in
grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black
cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of
his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up
to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with
flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this
young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let
us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of
fulfilling it—far less any of his sponsors. And yet!——</p>
<p>Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few
narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting
of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a
rival publication to the Kelmscott Press—he was to smash it to pieces
and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never
been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to
brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point—and Frederick
Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it
to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision
and essence than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the
problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made
of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work,
not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what
this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all
for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal
affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed
to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s
portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought
little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful
nor attractive, but probably trying to find <i>something</i> to praise,
at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added
fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”—and so saying he
dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed;
but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded
by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded
about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long,
that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than
to care for his drawings—he had no personal feeling whatsoever
against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of
William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again—and
he could never be induced to go.</p>
<p>Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott
House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead
another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused
to go, and Vallance went alone—but that is another story. For
even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to
come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far
wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in
the doing—one John Dent, a publisher.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end
in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was
about to leave the city behind him for ever—desert the night-school
at Westminster—burn his boats behind him—and launch on his destiny
as an artist.</p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c5">V</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to twenty-one</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">John M. Dent</span>, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition
to put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way
that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly costly
bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott Press.
Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s <i>Le Morte d’Arthur</i> to lead the
way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend Frederick
Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside.
He planned to publish the handsome book in parts—300 copies on
Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; but he
was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and illustrator.
He must have a fresh and original artist.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f5">
<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="hail">
<p class="caption">HAIL MARY</p>
</div>
<p>Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity
in the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent
that he believed he had found for him the very man; and he was
showing to Dent Beardsley’s <i>Hail Mary</i>, when, looking up, he whispered:
“and here he comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow
of a young man like one risen from the well-dressed dead—Aubrey
Beardsley had happened in, according to his daily wont, strolling over
at the luncheon hour from the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
his midday rummage amongst the books. It was like a gift from the
gods! Frederick Evans nudged the other’s arm, pointing towards the
strange youth, and repeated: “There’s your man!”</p>
<p>To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk
where he was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow
was now to discover to be the well-known publisher.</p>
<p>So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.</p>
<p>Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for
his “<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the
sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took
him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation
of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley
would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this
particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the
work.</p>
<p>Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a
specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties.
Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of
any consequence—he was utterly unknown—and his superb master-work
that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to
mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings
he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well
enough for a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was
becoming a trifle old for studentship—he was twenty before he made
a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate
Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott
in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind—of
what was expected of him.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span></p>
<p>At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick
Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s
too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of
it.” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all
would be well.</p>
<p>Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create
the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott
tradition, took the drawing to Dent—the elaborate and now famous
Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as <i>The Achieving of the
San Grael</i>, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers
to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to
appear in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>.</p>
<p>Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious
original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold
effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque
mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; <i>and the design
is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”</i> It is his first use of the
Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time
reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque
mark” is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a
sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was
meant for three candles and three flames—a baser explanation was
given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to
see evil in all that Beardsley did.</p>
<p>Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter,
in the June of 1893—the second volume in 1894.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
<p>So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking—to
mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the
mediæval woodcut and—to better his instruction. Frederick Evans
set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in
Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm
so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley
was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary
man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the
public—Lewis C. Hind.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate
and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong
urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his
clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned
his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum
and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting
at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being
now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley
was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of
<i>Bon Mots</i> by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came
about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and <i>Morte
d’Arthur</i> mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to
which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the <i>Bon
Mots</i> he made no pretence of illustration—the florid scribbling lines
drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of
the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital
quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they
were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally
dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But
the severe conditions and limitations of the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> page held
Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were
the finest education in art that he ever went through—for he taught
himself craftsmanship as he went in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>. It made him.</p>
<p>One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques
for the <i>Bon Mots</i> to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid
black decorations of the mediæval <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> put upon Beardsley
for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his
whole career depended on those designs for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, and
he strove to reach his full powers in making them.</p>
<p>Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred
designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost
tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last.
To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting
was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure
to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious
enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his
debt to Greece through Anning Bell.</p>
<p>We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was
during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s <i>Evelina</i>
and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings
for Hawthorne’s <i>Tales</i> and Mackenzie’s <i>Man of Feeling</i>.</p>
<p>Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the
glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside
of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are
written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance
masterpieces rose-leafwise from the <i>Rape of the Lock</i> and
<i>The Savoy</i> for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once—we
are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift
achievement is the more a marvel—almost a miracle.</p>
<p>It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the
decoration of the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> with almost mad enthusiasm. He
knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the
city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light,
the blinds drawn, and London asleep—poured them forth in that secret
atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and
barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being
free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind
rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood
and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have
more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood
upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most
sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed.
By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops,
or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such
places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts.
In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season,
people would ask when Beardsley worked—he was everywhere—but
for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he
never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in
the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had
not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that
art.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span></p>
<p>Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his
effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil,
and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only
sketch he made for the completed design—when the pen and ink had
next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber.
The well-known pencil sketch of <i>A Girl</i> owned by Mr. Evans
shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the
rough rhythm of his scrawls.</p>
<p>A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight;
as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether
of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night
into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley
was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to
recognition.</p>
<p>Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except
at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit
into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting
out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the
mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the
dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his
mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at
the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper,
and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one
has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a
model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs—than from
any record by eyewitnesses—that he finished his drawing in ink on
the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study—that
he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a
whole—that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design—and
then inked in the pen-line and masses.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f6">
<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="sketch">
<p class="caption">PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD</p>
</div>
<p>Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine
mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely
made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew
the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of
the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought
forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it
spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,”
and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost
deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the
lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil
of a fellow.”</p>
<p>Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house,
which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He
received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on
which stood two tall tapering candlesticks—the candlesticks without
which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of
pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was
very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much
else than pose whereon to lean for reputation.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>His rapid increase of power—and one now begins to understand
Vallance’s enthusiasm—induced Vallance to make a last bid to win
the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of
1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the
youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young
fellow to let him have a printed proof from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> of <i>The
Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur</i> to show to
Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived.
Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was
shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a
young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant
of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott
Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a
trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which
of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books!
but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb,
mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpassing
it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers
look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there
was a storm of anger from Morris.</p>
<p>Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation”
which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any
hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to
do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy
as a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so
hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir
Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from
writing an angry remonstrance to Dent.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f7">
<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="queen">
<p class="caption">HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “Le Morte D’Arthur”</i></p>
</div>
<p>How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old
glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not
easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a
point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley
and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow
as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to
Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the
bubble of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered
into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity.
He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had
in his being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to
do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook
for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that.
And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to
sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted
friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true
art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even
though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have
no cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>
were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into
sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he
turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would
never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris
circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research.
That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate
with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and
licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as
we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled
the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have
let him starve and the music die in him unsung.</p>
<p>William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival
him in his “mediæval fake”—find himself—and give to the world in
<i>The Savoy</i> a series of decorations that have made his name immortal
and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages,
where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an
elaborate boredom.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get
the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough,
he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes
and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s
<i>Shaving of Shagpat</i>—a desire to which he returned and on
which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane,
a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and
unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement,
brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small
gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane
was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of
fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for
some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to
be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual success,
increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.</p>
<p>However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness
of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of
the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions.
His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having
mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott
book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him
hugely—here he could use his line without troubling about floor or
ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve
the monotony of the heavy <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> convention by drawing
fantasies in this Japanesque vein for <i>Bon Mots</i>, both conventions
rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came
that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a
quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black
portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the
young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into
the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his
achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every
hand his life long.</p>
<p>The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar
School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there
had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of <i>The
Art Journal</i>, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done,
Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art
magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a
sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman
John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened
that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade
called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath,
the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art
magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together—and
in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>
Charles Holme and Lewis Hind—and <i>The Studio</i>, as it was christened
by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw
the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset—Holme saw
Hind in the editorial chair as <i>his</i> best asset.</p>
<p>So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind
to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary
and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace
Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January
of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced”
pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which
he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new
magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn
who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness
of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an
absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to
his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood
by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big
nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his
forehead much in the style of Phil May—a pallid silent young man,
but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful—with the inevitable
black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey
Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered
“geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm
of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his
drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once decided
that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember
that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one.
In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for <i>Le Morte</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
<i>d’Arthur</i>, the <i>Siegfried Act II</i>, the <i>Birthday of Madame Cigale</i>—<i>Les
Revenants de Musique</i>—“Some <i>Salome</i> drawings”—with several
chapter-headings and tailpieces for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>. Hind’s memory
probably tricked him as to the <i>Salome</i> drawings; for, in refreshing
his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of <i>The Studio</i>
published three months later. Wilde’s <i>Salome</i> did not see print until
February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.</p>
<p>However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture,
<i>The Studio</i>, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that
Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to <i>The Studio</i>
offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind;
indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the
drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.</p>
<p>Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read
critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon
Beardsley abroad—and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little
perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook
the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and
greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf
Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> and
the weekly <i>Pall Mall Budget</i> and was launching a new monthly to
be called <i>The Pall Mall Magazine</i>. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry
Cust, appointed editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, asked Hind to become
editor of the weekly <i>Budget</i> at a handsome salary; and Hind,
thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself
as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson
White to take command of <i>The Studio</i> in his stead. But even
as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship
of the <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>, for which, unfortunately, the young
fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat
dumbfounded Hind.</p>
<p>So the first number of <i>The Studio</i> was to appear in the April of
1893 glorifying a wonderful youth—his name Aubrey Beardsley!</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had
the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the
artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one
of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in
encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented
much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had
the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism
who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which
men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive—and they forgave Gleeson
White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and
Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy
at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the
aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts
men.</p>
<p>On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a
cover design for <i>The Studio</i> from the much gratified youth, who went
home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire—here was
<i>réclame</i>! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the
studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in
the first number of <i>The Studio</i> after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell,
the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in
his several styles—the Japanesque, and the mediæval <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>
blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell
there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could
make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the
lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what
was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly
nor over-rate his worth as did so many—he gave it just and
fair and full value.</p>
<p>All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness
to the first number of <i>The Studio</i> in bringing him before the public.
Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did
contain very remarkable work—at the same time it was scarcely
world-shattering—and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty
and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more
than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts
and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was
as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art—and all of us who
have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the
average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction
won through—and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell
says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was
when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous
style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down
and died.</p>
<p>The first number of <i>The Studio</i> did not appear until the April of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is
true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around <i>The Studio</i>
that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind.
<i>The Studio</i> itself was no particular success, far less any article in it.
Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested
greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by
mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable
pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.”
It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world—and a very
narrow inner circle at that—where <i>The Studio</i> caused any talk, and
Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé
to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a
somewhat dinted toy—we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the
Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that,
even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very
earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and
bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the
many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so—he
had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who
at the New Year had gone from <i>The Studio</i> offices to edit the <i>Pall
Mall Budget</i>, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley
to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the
like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley,
utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged
his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the
most wretched drawings imaginable—drawings without one redeeming
shred of value—work almost inconceivable as being from the
same hands that were decorating the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, which however<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print
until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable
venture in the <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>. The first volume of <i>Bon Mots</i>
appeared in the April of 1893—the <i>Sydney Smith and Sheridan</i> volume—although
few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it
respect. It was pretty poor stuff.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Now, though the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> was in large part done before <i>The
Studio</i> eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise
the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at
Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in <i>The
Studio</i> article. There are examples from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, of which
the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot
amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like
decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most mediocre
design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Mantegna
called <i>The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans</i> was curiously
enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year
gone by when he made it—so far had he now advanced beyond this
commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have
been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can
scarce be blamed. The <i>Siegfried Act II</i> of mid-1892, which Beardsley
had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and
fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque
mimicry—it is his typically early or “hairy-line” Japanesque,
hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The <i>Birthday of Madame</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
<i>Cigale</i> and <i>Les Revenants de Musique</i> show the Japanesque more asserting
itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to <i>Le Debris d’un
Poète</i> and <i>La Femme Incomprise</i>. But there was also a Japanesque in
<i>The Studio</i> which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he
little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893
in French the play called <i>Salome</i> by Oscar Wilde, which made an extraordinary
sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout
the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy
of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her
on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.”
Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque
drawing, just in time to be included in <i>The Studio</i> which was to appear
in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin
Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the destined
illustrator of the English <i>Salome</i>, translated by Lord Alfred
Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that <i>Salome</i> was to be a marvellous
significance for Aubrey Beardsley.</p>
<p>It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of <i>The Studio</i>,
the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy
design of this <i>Salome</i> drawing to the more severe and restrained edition
of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The
hairy Japanesque line has departed.</p>
<p>Note also another fact: The title of the article published in <i>The
Studio</i> first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written
at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent;
and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his
work—the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pencil
drawing of <i>Sandro Botticelli</i> made in 1893 about the time that <i>The</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
<i>Studio</i> was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by
Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures
unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he
proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings.
Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the
work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the
year before.</p>
<p>Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism
is dead—and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed.
Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this
time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic
Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock
Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done
with the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>; and it was only by the incessant prayers and
supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to
the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that
Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it.
He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism
from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly
concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And
he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British
Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand
Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging
that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism
became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He
was steeping himself in study of phallic worship—and when all’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier
civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early.</p>
<p>It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of
the decorations he wanted for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> in the young fellow’s
first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying
end of the year of 1892, to which half year the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>
almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby
enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893,
about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning
his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to
such as search the book that the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> was never completed—we
find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once—but
Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive
reiteration.</p>
<p>There appeared in the <i>Pall Mall Magazine</i> for June 1893, drawn
in April 1893, as the first <i>Studio</i> number was appearing, a design
known as <i>The Neophyte</i>, or to give its full affected name, “<i>Of a Neophyte,
and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend
Asomuel</i>”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May
1893 called <i>The Kiss of Judas</i>—both drawings reveal an unmistakable
change in handling, and the <i>Neophyte</i> a remarkable firmness of
andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed.
Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his
Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and kindred works
in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called
symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several
French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>it—it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque
possibilities.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f8">
<img src="images/fig8.jpg" alt="revealed">
<p class="caption">“OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED<br>
UNTO HIM”</p>
</div>
<p>It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley
for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long
sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise
that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist
to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left
behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling
as <i>The Neophyte</i>. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious
to the lay mind a little further on.</p>
<p>It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>
phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893
that the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back
upon it for months—indeed his principal drawings had been made for
it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from
him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in
his “hairy line” called <i>The Questing Beast</i> is dated by Beardsley
himself “March 8, 1893”—as for 1894, it would have been impossible
for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is,
the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval
or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time
the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we
have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.</p>
<p>The two cover-designs for <i>The Studio No. I</i> in April 1893 were
obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i>—in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be
exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> drawings. They make a good full stop to the record
of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.</p>
<p>There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating
procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the <i>Morte
d’Arthur</i> on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on
Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the
work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who
was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf.
Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding
with:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">There was a young man with a salary</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Who had to do drawings for Malory;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure</div>
<div class="verse indent0">You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry
of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty,
faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. And
as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a Japanesque
mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be outdone
in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque
mark” of the three candles, with three flames—in the more elaborate
later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke—or as Beardsley
himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as
important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light that
he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether the
“Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to employ
the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for
three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from <i>The Yellow
Book</i>—his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years—we shall
find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition
to his name. So it is well to dwell upon it here.</p>
<p>The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid
1892 to mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped,
and he employed it indifferently and incongruously on any
type of his designs whether <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> mediævalism or the Japanesque
grotesques of his <i>Bon Mots</i>. And we have seen that it was
in the middle of his twentieth year—he last used it in fact in the February
of 1893—that he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his
initials and signature. He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative
years. He signs henceforth as A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as
Aubrey B.</p>
<p>In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon
his <i>Salome</i> designs, as weary of the <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques as of the
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque
mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate—the V
quite departed from his signature.</p>
<p>I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as
he called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most
amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on
forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it!</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/fig9.jpg" alt="sign">
</div>
<p>From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship
by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at
twenty-one except to a small artistic circle. The <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques,
mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume,
<i>Sydney Smith and Sheridan</i>, in the April of 1893; the second volume
at the year’s end, <i>Lamb and Douglas Jerrold</i>, in December 1893;
and the third, the last volume, <i>Foote and Hooke</i>, in the February of
1894. The <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> began to be published in parts in June
1893. The feverish creation of the mediæval designs in the late part
of 1892 alongside of the <i>Bon Mots</i> grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s
enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his
weariness—by mid-1893 he was finding the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> “very
long-winded.” And what chilled him most, he found the public indifferent
to both—yet Beardsley knew full well that his whole interest
lay in publicity.</p>
<p>It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond.
This is a larger question and a serious question—but it <i>is</i> a question.
It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as
well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to
that. But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed
his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism
of the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, by that time he came near to the end<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
of the book he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created
for it; so also his next development was as rapid, and by the time he
is at the end of his new Japanese phase in <i>Salome</i> we shall see
him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style
that he grew weary of the <i>Salome</i> before he completed it, and threw
in a couple of illustrations as makeweight which are utterly alien to the
work and disfigure it. And yet these two drawings were made immediately
after working upon this <i>Salome</i>, and were thrown in only out
of a certain sense of resentment owing to the suppression of two designs
not deemed to be circumspect enough. But Beardsley did not
refuse to make new drawings in key with the rest—he had simply advanced
to a new style quite alien to <i>Salome</i>, and he found he could not
go back. This will be clearer when we come to the <i>Salome</i>.</p>
<p>So precisely with the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>; even the last decorations he
made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in <i>The Yellow Book</i>.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Before we leave the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, and the difficulties with Beardsley
in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors are
often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps to
the ladder of Fame—and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M.
Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to
bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with
his song wholly unsung—there would have been for him no <i>Studio</i>
“réclame,” no <i>Yellow Book</i>, no <i>Salome</i>, no <i>Savoy</i>. Dent, employing
with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an
edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> which is a
triumph for English bookmaking—he gave us the supreme edition<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
that can never be surpassed by mortal hands—he did so in a form
within the reach of the ordinary man—and in the doing he made the
much vaunted work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear
second-rate, mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f10">
<img src="images/fig10.jpg" alt="headpiece">
<p class="caption">HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f11">
<img src="images/fig11.jpg" alt="skirt">
<p class="caption">THE PEACOCK SKIRT</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “Salome”</i></p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c6">VI</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">THE JAPANESQUES</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-One</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">“SALOME”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">Entered</span> into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was
on the edge of manhood.</p>
<p>We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have
paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate.
He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial
fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration
of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without
much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated
furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear
in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque
<i>Caricature of Whistler</i> on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this
time.</p>
<p>Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing
his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is
put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was
of the early part of 1893—at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its
effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and
then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and craftsmanship
burst forth in designs of the <i>Salome</i> founded frankly upon
the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry
of Whistler have been delayed for two years?</p>
<p>But—as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at
this time revealed to the seeing eye—it was now to the work of the
better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to
Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being
saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within
Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was
fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the
sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite
as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods
and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect
such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to
those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating
a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself
used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek
vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased
power later on.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to
publish the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> in parts in the June of 1893, as it had
called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John
Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished
edition of Oscar Wilde’s <i>Salome</i>, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas.
The young fellow leaped at it—not only as giving him scope for fantastic
designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing
over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their
choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that
Beardsley had made—either on reading the French edition, or on
reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published
in the February of 1893—illustrating the lines that raised so
hot a controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai
baisé ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the
several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator”
at the birth of <i>The Studio</i> in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.</p>
<p>Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning
his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness
he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year
before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission
for <i>Salome</i>.</p>
<p>Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at
the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing
house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that
day—they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who
found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they
were bent on producing <i>belles lettres</i> in an attractive and picturesque
form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the
moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott
reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism
of the hack publishers.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley
rather on trust—the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and the <i>Bon Mots</i> were far from
what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering
that Beardsley was but little known.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span></p>
<p>It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the
true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar
Wilde—but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on
Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent
than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the
times of King Herod—but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What
he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations
about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject
as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a
bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the
Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate
the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any
more than in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, but was wholly concerned with
creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions
in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in
the play—and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a
sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole
conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods,
Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley
revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a
touch of tragic power.</p>
<p>It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if
reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press,
to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have
been hard put to it to explain—it was a sort of philistine literary or
journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line
is perhaps more obvious in the <i>Salome</i> drawings than in the <i>Savoy</i>,
since the <i>Salome</i> designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
even so-called critics to be found who place the <i>Salome</i> drawings at
the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!</p>
<p>Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but
happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line
that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius
thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the <i>Salome</i> drawings
in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line condemns
him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged
application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this,
the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last surrendered
its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to
his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mastery
that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sustained
notes of a violin. His line became emotional—grave or gay.
But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook,
nor when he completed, the <i>Salome</i>, wherein his line is yet hesitant,
thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen
music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived
never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the
self-dug grave of every academy. Set the <i>Salome</i> against the genius
of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not
great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses.
It is “very clever for a young man.” In <i>Salome</i> he got all that he
could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in <i>The Stomach
Dance</i>, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of
the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he
could take it. By the time he had completed the <i>Salome</i> he was done
with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most
serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he increased
in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating originality
of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the
wide range of his flippant fantasy that the <i>Salome</i> designs reveal the
increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight.
He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary
of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had completed
the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those
few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis
to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents,
he was done with emptiness—the groundless earth, the floating figures
in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reckless
lack of perspective—all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures
on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his
triumphs in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, and trained by his two conflicting
guidances, the Japanesque and the mediævalesque, he creates a line
that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand—neither the hand of Esau nor
the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of <i>Salome</i> he
had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates
to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of <i>Salome</i> he had
found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as
though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite
<i>Burial of Salome</i> in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth
century whose child he was.</p>
<p><i>Salome</i> finished, however, was not <i>Salome</i> published. Elkin Mathews
and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear
without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve
public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to
be “difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted
me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion.
Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White
put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the
two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy
for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction
of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but
should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new
blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all
is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the original
drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense
of decorum—however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to
say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst
more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the <i>Title
Page</i>, and <i>Enter Herodias</i> were slightly altered simply to avoid offence
to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of
the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, <i>The
Stomach Dance</i> appeared without change—was accepted without demur
by the public and in silence by the censorious—indeed the lasciviousness
of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye;
while the <i>Toilette of Salome</i>, a fine design, which only required a very
slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent
but very second-rate design of <i>John and Salome</i>, and in place of
the two had been inserted the wretched <i>Black Cape</i> and Georgian
<i>Toilette</i> which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore
the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared
to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and
cheap conceit—for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to
prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his
supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting
or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have
been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the
public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent.
The public were canting in many ways; but they were also
long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned
with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as
virtue. In any case, the mediocre <i>Black Cape</i> and the better Georgian
<i>Toilette</i>, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings,
were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young
fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He
who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on
which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f12">
<img src="images/fig12.jpg" alt="dance">
<p class="caption">THE STOMACH DANCE</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “Salome”</i></p>
</div>
<p>The interpolated <i>Black Cape</i> and the <i>Second Toilette</i> we may here
dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they
are wholly outside the <i>Salome</i> atmosphere. Of the pure <i>Salome</i> designs,
incomparably the finest are <i>The Stomach Dance</i> and the <i>Peacock
Skirt</i>. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he
considered the best drawings to be <i>The Man in the Moon</i>, the <i>Peacock
Skirt</i>, and <i>The Dancer’s Reward</i>—it should be noted by the way
that Beardsley showed by his <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i> that his title was
<i>The Man in the Moon</i> not as the publishers have it, <i>The Woman in
the Moon</i>. But it is in <i>The Climax</i>, one of the less noteworthy designs,
that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride—for though the lower
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand
as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the
fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and
“hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design,
drawn but a year before and shown in <i>The Studio</i> first number, make
us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and
clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young
fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship
which he has utterly outgrown.</p>
<p>We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely
censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be
on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the
lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his
making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out.
A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely
to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame
Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs,
covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is
only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could
not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will
in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he
has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling
as <i>The Neophyte</i>. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and
intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won
the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all,
were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage?</p>
<p>Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good
citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly,
between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A
choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty
thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts—or rather
contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not
fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he
could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible
for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments,
to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown
as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the
youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of
the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have
been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless
incongruity? Could the <i>Salome</i> drawings for instance have appeared
in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and
genius and his high achievement would have suffered—and Death
was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage
of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go.
Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good
to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial
contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of
one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is
called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of
completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings
for a book, would he deserve censure? Of the 544 or so decorations for
the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, several are repeated—some more than once. Let
us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
roughly that he made 400 drawings for the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, did he
get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a
guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would
be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred
pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shillings.
His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But supposing
he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer
to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so,
then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a
beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole
truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of flesh” may
be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self-righteous
hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay
his pound of flesh....</p>
<p>Even before Beardsley was done with <i>Salome</i>, he had exhausted
the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish
brain has to evolve a <i>Title-page</i>, a <i>List of Contents</i>, and a <i>Finis</i>; and
we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of <i>Salome</i>,
weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his
restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his
<i>Morte d’Arthur</i> designs again, he was about to burst into a new song
as hinted at by the last three designs for <i>Salome</i>. An artist is finding
himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f13">
<img src="images/fig13.jpg" alt="title">
<p class="caption">TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”</p>
</div>
<p>About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley
wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a
new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,”
which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress
in a new venture about to appear. For <i>The Yellow Book</i> is the
only contract that emerges out of this time.</p>
<p>It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about
this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and
that they took their scheme to John Lane.</p>
<p>Whilst at work on the <i>Salome</i>, Beardsley began the long series of
decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, forming
the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews
and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street
as <i>The Keynote Series</i> of novels, published on the heels of the wide
success of <i>Keynotes</i> by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist
stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.</p>
<p>And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English
Art Club.</p>
<p>Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists
and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother
and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after
their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his
sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof.
About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their
little home—a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f14">
<img src="images/fig14.jpg" alt="yellow">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c7">VII</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">THE GREEK VASE PHASE</p>
<p class="c">New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">“THE YELLOW BOOK”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">It</span> was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his
sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico
home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which
Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork,
with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale
it all sounds today!</p>
<p>Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London.
Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his
mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous
care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play
the host—and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities
were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young
man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his
“tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white
forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it
with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.</p>
<p>Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running
from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs
of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her
dressing-table known as <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i>. The couch in his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much
of his all too short life lying upon it.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>When Beardsley began the <i>Salome</i> drawings at twenty-one he was,
as we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese
masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did
the craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his
faces was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the
grotesque features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst
at work upon the <i>Salome</i> designs he was much at the British Museum
and was intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the
British Museum is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry
of the Greeks in their line and mass fascinate Beardsley—not only was
he struck by the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical,
uttered by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek
genius which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more
obscene of the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the
public eye towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been
“purified” by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”;
but it was precisely the skill with which the great Greek
painters uttered erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass
that most keenly intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous
old satyrs upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as
Brygos and Duris, appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and
mood of Beardsley as they had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had
scarce finished his <i>Salome</i> drawings under the Japanese erotic influence
before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry
with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f15">
<img src="images/fig15.jpg" alt="dame">
<p class="caption">LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III</i></p>
</div>
<p>On the 15th of April 1894 appeared <i>The Yellow Book</i>. It made
Beardsley notorious.</p>
<p>In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl
with the 3rd, the last, volume of <i>Bon Mots</i>; and <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> was
in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that <i>Salome</i>
made Beardsley famous. <i>Salome</i> was an expensive book, published
in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing
literary and artistic set, the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and <i>Salome</i> passed quite
unrecognised and unknown. But <i>Salome</i> did lead to an act which was
to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye.</p>
<p>Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing
a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should
gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists
that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by
the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe
or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea
of <i>The Yellow Book</i> developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was
rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby
he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever,
of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes—to answer
in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not
seem to have fired a publisher. <i>The Yellow Book</i> quarterly, however,
was a very different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered
art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley
dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the literary
editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne witness
to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and
himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth
Club, founded the much discussed <i>Yellow Book</i>.” This
quarterly, to be called <i>The Yellow Book</i> after the conventional name
of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in
itself in each number—not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence
idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have
no dependence the one on the other.</p>
<p>Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the <i>Salome</i>,
as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied
of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New
Year of 1894, the <i>Salome</i> off his hands, that <i>The Yellow Book</i> was
planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with
renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held
out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s
craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and
self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the
<i>Salome</i> into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of
relief as he had aforetime flung aside the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> Kelmscott
mediævalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he
saw it—through books—and he created a decorative craftsmanship
wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and
musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the
Greeks had done—employing line and mass like treble and bass to
each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm
line and solid blacks in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> now served him to splendid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate
the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of
Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table.
Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his subjects
in the half-world—he took the blatant side of “life” as it was
lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the
cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance”
amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into
which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as
judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He
scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional
experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else—but
we are coming to that.</p>
<p>It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German,
Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic
weekly, <i>Pick-Me-Up</i>, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a
monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that it
should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the <i>Graphic</i> and
<i>Illustrated London News</i>.” Struck by some article attacking the art
critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly review
of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called <i>St. Paul’s</i>. Although
at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the general
public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an opening
for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make some
drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac—(remember, <i>St. Paul’s</i>
was to begin as a monthly!)—and to illustrate the subjects to which
each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, Fashions, The
Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “<i>Man that holds the Water</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
<i>Pot</i>” and the “<i>Music</i>,” but the paper did not appear in January—indeed
not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and fobbed
off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably meant for
Dent’s <i>Bon Mots</i>—however they may have been intended for <i>The
Fashions</i> and <i>The Drama</i> pages of <i>St. Paul’s</i>. He made in all four
which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not
greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said
that I “might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have
this value, however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the
New Year of 1894—they show him ridding himself of the “hairy
line,” with a marked increase of power over line—they end his <i>Salome</i>
Japanesque phase.</p>
<p>It is somewhat curious that, whilst <i>The Man that holds the Water
Pot</i> is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the
fourth drawing he made for <i>St. Paul’s</i> seems to have been missed by
all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print
of it!</p>
<p>Before we leave <i>St. Paul’s</i>, it is interesting to note that at this time
the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by
the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental
headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for <i>St. Paul’s</i> and other
papers.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f16">
<img src="images/fig16.jpg" alt="messalina">
<p class="caption">MESSALINA</p>
</div>
<p>It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the <i>Poster for the
Avenue Theatre</i> which really brought him before a London public
more than anything he had so far done—a success, be it confessed,
more due to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the
Avenue Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which
could not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
Needless to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw
was to float into the public ken with his play of <i>Arms and the Man</i>
at this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house
that from its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross
Bridge, it was cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost
Seagulls.” I shall always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster
with Shaw’s rise to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being
called before the curtain at the end of <i>Arms and the Man</i>, some man
amongst the gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s
ready Irish wit brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the
darkness, his lank loose figure waited patiently until complete silence
had fallen on the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I
agree with that gentleman in the gallery, but”—shrugging his shoulders—“what
are we amongst so many?”</p>
<p>Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s <i>Plays</i> appeared about
the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest
of a wide public.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.</p>
<p>It was the publication of <i>The Yellow Book</i> in the mid-April of 1894
that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow
circle so far interested in him.</p>
<p>London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests,
or at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room
was sprinkled with the latest books—the well-to-do bought
pictures and wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves
on their literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London
white in a night, so <i>The Yellow Book</i> littered the London drawing-rooms<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">with gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand.</span><br>
It “caught on.” And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the
crest of its wave of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue.
After all, everything that was outstanding and remarkable about the
book was Beardsley. <i>The Yellow Book</i> was soon the talk of the town,
and Beardsley “awoke to find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured
his work; and soon he was himself caricatured by “Max” in
the <i>Pall Mall Budget</i>; whilst the Oxford undergraduates were playing
with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like. But it was left to Mostyn
Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque on any poem in our
tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">’Twas rollog; and the minim potes</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Did mime and mimble in the cafe;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">All footly were the Philerotes</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And Daycadongs outstrafe....</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The aims that rile, the art that racks,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The stumious Beerbomax!</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Came piffling through the Headley Bod,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And flippered as it flew....</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="figcenter" id="f17">
<img src="images/fig17.jpg" alt="portrait">
<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book” Volume III</i></p>
<p class="caption">PAR LES DIEVX<br>
JVMEAVX TOVS<br>
LES MONSTRES<br>
NE SONT PAS EN<br>
AFRIQUE</p>
</div>
<p>As one turns over the pages of <i>The Yellow Book</i> today, it is a little
difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span>
passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and
yellow leaf. But it <i>was</i> a sensation. And that sensation flung wide the
doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He enjoyed his fame with gusto.
He revelled in it. And the ineffable and offensive conceit that it engendered
in the lad was very excusable and understandable. He was
lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere and enjoyed every
ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good fortune that his
fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours, was enhanced
by an increase of health and strength that promised recovery from
the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and waking. His musical
childhood had taught him the value of publicity early—the
whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means and at
every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and
loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes
he even felt a little ashamed of it—and of his Jackals. But his vogue
now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody—and
he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained.</p>
<p>It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even
at the publishing of the second volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i> in July
there was that which happened—had he had prophetic vision—that
boded no good for the young fellow.</p>
<p>The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane
fell in, and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane
in sole possession of The Bodley Head—and <i>The Yellow Book</i>.</p>
<p>The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a
head considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected
about The Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before
a twelvemonth was out.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></p>
<p>It was on the designs of this second volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i> of
July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last
time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June;
for, in the <i>Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf
Club</i> on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given
place to “<span class="allsmcap">AUBREY BEARDSLEY</span>.”</p>
<p>Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he
did his work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though
he had no need to work—were above work. He liked to pose as one
who did not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the
quarterly appeared, he won an increase of notoriety—or obloquy,
which was much the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter
came on, he was to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did
not relish, indeed that scared him—and as a fact, it was most scandalously
unfair gossip. Meanwhile the Christmas number of <i>Today</i>
produced his very fine night-piece <i>Les Passades</i>.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f18">
<img src="images/fig18.jpg" alt="night">
<p class="caption">NIGHT PIECE</p>
</div>
<p>Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue—as playwright and wit
and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the <i>Salome</i>, with its
erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a false
impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never were.
Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer of
Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented
Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley delighted
in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of
what was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so
happened that Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his
Court, where young talent was allowed to be brought into the presence
and introduced. It came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
to go over to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in
hero-worship, and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as
Wilde had signified his condescension to that end—but the gross
patronage of Wilde on the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit
to the quick. It had flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde;
but he never became an intimate—he never again sought to bask in
the radiance.</p>
<p>To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue
a novel called <i>The Green Carnation</i> of which Wilde and his associates
were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination.
The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s
intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even
if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very well
in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to pass
by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He
sprang at opportunity—and struck hard. With the reckless courage
so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he struck—and
he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a
leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of
the healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support
of his vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening
public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived
at a state of elegant decay.</p>
<p>Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which
brought Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde
but to bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social
pariah. On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and
charged at Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>
and on the 3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary
public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April
amidst the wild enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested
the same evening.</p>
<p>On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow
Street with a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch
during the fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde
and Taylor were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later,
on the 26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey.
After a case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed
and the prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again
refused. A week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail
for £5,000; and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor
was put on trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May
the 20th, and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed.
The following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began
at the Old Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,”
and with Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard
labour.</p>
<p>The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat.
The fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of
mark with like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general
scare set in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but
it also caused a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a
short while before been in truculent vogue....</p>
<p>John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume
III of <i>The Yellow Book</i> in October 1894 and volume IV in the January
of 1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>
volume V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number
bound, when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook
society. The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend
of Oscar Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the
writers of <i>The Yellow Book</i>; but whatever the cause, John Lane who
was in America was suddenly faced with an ultimatum—it was said
that one of his chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened
that without further ado either he or Beardsley must leave <i>The Yellow
Book</i> at once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not
alone but had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her
vogue, with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits
of the storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John
Lane in his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet
was a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own
business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision
could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s
drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete,
and anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine.
It may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship
was solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a
most unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic
in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts
of moral cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley
<i>The Yellow Book</i> was doomed—it at once declined, and though it
struggled on, it went to annihilation and foundered.</p>
<p>This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of
cant that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John
Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>
deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it
might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite
pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive
him. But Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly
incident, in that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing
himself to be thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had
been made responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had
whole-heartedly detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never
ceased to blame himself.</p>
<p>His expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i> was very bitterly resented by
Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height of his
triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him by the
time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did with an association
of which he was wholly innocent. And it must be confessed
that <i>The Yellow Book</i> at once became a stale farce played by all concerned
except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter—<i>Hamlet</i>
being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.</p>
<p>The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow
even more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment
at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an
intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking,
Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude
towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous
price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at
least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled
in the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to
his very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable
personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f19">
<img src="images/fig19.jpg" alt="campbell">
<p class="caption">PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I</i></p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span></p>
<p>His expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i> placed Beardsley in a very
awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his
drawings for <i>The Yellow Book</i> must have been but small at best; and
it is a mystery how he lived. It has been said that he found generous
patrons, and that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich,
a man of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood
must have been dangerously staunched by his expulsion from <i>The
Yellow Book</i>.</p>
<p>The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for volume
V of <i>The Yellow Book</i>, printed for April, but suppressed at the
last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and craftsmanship.
When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a new
craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves
in the later <i>Yellow Book</i> designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895,
at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an
interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was
about to astonish the world.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p><i>The Yellow Book</i> phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what
went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine
firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous <i>Lady
Gold’s Escort</i> and <i>The Wagnerites</i> are the type, and of which The
Nightpiece is the triumph—and a very thin delicate line, generally
for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn head—of
which the <i>Mrs. Patrick Campbell</i> is the type and <i>L’Education
sentimentale</i> a variant—whilst the three remarkable <i>Comedy-Ballets
of Marionettes I, II, and III</i>, show white masses used against black.</p>
<p>Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
mid-1894 in the July volume, No. 2, of <i>The Yellow Book</i>. The <i>Plays
of John Davidson</i>, several <i>Madame Réjanes</i>, the fine <i>Les Passades</i>,
the <i>Scarlet Pastorale</i>, and the <i>Tales of Mystery and Wonder</i> by Edgar
Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 <i>Yellow Book</i> phase.</p>
<p>But in the third volume of <i>The Yellow Book</i>, the fanciful and delightful
portrait of <i>The Artist in bed</i>, “<i>Par les dieux jumeaux tous les
monstres ne sont pas en Afrique</i>,” and the famous <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i>
standing before her dressing table, advance his handling in freedom
and rhythm; as does the exquisite <i>The Mysterious Rose Garden</i>,
which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of Biblical
illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the <i>Annunciation</i>”—indeed
he could not understand the objections of the prudish
to it and resented its being misunderstood! The <i>Messalina with
her Companion</i> is of this later <i>Yellow Book</i> phase; and the <i>Atalanta
without the hound</i> of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example
of it.</p>
<p>The beautifully wrought <i>Pierrot Invitation Card</i> for John Lane;
the remarkable wash drawings <i>A Nocturne of Chopin</i> from the suppressed
Volume Five, and the <i>Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47</i> of <i>The
Studio</i>, all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i>,
show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and
in the double-page <i>Juvenal</i> of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair,
he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change,
as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that followed
Beardsley’s expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i>; for, being commissioned
to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for <i>An Evil
Motherhood</i>, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected <i>Black Cape</i>, of the
suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only under<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>
the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley
made the now famous design of the <i>Evil Motherhood</i> in which he entirely
breaks from <i>The Yellow Book</i> convention and craftsmanship,
and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f20">
<img src="images/fig20.jpg" alt="rose">
<p class="caption">THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV</i></p>
</div>
<p>It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from <i>The Yellow
Book</i> that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s
<i>Posters</i> for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a
mediocre poster for <i>The Pseudonym Library</i>, a woman in a street
opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest <i>Poster</i> he ever
designed—a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in
black and purple, for <i>Christmas Books</i>—all three of <i>The Yellow Book</i>
phase.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from <i>The
Yellow Book</i>, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young
Beardsley’s life—an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and
was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were
passed by.</p>
<p>I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance—and
it was a regret to me that it so chanced—it fell to my lot to
have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer,
and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had
asked for it, ’tis true—had clamoured for it—and yet resented others
saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid,
narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with
self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst
academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>
in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry
Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for
its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges
against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the
great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It
will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled
with that of Wilde—I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see
it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled <i>The Decay
of English Art</i>, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that
it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature
and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples
of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard
Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and
the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but
two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of
their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither
Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius,
was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable
as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as
he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the
Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites
who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a
foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and
had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted
mimicry of mediæval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s
claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men
as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”—which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span>
was not at all typical of the modern achievement as a
whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere
precious poetasters.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f21">
<img src="images/fig21.jpg" alt="design">
<p class="caption">DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD</p>
</div>
<p>Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about
him, cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply;
and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously
hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured
ambition of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to
the Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of <i>St. Paul’s</i>; and the editor,
Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to
its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but
contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="r">
114 Cambridge Street<br>
<span class="pad">S. W.</span><br>
<span class="pad2">June 28th</span>
</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Sir</span>, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or enjoys
more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a
little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take
up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.”</p>
<p>As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he
has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.</p>
<p class="r">
<span class="pad3">Yours &c</span><br>
Aubrey Beardsley
</p>
</div>
<p>This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic
delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.</p>
<p>I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be published—that
I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in
seeking self-advertisement—but I was the last man in the world to
allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to
Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather
raw at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown
before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword and
first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired to pose as
a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by cutting out
the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with “Your
critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his naughty
but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply at the
same time, as follows:</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="c">A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Sir</span>,</p>
<p>When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee,
his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried
skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the
scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the
monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray
assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I
overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath—a
pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist
in it.</p>
<p class="r">
<span class="pad">Yours truly</span><br>
<span class="pad2">Hal Dane.</span>
</p>
<p class="l">July 3rd 1895</p>
</div>
<p>The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way
to advertisement—the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as
deadly a weapon for wounds.</p>
<p>Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt—before giving
out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “masterpiece”—on
receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too
late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to
withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I
then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s
childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thoroughly
a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth;
but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine
to lash <i>at him</i> but at Harry Quilter—at the same time perhaps he
would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought
it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the applause
of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he
should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would
be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to
come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted
me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent
to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt
about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his signature
of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ
plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and
design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice,
from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley
used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that
tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>
passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at
Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal
Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly
when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme
masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly
replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s
work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to
me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation
whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master
of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with
precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the
use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection,
whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass
by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his
own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was
an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.”</p>
<p>In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying:
and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant
pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before
it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of
bitter regret was at hand.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Beardsley during his early <i>Yellow Book</i> phase, about the July of
1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting
with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for <i>The
Comedy Ballet of Marionettes</i> which appeared in the July <i>Yellow
Book</i>; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight
changes, <i>The Comedy Ballet No. 1</i>, in William Nicholson’s manner.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span>
He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of
the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a <i>Lady with a
Mouse</i> on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter
Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said—“I only use
flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at
being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything
in little.”</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f22">
<img src="images/fig22.jpg" alt="scarlet">
<p class="caption">THE SCARLET PASTORALE</p>
</div>
<p>It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint <i>The Comedy Ballet I</i>
in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement
for Geraudel’s Pastilles—as well as I can remember—which first appeared
in <i>Le Courier Français</i> on February 17th, 1895. It was a wonderful
decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome
prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact,
Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men
in that realm—Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec,
and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was essentially
“in the small.”</p>
<p>For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured intention
of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dismissal
from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, John Lane whilst in America during
the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much
resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the
flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it out of
existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his <i>Lady Gold’s
Escort</i> and his <i>Wagnerites</i>.... The decadent fad can’t long stand
such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant wonder that
the <i>Daily Chronicle</i> asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing
that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offended<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span>
Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but who still more resented
this desire to show him as being really “quite respectable.”
As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of the satirist in him; had
he wanted to satirise anything he would have satirised the respectabilities
of the middle-class which he detested, not the musicians and
the rich whom he adored and would have excused of any sin. Look
through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling together a dozen
designs that could be made to pass for satire of the vices of his age!
It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to try and whitewash
Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist—he was none. A dying satirist
does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>At a loose end, on his expulsion from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, Beardsley
drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career,
and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling <i>Venus
and Tannhäuser</i>—it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as
<i>Under the Hill</i>—a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris.
He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his
drawings for <i>The Yellow Book</i>, and developed a new craftsmanship
which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art.</p>
<p>The smallness of the page of <i>The Yellow Book</i> had galled him by
compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size
of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted
him; it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line
and flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest
was kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily
rapid as though he knew he had but a short way to go.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f23">
<img src="images/fig23.jpg" alt="atalanta">
<p class="caption">ATALANTA</p>
</div>
<p><i>Baron Verdigris</i> was the transition from the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> phase<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span>
to the <i>Yellow Book</i> or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as <i>The
Fat Woman</i> was the transition from his Greek vase stage; <i>Black Coffee</i>
the end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of
<i>The Yellow Book</i> page and its consequent disheartening reduction,
Beardsley was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a
greater love of detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all
his own.</p>
<p>He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street,
with his sister, when expelled from <i>The Yellow Book</i>. It was about this
time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent
movement and became a Roman Catholic priest—the friendship soon
became more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was
to have a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published
Beardsley’s letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and
were soon very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate
insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this
time. Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,”
from which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was
from the first bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes
and artistic temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic
Church. Indeed, soon we find Gray priming the young fellow with
arguments to refute his “Anglican” friends.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with
<i>The Yellow Book</i>, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health
began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to
his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.</p>
<p>Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from <i>The
Yellow Book</i> and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at
114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11
St. James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.</p>
<p>He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was
so ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.</p>
<p>And <i>The Yellow Book</i> went on without him, to die a long lingering
ignoble death.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley
Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that
shook his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him
to the making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer
of 1895—and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the
first rank in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth
an original art of astounding power. It was the proof of the <i>Venus between
Terminal Gods</i>. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite
<i>Mirror of Love</i>, wrought just before the <i>Venus between Terminal
Gods</i>. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black
gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f24">
<img src="images/fig24.jpg" alt="savoy">
<p class="caption">TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NOS. 1 AND 2</i></p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c8">VIII</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">1. “THE SAVOY”</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">It</span> was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even the
present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good fortune,
thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That fickle and
heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for his smile,
that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his art, these
were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or put hand in
pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve his art. The
greater public was inimical and little likely to show sympathy, far less
to help.</p>
<p>But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to
venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man
who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy.
For, at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday,
Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist,
sought out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange
a providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny—a man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>
who proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary
editor and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed
this fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard
Smithers; and it was to this dandified fantastic adventurer that
Beardsley was wholly to owe the great opportunity of his life to
achieve his supreme master-work. Had it not been for Smithers it is
absolutely certain that Aubrey Beardsley would have died with the
full song that was within him unsung.</p>
<p>Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley
lying on a couch—“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too
late.” Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival
to <i>The Yellow Book</i> which had at once begun to feel the cold draught
of the fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed
hugely to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the
scheme for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner
for Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than
Arthur Symons. A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters,
he had far more than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for
pictorial art. The two men had also a common bond in their contempt
of Mrs. Grundy and in their keen interest in the erotic emotions—Arthur
Symons had not hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet
by writing of a “Juliet of a Night.”</p>
<p>Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of <i>The Savoy</i>
for the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so
vital to Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order
to enable his work to be produced on a larger scale.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f25">
<img src="images/fig25.jpg" alt="venus">
<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”</p>
</div>
<p>The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and
he was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of his
art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of his publisher,
Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work whatsoever
from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of
Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see
working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made
him a free man.</p>
<p>The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives
us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from <i>The
Yellow Book</i> in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for
Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two
drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him
into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age—these drawings,
clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the
one hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly <i>Venus between
Terminal Gods</i>, designed for his novel of <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>,
better known as <i>Under the Hill</i>, and the exquisite <i>Mirror of
Love</i>, or as it was also called <i>Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape
of a Mirror</i>. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past
and utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s
skill is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the
different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician
drew subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement,
rhythm, orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These
two masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense
of sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom.</p>
<p>The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was
a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed
to be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from
the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked,
gossip whispered and pursed the lip—but gave no clue. He came to
London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature
and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the
life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set
up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow
shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of questionable
morality—a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the
end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean
and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with
such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening,
there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens
in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation
of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how—whilst the henchman
held the absent-minded seller in converse—Smithers slipped out
and resold it for several hundred pounds—and how, the book being
bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily
put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained
door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table
before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid
youth bathed their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon
therefore made his daring <i>coup</i> with Burton’s unexpurgated <i>Arabian
Nights</i>, which was to be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip
ran that, choosing Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by
him could not reach a London bank before the morning of Monday,
Smithers ran down to the country to see Lady Burton; and after much
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>persuasion, and making it clear to her that the huge industry and
scholarship of the great work would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it
was quite unsaleable to an ordinary publisher, but would have to be
privately issued, he induced her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of
thousand pounds. Skilfully delaying the writing of the cheque for a
sum which his account at the bank could not possibly meet, Smithers
waited until it was impossible for the local post to reach London before
the banks closed on Saturday morning—returned to town with
the scrip—and spent the rest of the evening and the whole of Saturday
in a vain and ever-increasing frantic endeavour to sell the famous
manuscript for some seven or eight thousand pounds or so. It was
only by dogged endeavour on the Sunday that he at last ran down his
forlorn hope and sold it for—it is gossiped—some five thousand
pounds. On the Monday morning the bank-porter, on opening the
doors of the bank, found sitting on the doorstep a dandified figure of
a man in silk hat and frock coat, with a monocle in his anxious, whimsical
eye.... So Smithers paid the money into his account to meet
the cheque which he had drawn and dated for this Monday, before the
manager was likely to have opened his morning correspondence. It
had been touch and go.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f26">
<img src="images/fig26.jpg" alt="mirror">
<p class="caption">THE MIRROR OF LOVE</p>
</div>
<p>Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of
fine editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it
came about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space,
Smithers with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had
cast from him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly
wherewith to usurp <i>The Yellow Book</i>. He knew that young Beardsley,
bitterly humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable
flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span>
and Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more—or
at any rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not
above an “exaggeration” to his own advantage—Beardsley’s bank-books
alone can verify or refute it—he intended and meant to see to
it that, Beardsley from that hour should be a free man, free from cares
of bread, free from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace,
free to utter what song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous
rogue that he was painted by many or not, he determined
that from thenceforth Beardsley should be assured of a sound income
whether he, Smithers, had to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others,
in order that Beardsley should have it. This dissipated-looking man,
in whatsoever way he won his means, was at this time always well
dressed and had every appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups
and downs; but he made a show of wealth and success. And he kept
his wilful bond in his wilful way. Whosoever went a-begging for it,
Smithers raised the money by fair means or foul that Beardsley might
fulfil himself, for good or for ill. He knew no scruple that stood in
Beardsley’s way. It is true that when Beardsley died, Smithers exploited
him; but whilst he lived, Smithers was the most loyal and devoted
friend he had.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f27">
<img src="images/fig27.jpg" alt="cover">
<p class="caption">A CATALOGUE COVER</p>
</div>
<p>A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper,
<i>M. A. P.</i>, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he
appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade
and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as
town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place
in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a
subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and interesting
personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span>the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come
under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden,
Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room
painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the
walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey
Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his
brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and
very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and
has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be
noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power
of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great
palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy
and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house
at Walton-on-Naze....”</p>
<p>You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world
his footstool—no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious
mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless,
for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was
Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s
life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the humiliation
that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write:
“a good friend as well as a publisher.”</p>
<p>Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the
which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous
one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public.
There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus
be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley
to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his
novel entitled in its bowdlerised form <i>Under the Hill</i>, and later to
illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare
craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Disgusted with <i>The Yellow Book</i>, Beardsley put his immediate past
and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his
beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest
achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated
this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now
opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn
and the early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that
had again begun to dog his steps.</p>
<p>Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed
to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895,
Beardsley in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased
now from money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with <i>The
Savoy</i> due to appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration
from the 18th century, and at once his art burst into full
song.</p>
<p>Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered
Beardsley immersed in his work for <i>The Savoy</i>; but finds him now
more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was
hard at work upon his obscene novel <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>, the so-called
<i>Under the Hill</i>, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the
inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went
and scribbling phrases as they came to him.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f28">
<img src="images/fig28.jpg" alt="beach">
<p class="caption">ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f29">
<img src="images/fig29.jpg" alt="abbe">
<p class="caption">THE ABBE</p>
</div>
<p>The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span>city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he
could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk
for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked
violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of
the Prudential.”</p>
<p>It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if
his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of
letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in
the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into
literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an
artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in
literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate,
let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university
magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts
that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its
stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified
stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured
exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really
sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose.
It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial
minds—the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering
product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured
city and scholastic circles.</p>
<p><i>Under the Hill</i> was published in mutilated form in the coming
<i>Savoy</i>, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to
understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur
Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing—if indeed
he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span>
cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning—a sheer
laboured stupidity, revealing nothing—a posset, a poultice of affectations.
The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity,
is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow
revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible
to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s
underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives
us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that
would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour
to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant
erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only
value out of it—a real revelation of life—and it yields us nothing but
a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument
of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate
as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to
express emotion—even though in halting fashion it does discover the
real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any
rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the
world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f30">
<img src="images/fig30.jpg" alt="fruit">
<p class="caption">THE FRUIT BEARERS</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f31">
<img src="images/fig31.jpg" alt="card">
<p class="caption">A CHRISTMAS CARD</p>
</div>
<p>As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us
Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy
images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing—better uttered
pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature
that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical essay.”
In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is
strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in
prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of
words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span>taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say
that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say
“it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” “reticent waters,”
“ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” and suchlike
elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude
housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “anyhow
it was a wonderful lake”—what Tree used wittily to call “re-faned”
English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort
of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing,
with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the
housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap commonplaces
such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty
little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and refraining”;
“commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet little place”;
“card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the
sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat old thing,”
“Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a sweet
white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest
of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic
fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant
if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achievement;
and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publication
is impossible.</p>
<p>This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate
or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we
read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been
denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, unintellectual,
innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved
Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that
shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals
no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions
that vex the age—he is concerned solely with his health or some business
of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion
shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual
upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his
struggling fellows, not a sign!</p>
<p>It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that
he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned
him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid
contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that
others published.</p>
<p>In <i>Under the Hill</i> Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art
except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul,
so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé—it sounded more real
to him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley—a
hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or
generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable of
postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on satisfying
every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome garment over
the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings over acts so
bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind as Beardsley’s,
judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being nauseated by his
own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament—it explains his art, his
life, his vision—and it proves the cant of all who try to excuse Beardsley
as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, he lashes it.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span>Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and
commonplace all such as did not revel in it.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f32">
<img src="images/fig32.jpg" alt="three">
<p class="caption">THE THREE MUSICIANS</p>
<p class="caption"><i>from “The Savoy” No. 1.</i></p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f33">
<img src="images/fig33.jpg" alt="tailpiece">
<p class="caption">TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”</p>
</div>
<p>The story of <i>Venus and Tannhäuser</i>, bowdlerised as <i>Under the Hill</i>—by
which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for
even Beardsley feared to <i>write</i> the Mons Veneris,—he seemed undecided
as to which to call it—the story was without consequence,
without cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together
of little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene
moods and desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive
whose life burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know
from Arthur Symons that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages,
epithets, newly coined words, in pencil in odd moments during
this month at Dieppe. He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable
to work except in London, never in the least appealed to by nature.
Beardsley never walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at
the sea. When the night fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the
casino, gazing at the life that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted
rooms when no one was there—to flit awhile into the room
where the children danced—the sound of music always drew him to
the concerts. He always carries the inevitable portfolio with him and
is for ever jotting down notes. He writes in a little writing room for
visitors. He agonises over a phrase—he pieces the over-polished sentences
and phrases together like a puzzle, making them fit where best
they can. He bends all his wits to trying to write verse. He hammers
out the eight stanzas of <i>The Three Musicians</i> with infinite travail on
the grassy ramparts of the old castle, and by dogged toil he brings
forth the dainty indecencies, as later he chiselled and polished and
chiselled the <i>translation from Catullus</i>. The innate musical sense of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
the fellow gives the verse rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed,
and was bound to fail, in literature, whether in verse or prose, because
he failed to understand the basic significance of art. He failed because
he tried to make literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an
emotional act—he failed because all academism is a negation of art,
because he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument
for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing
done to order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse
of all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe
whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was
more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It
was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings—it was a
deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the aping
of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the
eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were
obsolete, a dead language—he is more concerned with dead words
than with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he
cannot make it alive even for himself—he cannot fulfil a character in
it or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street of
fine clothes—there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He is not
greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly concerned
with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this akin to
Oscar Wilde.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques
Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable
friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the picture
he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to Beardsley’s
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see the author of one
of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, <i>La Dame aux Camélias</i>—Alexandre
Dumas, fils.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f34">
<img src="images/fig34.jpg" alt="savoy">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” <i>NO. 1</i></p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f35">
<img src="images/fig35.jpg" alt="billet-doux">
<p class="caption">THE BILLET-DOUX</p>
</div>
<p>Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley
in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits
of Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max
Beerbohm.</p>
<p>Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to
be “unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily
an affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is
painfully common to the artistic temperament which often cannot
work at all except in the atmosphere of its workshop.</p>
<p>He was now working keenly at <i>The Savoy</i> drawings and the illustrations
for his bowdlerised <i>Under the Hill</i>, to be produced serially in
that magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895,
and the rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards,
showed, in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for <i>The
Yellow Book</i>, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second
edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for <i>The
Savoy</i>, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first
number for December, <i>The Savoy</i> eventually had to be put off until
the New Year; meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced
work upon the famous sequence of masterpieces for <i>The Rape
of the Lock</i>, announced for publication in February, and which we
know was being sold in March.</p>
<p>In January 1896 <i>The Savoy</i> appeared, and made a sensation in the
art world only to be compared with the public sensation of <i>The Yellow
Book</i>. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>
a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like beauty of the
superb Title Page—the two black-masked figures in white before a
dressing table—the deft witty verses of the naughty <i>Three Musicians</i>,
the <i>Bathers on Dieppe Beach</i>, the three sumptuously rich designs of
<i>The Abbé</i>, the <i>Toilet of Helen</i>, and <i>The Fruit-bearers</i> for the novel
<i>Under the Hill</i> which began in this number, capped by the stately
<i>Christmas Card</i> of <i>The Madonna and Child</i> lifted the new magazine
at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.</p>
<p>The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the
rest, with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which
Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided
him to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved
from it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his <i>Morte
d’Arthur</i> experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation
even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the
artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath
from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared
the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>—masterpieces
of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first
rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, <i>The New Star</i>—with
the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of <i>The Dream</i>, the
exquisite <i>Billet-Doux</i>, the <i>Toilet</i>, the <i>Baron’s Prayer</i>, and the magnificent
<i>Rape of the Lock</i> and <i>Battle of the Beaux and Belles</i>.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f36">
<img src="images/fig36.jpg" alt="toilet">
<p class="caption">THE TOILET</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f37">
<img src="images/fig37.jpg" alt="lock">
<p class="caption">THE RAPE OF THE LOCK</p>
</div>
<p>The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning
to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming
nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an
extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces—we find
silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal,
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and
interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom
of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his design
as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the
two drawings of <i>The Rape of the Lock</i> and <i>The Battle of the Beaux
and Belles</i> it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the
white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the
single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the
muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and
satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially
as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the cohesion
and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of
the thing.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s
life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the
February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous
scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable
time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon
that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended
in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his
state—he was about to learn the dread verdict.</p>
<p>The second number of <i>The Savoy</i> appeared in April, as a quarterly,
and its charming cover-design of <i>Choosing the New Hat</i> screened a
sad falling off in the output of the stricken man—for the number contained
but the <i>Footnote portrait of himself</i>; the <i>Third Tableau of
“Das Rheingold”</i> which he had probably already done before going
to Brussels; a scene from <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>; and but one illustration<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span>
to <i>Under the Hill</i>, the <i>Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima</i>; whilst the
beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II—in all
but four new drawings!</p>
<p>Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next—the
third—number of The Savoy to appear in July, <i>the driving of Cupid
from the Garden</i>, and worked upon the poem of the <i>Ballad of a Barber</i>,
making the wonderful line drawing for it called <i>The Coiffing</i>, with
a silhouette <i>cul-de-lampe</i> of <i>Cupid with the gallows</i>; but his body was
rapidly breaking down.</p>
<p>On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing
the letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant,
in which Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his
condition this day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate
change, wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I
am beginning to be really depressed and frightened about myself.”
From this dread he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free.
It was to stand within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went.
He was about to start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be
the rest of his wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than
he sees it taking stealthy possession of the shadows almost within
reach of his hand. It is now become for Beardsley a question of how
long he can flit from the Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he
can keep him from his side if but for a little while.... In this June
of 1896 was written that “<i>Note</i>” for the July <i>Savoy, No. 3</i>, announcing
the end of <i>Under the Hill</i>—Beardsley has made his first surrender.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f38">
<img src="images/fig38.jpg" alt="battle">
<p class="caption">THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f39">
<img src="images/fig39.jpg" alt="baron">
<p class="caption">THE BARON’S PRAYER</p>
</div>
<p>So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his
last restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the
terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had to
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span>turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the fatuous
falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write as if
London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition to
alien peoples—it was London that found him, London that raised him
to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley himself
feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It was
the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the bedizened
and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed
for the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but
it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And
though Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his
spiritual home with him—clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale
furniture and to his books and the inspiration of his genius—the
engravings after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like;
above all he clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without
which he was never happy at his work.</p>
<p>By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at
Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating <i>Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves</i> as a Christmas Book—for which presumably was the fine
<i>Ali Baba in the Wood</i>. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is
now fretted by his “entire inability to walk or exert himself in the
least.” Suddenly he bends all his powers on illustrating <i>Lysistrata</i>!
and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe
and masterly drawings for the <i>Lysistrata</i> as would have made any
man’s reputation—but alas! masterpieces so obscene that they could
only be printed privately. However, the attacks of hemorrhage from
the lungs were now very severe, and the plagued man had to prepare
for another move—it is a miracle that, with death staring him in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span>
face, and with his tormented body torn with disease, Beardsley could
have brought forth these gay lyrical drawings wrought with such
consummate skill that unfortunately the world at large can never look
upon—the <i>Lysistrata</i>. It is almost unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind
could have allowed his exquisite art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity
which he knew, when he drew these wonderful designs, must
render them utterly impossible for publication—that he should have
deliberately sacrificed so much to the naughtinesses. Yet as art they
are of a high order—they utter the emotions of unbridled sexuality
in reckless fashion—their very mastery renders them the more impossible
to publish. He knew himself full well that the work was
masterwork—“I have just completed a set of illustrations to Lysistrata,
I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done,” he
writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, who is now striving his
hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic Church. Gray realises
that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the <i>Lysistrata</i> should be
printed in pale purple.... It was probable that Beardsley reached
the <i>Lysistrata</i> of Aristophanes through the French translation of
Maurice Donnay—he was so anxious to assert that the purple illustrations
were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in book form, not
with Donnay’s translation! The <i>Lysistrata</i> finished, he turned to the
translation and obscene illustration of the <i>Sixth Satire of Juvenal</i>.</p>
<p>But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed
off hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a
sad state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place
made his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop
the mischief.” Beardsley found relief—in the <i>Juvenal</i> drawings! “I
am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f40">
<img src="images/fig40.jpg" alt="coiffing">
<p class="caption">THE COIFFING</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f41">
<img src="images/fig41.jpg" alt="savoy">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO.</i> 4.</p>
</div>
<p>With the July number, <i>No. 3</i>, <i>The Savoy</i> became a monthly magazine;
and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to
arouse Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an
almost passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the
<i>Lysistrata</i> sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August <i>Savoy,
No. 4</i>—but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this beautiful
design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze curtain,
in the same month that he drew the <i>Lysistrata</i> sequence, and that it
is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world
a hint of what it lost.</p>
<p>August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the
Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the <i>September
Savoy, No. 5</i>, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the
uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of
<i>The Woman in White</i> which he had made from the <i>Bon Mots</i> line
drawing long before—there was now much searching amongst the
drawings and scraps lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked
body, the cover-design showed him at his most sumptuous employment
of black and white.</p>
<p>It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after
signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work
with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his drawing
within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three drawings
made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but
they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings
were most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed
that they should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span>
through the issues of <i>The Savoy</i> so as to prevent a sense of monotony—we
shall see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded
in a bunch” at the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian
drawings with the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form
of signature. Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun,
and Arthur Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he
might get from month to month, though there was always a Wagner
to count upon as at least one. The full signatures on the <i>Death of
Pierrot</i> and the <i>Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings</i> are the last signatures
in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after
his birthday, as we are about to see.</p>
<p>Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent
business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with
return of the bleeding from the lungs—a train journey always upset
him. He had to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in
so enfeebled a state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter
at Boscombe as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France.
A despairing cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out
of the wood.”</p>
<p>The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic <i>Death
of Pierrot</i> that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was
now brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design,
so the powerful <i>Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”</i> had to be
used as a cover for the October <i>Savoy No. 5</i>. The <i>Death of Pierrot</i> is
wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and
the sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual
literary beauty of its written legend.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f42">
<img src="images/fig42.jpg" alt="cover">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” <i>NO</i>. 7.</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span></p>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f43">
<img src="images/fig43.jpg" alt="pierrot">
<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span></p>
<p>September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s
winter.</p>
<p>It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new
offices at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved
from the first offices of <i>The Savoy</i> at Effingham House, Arundel Street,
Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade
that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already
done, and their publication in an <i>Album of Fifty Drawings</i>, to
appear in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley
in his suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion
of the end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the
<i>Death of Pierrot</i>. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the
<i>Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings</i>. The fifty drawings were collected
and chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this
makes it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September,
the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive <i>Bookplate of
the Artist</i> for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the
Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm,
however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely
to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path in
drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the extraordinary
influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have upon
a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade greatly
extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on view to
passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.</p>
<p>The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful <i>Cover for
the November Savoy, No. 7</i>, of spectacled old age boring youth “by
the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span>
of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful
translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing
<i>Ave atque Vale</i> or “Hail and Farewell” for the <i>Carmen C I of
Catullus</i>, whilst the third illustration for the November <i>Savoy</i>, the
small <i>Tristan and Isolde</i>, shows his interest maintained in the musical
sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended
to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October,
Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s <i>Das
Rheingold</i>, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he
himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of <i>Tannhäuser
returning to the Horselberg</i>, was trying to induce Beardsley at
this time to illustrate the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i> for him. The month of
October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright
fire with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber
from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly
ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am
quite paralysed with fear,” he cries—“I have told no one of it. It’s so
dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer
ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.”
Yet before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took
“quite a long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my
fortnight’s bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His
only distress made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel,
about to start on her American theatrical tour.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f44">
<img src="images/fig44.jpg" alt="headpiece">
<p class="caption">HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f45">
<img src="images/fig45.jpg" alt="tailpiece">
<p class="caption">TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”</p>
</div>
<p>November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It
was to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that
ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown
the achievement of this great period of his art—he writes that he has
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span>just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of
Ernest Dowson’s, <i>The Pierrot of the Minute</i>” which was published in
the following year of 1897—a grim irony that a boredom should have
brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work,
he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November
a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to
avail anything.”</p>
<p>There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illustrate
at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one design
in particular of the several good designs in the <i>Pierrot of the
Minute</i>, that “<i>cul-de-lampe</i>” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is
leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing wondrously
enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework—a
tragic comment on the wonderful <i>Headpiece</i> when Pierrot holds up
the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob,
blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work
of human hands.</p>
<p>It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on
Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for
the appearance of his own <i>Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line</i>,
“an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for
some reason difficult to plumb—it is neither good nor bad, and certainly
not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval
at this time for the <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i>. It is a pathetically tragic
thought that the November of the exquisite <i>Pierrot of the Minute</i> was
for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room
for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief
that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span>
of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of
helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is
the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles
are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I
have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with
writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains
bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed
state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”</p>
<p>It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published
prints for the cover and the title-page of <i>Evelina</i>—of his “own
early designing.”</p>
<p>The <i>Savoy</i> for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon
drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings
that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.</p>
<p>It was soon clear that the days of <i>The Savoy</i> were numbered and
the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be
the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public
support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley,
spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it
a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest
and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful <i>A Répétition of Tristan
and Isolde</i>—and he flung into the number all the drawings he now
made or had made for <i>Das Rheingold</i>, which included the marvellously
decorative <i>Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold</i>, that
“sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated
his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book
for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the
unimportant fragments <i>Flosshilde</i> and <i>Erda</i> and <i>Alberich</i>, which he,
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span>as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of “most
of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of
musicians, the <i>Mendelssohn</i> and the <i>Weber</i>; he somewhat fumbles
with his <i>Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar</i> from that <i>Don Juan</i> of
Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the
<i>Mrs. Margery Pinchwife</i> from Wycherley’s <i>Country Wife</i>; he very
sadly disappoints us with his <i>Count Valmont</i> from Laclos’ <i>Les Liaisons
Dangereuses</i> for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out
such high hopes; and he ends with <i>Et in Arcadia Ego</i>.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f46">
<img src="images/fig46.jpg" alt="isolde">
<p class="caption">A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f47">
<img src="images/fig47.jpg" alt="frontispiece">
<p class="caption">FRONTISPIECE</p>
</div>
<p>It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for
<i>The Savoy</i> that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces
that <i>The Savoy</i> is in future to be half-yearly and a much
higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended
on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.</p>
<p>Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in
the appearance of <i>The Book of Fifty Drawings</i> which he had completed
in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design—an
afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance
copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.</p>
<p>The December <i>Savoy</i>, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload
all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying
with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books,
<i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> by Laclos, and Stendhal’s <i>Adolphe</i>....</p>
<p>On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing
himself for <i>The Idler</i>”—the interview that appeared in that
magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.</p>
<p>About Christmas his edition of <i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> was taking
shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span>
170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to each
of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s enthusiasm.
At this Yuletide appeared <i>The Book of Fifty Drawings</i>, in
which for the first time were seen the <i>Ali Baba in the Wood</i>, the <i>Bookplate
of the Artist</i>, and the <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i> with the hound. This
book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own estimate of
his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty best drawings;
it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did not always know
what was his best work. It is interesting to note that Beardsley includes
the mediocre and commonplace <i>Merlin</i> in a circle, yet omits
some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting in that Beardsley
not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his early work,
but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant that he
would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it, certain definite
drawings—he particularly forbade anything from the <i>Scrap Book</i>
then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected Ross’s malicious
thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to exchange good,
and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces and inadequacies.
And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my presence
solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley was
dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the temptation
until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous betrayal. However
that was not as yet.... Evidently, though the fifty drawings
were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed one
October drawing for something thrown out, for the October <i>Ave atque
Vale</i> appears; and it may be that the <i>Atalanta in Calydon with the
hound</i>, sometimes called <i>Diana</i>, and the Beardsley <i>Bookplate</i> together
with the <i>Self-portrait silhouette</i> that makes the Finis to the Iconography,
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span>may have been done as late, and replaced other drawings.
Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to the man
who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very beginning—Joseph
Pennell. It was the least he could do.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f48">
<img src="images/fig48.jpg" alt="hound">
<p class="caption">ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND</p>
</div>
<div class="figcenter1" id="f49">
<img src="images/fig49.jpg" alt="plate">
<p class="caption">BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE</p>
</div>
<p>December had begun with more hope for Beardsley—his lung
gave him little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than
anything else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he
felt he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made
him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in
London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would
be “abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.”
And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he
was becoming quite hopeful again when—taking a walk about New
Year’s Eve he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a
dreadful state” before he could get any help. And he began the New
Year with the bitter cry: “So it all begins over again. It’s so disheartening.”
He had “collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to
take him to some more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>So ended the great <i>Savoy</i> period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated
to the span of twelve moons.</p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c9">IX</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE</p>
<p class="c">1897 to the End—Twenty-Five</p>
<p class="c less sp p1">II. THE AQUATINTESQUES</p>
<p>So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley
was now twenty-four and a half years of age—the great <i>Savoy</i> achievement
at an end.</p>
<p>The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897
came in amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of
carrying on <i>The Savoy</i> had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition
was so serious at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier
View to a house called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where
the change seemed to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He
was very funny about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little
from the name of this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at
school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he
writes whimsically. He began to find so much relief at Muriel, notwithstanding,
that he was soon planning to have rooms in London
again—at Manchester Street.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f50">
<img src="images/fig50.jpg" alt="lady">
<p class="caption">THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY</p>
</div>
<p>By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was
“sketching out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with
Boussod Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his <i>Frontispiece</i> for
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span>Theophile Gautier’s <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i>, for which he was now
making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style
of the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done—scant
wonder that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after reproduce
his works!—he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous
<i>Bookplate for Miss Custance</i>, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas,
and he also designed the <i>Arbuscula</i> for Gaston Vuillier’s <i>History of
Dancing</i>. For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in
Beardsley’s keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by
death one of the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they
hold, the subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that
suffuses them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering display
of Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he
should have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man.</p>
<p>Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding
had almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious
bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully,
and made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two
afterwards he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sunshine
makes the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire
and dreads to go out. “At present my mind is divided between the fear
of getting too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough
sunshine, or rather warmth near home.” But the doctors had evidently
said more to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided
now and in future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of
February saw his doctor take him out to a concert—a great joy to the
stricken man—and no harm done.</p>
<p>In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span>
draw. He also started a short story <i>The Celestial Lover</i>, for which he
was making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March
turned cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed
a serious lip over his promise to let him go up to town—to Beardsley’s
bitter disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South—if
only even to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in
his room were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months
now.” Yet a day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in
all directions are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with
cold winds, and bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted
fellow amongst the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh
how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made
pair of boots.... I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved
bitterness.” The move to London for the South was at last
decided upon, for the first week in April—to the South of France by
easy stages. He knew now that he could never be cured, but he hoped
that the ravages of the disease could be prevented from becoming
rapid.</p>
<p>On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even
more eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought
to have the right to beg for a few months more of life—“Don’t think
me foolish to haggle about a few months”—as he has two or three
pictured short stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day,
Wednesday the 31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman
Catholic Church—on the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the
Sacrament which had to be brought to him, to his great grief, since
he could not go to the Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span>
near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church
of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.”</p>
<p>There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art
from his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual upheaval.
It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going
through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been
drawing the designs for <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i>, or indeed steeping
in that novel at all, or drawing the <i>Arbuscula</i>. For months he has been
led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church;
yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on <i>Under the
Hill!</i> and drawn the designs for <i>Lysistrata</i> and the <i>Juvenal!</i> not five
months since he has drawn his <i>Bookplate!</i> And by the grim irony of
circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that
there appeared in <i>The Idler</i> his confession: “To my mind there is
nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have the sun
shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March <i>Idler</i> by Lawrence,
one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the framework and
then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in the details, was
as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend John Gray,
written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just departing.
That interview will therefore remain always as an important evidence
by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It is true that
he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having despatched it,
was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I have not said too
many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute to the complexity of
the human soul that the correspondence with the poet-priest John
Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are hidden from us,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span>
was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to Rome, he was
lending him books and interesting him in books, side by side with
lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their fellowship
with the saints.</p>
<p>Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a
week after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London,
staying a day or two at the Windsor Hotel—a happy halt for Beardsley
as his friend John Gray was there to meet him—and crossed to
France, where on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel
Voltaire, quai Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted
mother. Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man.
He loved to be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in
May he was reading <i>The Hundred and One Nights</i> for the first time,
and inspired by it, drew his famous <i>Cover for Ali Baba</i>, a masterpiece
of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure
resplendent with gems—as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous
design.”</p>
<p>Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the prospect
of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sunshine.
He felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he
was soon able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again—perhaps
it had been better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to
the sun. There was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beardsley’s
return from America and their early meeting. He could now
write from a café: “I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though
he could not get a sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove
which, being shut off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a
sitting-room and thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room—he
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span>could forget he was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a
lift, the waiters would carry him up stairs—he could not risk the
climbing. And the bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal
joy to him.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f51">
<img src="images/fig51.jpg" alt="cover">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”</p>
</div>
<p>With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping
better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his
new religion; reads works of piety, and—goes on his way poring over
naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out
of his room awhile—talks even of getting strong again quite soon.</p>
<p>But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for
Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of his
room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the following
day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him. A
month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised; and
Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its picturesqueness—indeed
St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to inspire
him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself
breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the
air was to make a new man of him.</p>
<p>The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had secured
him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celebrities.
And the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St.
Germain, upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cautioned
care.</p>
<p>Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye,
where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue
de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May
drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span>
giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch
by assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet—if
he went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth
and the South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St.
Germain. However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a
walk in the forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s
creaking body. The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of
the lungs started again and made him wretched. The arrival of his
sister, however, was a delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his
delicious waggery that she showed only occasional touches of “an
accent which I am sure she has only acquired since she left America.”
His health at once improved with his better spirits.</p>
<p>Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living genius
of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s <i>Evan Harrington</i>;
it was about the time that the <i>Mercure</i> published in French
the <i>Essay on Comedy</i> which started widespread interest in the works of
Meredith.</p>
<p>By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; “everyone in the hotel
notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sitting
out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and
lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled
again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a
journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised
to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised
by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley
decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the
means forbade.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f52">
<img src="images/fig52.jpg" alt="ali baba">
<p class="caption">ALI BABA IN THE WOOD</p>
</div>
<p>Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span>hopes, Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence
he wrote of his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in
the rue Halle au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that
he was out and about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz
Thaulow’s family welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of
his improved health, it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best
of all blessings, he was now able to work. It was in this August that he
met Vincent O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty-fifth
birthday. Before the month was half through he was fretting to
be back in Paris for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He
found this Hotel rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more
sheltered lodgings in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado,
hoping that Dieppe might still know a gentle September. Though the
weather remained wet and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to
Paris. His London doctor came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered
him vastly with hopes of a complete recovery if he took care of himself,
and advised Paris for the early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was
for Paris, turned his back on Dieppe with a pang—he left many
friends. However, late September saw him making for Paris with unfeigned
joy, and settling in rooms at the Hotel Foyot in the rue Tournon
near the Luxembourg Gardens.</p>
<p>His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again
from a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doctor
considered him curable still; he might have not only several years
of life before him “but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching
heat of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the
chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span>
out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was—reading
the <i>Memoirs of Casanova!</i> But he had grown cautious; found
that seeing many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and
inspiring book.” But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake
solemn heads—all the talk was henceforth of the South of France.
“Every fresh person one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh objections
to the places we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger
late in Paris; but what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put
aside on account of its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of
it show it horribly “Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cœur
sent him a bottle of water from Lourdes. “Yet all the same I get
dreadfully nervous, & stupidly worried about little things.” However,
the doctors sternly forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly,
with fogs; and Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November
saw his mother taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in
the rooms at the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his
last place of flitting.</p>
<p>Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have
ever been since my school days”; but the fogs that drove him forth
made him write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved
so well: “If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go
down hill rather quickly.”</p>
<p>At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque
place. Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied
again and was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eating
well; was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement
in him, to his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustrations
for Ben Jonson’s <i>Volpone</i>, and was keenly interested in a new
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span>venture by Smithers who proposed a successor to <i>The Savoy</i> which he
wished to call <i>The Peacock</i>.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f53">
<img src="images/fig53.jpg" alt="volpone">
<p class="caption">COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE”</p>
</div>
<p>The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier
and more peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.”</p>
<p>So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the <i>Cover of
Volpone</i> one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever
brought splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book.
He also made a pen drawing for the <i>Cover of a prospectus for Volpone</i>,
which was after his death published in the book as a <i>Frontispiece</i>, for
which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning
which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear in
the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had developed
and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All the
same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs, or so
it seems to me, as a Title Page, since <i>Volpone</i> is lettered on a label
upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor would
have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at all;
for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole style of
the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction on the
<i>Prospectus</i>. But in this <i>Prospectus Cover for Volpone</i> his hand’s skill
reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his body’s sorry
state—its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical severity. And
all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are there, the white
robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands raised palm to
palm suppliant-wise—the dark polished wood of the gilt doorway—the
fabric of the curtains—the glitter of precious metals and gems.</p>
<p>In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span>
list of drawings for the <i>Volpone</i>,” suggested its being made a companion
volume to <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, and asked Smithers to announce
it in <i>The Athenæum</i>. Besides the now famous and beautiful
<i>Cover</i>, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of
<i>Volpone</i> to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did
execute are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals
that the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus,
<i>Volpone and his treasure</i>, but that is to be in line and wash—obviously
in the style of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i>—yet strangely enough,
the remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”!
And it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus
in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate
and line version of the <i>Frontispiece</i>—and that it is not to appear in
the book. We have the line drawing for the <i>Prospectus</i>—and we can
only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated
in the manner of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i> or the <i>Initials</i>. That, in
this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling in
face of the fact that the <i>Initials</i> were in the new method, line with
pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely
states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month,
that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything
he had yet done, which the <i>Initials</i> certainly were.</p>
<p>On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,”
sending the <i>Cover Design for Volpone</i> and the <i>Design for the Prospectus
of Volpone</i>, begging for proofs, especially of the <i>Design for
the Prospectus</i>, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs
of the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for
Beardsley’s Christmas cheer. The beautiful <i>Miniature</i> edition of <i>The</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span>
<i>Rape of the Lock</i>, with Beardsley’s special <i>Cover-design in gold on
scarlet</i>, had just been published—the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley
called them.</p>
<p>However, these 24 designs for the <i>Volpone</i> were never to be. But
we know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on
the 19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new magazine
of <i>The Peacock</i> projected by Smithers, of which more later.
Whilst delighted with the idea of editing <i>The Peacock</i>, Beardsley expresses
fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put
the <i>Volpone</i> into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so, that
there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the <i>Initials</i>
with this letter, for he underlines that <i>Volpone</i> is to be an important
book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that Beardsley is now
sending him—indeed the <i>Initials</i> were, alas! all that he was ever destined
to complete—the 24 illustrations were not to be. That these
<i>Initials</i> were the designs sent is further made clear by the remark that
the new work is a complete, “a marked departure as illustrative and
decorative work from any other arty book published for many years.”
He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he has left behind
him definitely all his former methods. He promises the drawings to be
printed in the text by the first week in January, and that they shall be
“good work, the best I have ever done.”</p>
<p>On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers,
urging on the production of the <i>Prospectus for Volpone</i>; and it is interesting
to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in line and
wash, in his aquatint style, of <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i>, was originally
intended for the <i>Volpone</i> and not for the set of the <i>Mademoiselle
de Maupin</i> in which it eventually appeared; but was cast out of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span>
<i>Volpone</i> by Beardsley as “it will be quite out of keeping with the rest
of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was clearly the method
he had intended to employ for his illustrations.</p>
<p>What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed
for the illustrations to <i>Volpone</i> only <i>The Lady and the Monkey</i> and the
<i>Initials</i> can hint to us—he was never to create them.</p>
<p>The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the
place, the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued
fellow; and again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depression
left him. He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold
or chill; indeed his only “grievance is mosquitoes.” He would weigh
himself anxiously, fearful of a set-back at every turn.</p>
<p class="gtb">******</p>
<p>Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career—a fact
that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley
has noticed—was the very brief period of the public interest in him.
Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound—with <i>The Yellow
Book</i>; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the
last number of <i>The Savoy</i> he had vanished from the public eye almost
as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings;
and his failure to keep the public interest with <i>The Savoy</i>, and
all its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie
in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire
whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what new
books he was producing. The <i>Book of Fifty Drawings</i> seemed to have
written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better cause
to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to continue
<i>The Savoy</i> in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span>Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture—it had all
ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the public
homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought
it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper cutting”
had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about
that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called <i>The Peacock</i>,
to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of <i>The Savoy</i>;
and had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s
flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the
name of <i>The Peacock</i> to <i>Books and Pictures</i>, which sounded commonplace
enough to make <i>The Peacock</i> appear quite good when otherwise
it seemed somewhat pointless.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f54">
<img src="images/fig54.jpg" alt="initial">
<p class="caption">INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”</p>
</div>
<p>Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly
in reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the editor
of his new magazine <i>The Peacock</i> and should design the cover and
whatever else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one unswerving
condition, and but one—that “it is quite <i>agreed that Oscar
Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously
or otherwise</i>.” The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s
detestation of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public
eye, is the more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the
Church of Rome with much publicity. Beardsley would not have
Wilde in any association with him at any price.... Before Beardsley
leaves the subject of <i>The Peacock</i> he undertakes to design “a
resplendent peacock in black and white” and reminds Smithers that
he has “already some fine wash drawings” of his from which he
can choose designs for the first number of the magazine. So that we at
least know that this first number of <i>The Peacock</i> was to have had a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span>
resplendent peacock in black and white for its cover, and that it was
to have been adorned with the superb decorations for <i>Mademoiselle de
Maupin</i>, the supreme artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent
skill. He outstripped in beauty of handling even his already exquisite
craftsmanship: and it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that
he was to die before he had given the world the further fulfilment
of his wondrous artistry—leaving us wondering as to what further
heights he might have scaled.</p>
<p>Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in
his “aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement.</p>
<p>We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers
was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off Bond
Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the <i>Mademoiselle
de Maupin</i>, at Beardsley’s request, which had been beautifully
reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley himself
realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a mark in
watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings.</p>
<p>But the gods had willed that it should not be.</p>
<p>Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to
the planning of his prospectuses—he watched over them with fatherly
anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part
he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was
art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture
of <i>The Peacock</i>, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon
which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals
in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers,
should not be produced “unless you have piles of stuff up your editorial
sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span>
his ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions
of the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for
the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns
of <i>The Yellow Book</i> and even <i>The Savoy</i>. “The thing,” he writes,
“must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas about
everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little backbone-less
babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical infinitely
more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory genius (especially
when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives in more
detail his mature attitude towards literature: “On the literary side,
impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness should
be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount. Let
verse be printed very sparingly.... I should advise you to let
Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together a staff.
Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something to say.”...
And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and antipathies
in art—“On the art side, I suggest that it should attack <i>untiringly
and unflinchingly</i> the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval
business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of
what picture making should be.”</p>
<p>There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed,
his limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of
eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn
confession of his artistic faith.</p>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c10">X</h2>
</div>
<p class="c large sp">THE END</p>
<p class="c large p1">1898</p>
<p><span class="smcap large">Yet</span> the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man
with relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.”
It kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine
again, and his hopes were reborn.</p>
<p>So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke,
with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.</p>
<p>In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were
raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse,
has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am,
& yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely
since I have known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the
cold north-east wind come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering
candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January
he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his
bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the
inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to
his bed—a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor
plagued fellow had lost heart—he felt the grave deepening and could
not summon the will any further to clamber out of it.</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f55">
<img src="images/fig55.jpg" alt="pierrot">
<p class="caption">THE DEATH OF PIERROT</p>
<p class="caption1">“<i>As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly
into the room, came the comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina,
who with much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of Bergamo;
whither, we know not.</i>”</p>
</div>
<p>The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was
soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his
designs and decorations for the <i>Volpone</i>, and remembering the pushing
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span>forward of the <i>Prospectus</i> that he had urged on the publisher, he
had fallen back on the pencil—as the elaborately drawn <i>Initial</i> letters
show—for each of the scenes in <i>Volpone</i>, employing pencil with
the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked
his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever
dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now
to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of <i>The Savoy</i> he had
come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and
flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they
were when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as
he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative
as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical
increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his
imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil,
and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere
and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the
sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or
white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his
skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the
fragile body failed him—at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his
bloodless fingers—his work was done.</p>
<p>As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before
he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from
the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard
Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power
to fulfil—even had he had the will—for “the written word remains,”
and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven:</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="c">Jesus is our Lord & Judge</p>
<p>Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad
drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is
holy—all obscene drawings.</p>
<p class="r">
Aubrey Beardsley.<br>
In my death agony.
</p>
</div>
<p>But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter repentance
of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting
theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing
the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such
claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern
facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote
he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous
achievement—and he did so without stooping to any attempt at palliation
or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth—and
the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to
base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might
have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as
he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were
they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes—indeed, almost
before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not
only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together
for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew
full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication
owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship.</p>
<p>On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years
and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked
body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span>
The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian
throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death,
together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to
the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was
music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road
that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like
the way of the Cross—it was long and steep and we walked.” They
laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock,
a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they
who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The
Lord.”</p>
<p class="c large sp">Hail and Farewell!</p>
<div class="figcenter" id="f56">
<img src="images/fig56.jpg" alt="vale">
<p class="caption">AVE ATQVE VALE</p>
</div>
<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="c11"><span class="less">A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY
ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE</span></h2>
</div>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="c">PUERILIA</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1888 he comes to town</p>
<p class="c p1">JUVENILIA</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement</p>
<p class="c p1 sp">FORMATIVE PERIOD—BURNE-JONESESQUES</p>
<p class="c">Mid-1891 to Mid-1892</p>
<p>During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three
initials A. V. B.</p>
<p class="c p1 sp">MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES</p>
<p class="c">The <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> and <i>Bon Mots</i></p>
<p>Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”—the <i>stunted</i>
mark.</p>
<p>In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending
of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of his signature.
He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in ill-shaped
“rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque mark,” even
sometimes when he does employ it.</p>
<p class="c p1 sp">“SALOME”</p>
<p>Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes
longer, more slender, and more graceful.</p>
<p class="c p1 sp">“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD</p>
<p>This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this
<i>Yellow Book</i> period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque mark”
for the last time.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span></p>
<p class="c p1 sp">THE GREAT PERIOD</p>
<p>
I. “<i>The Savoy</i>” and <span class="pad4">II. “<i>The Aquatintesques</i>”</span><br>
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 <span class="pad4">1897</span><br>
</p>
<p>From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, right up to the
end—the only difference being that in the last phase of the <i>Aquatintesque
line and wash</i> work with the few line drawings of this time, that is from
Mid-1896, he signs as a rule only the initials A. B. in plain block capitals,
but now usually <i>in a corner of his design</i>, either in or without a small square
label.</p></div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span></p>
<hr class="full">
<p class="c">
“AUBREY BEARDSLEY”<br>
HAS BEEN DESIGNED<br>
BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY<br>
AND PRINTED UNDER HIS<br>
SUPERVISION BY THE<br>
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS<br>
BINGHAMTON<br>
NEW YORK
</p>
<hr class="full">
<div class="transnote">
<p class="c">Transcriber’s Notes:</p>
<p>Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed.</p>
<p>Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.</p>
<p>Perceived typographical errors have been changed.</p>
</div>
<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75239 ***</div>
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