did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who
was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful nor attractive, but probably trying to find _something_ to praise, at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”--and so saying he dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care for his drawings--he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again--and he could never be induced to go.
Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused to go, and Vallance went alone--but that is another story. For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in the doing--one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for ever--desert the night-school at Westminster--burn his boats behind him--and launch on his destiny as an artist.
V
BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to twenty-one
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”
John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s _Le Morte d’Arthur_ to lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts--300 copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist.
Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent Beardsley’s _Hail Mary_, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one risen from the well-dressed dead--Aubrey Beardsley had happened in, according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s your man!”
To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to discover to be the well-known publisher.
So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.
Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his “_Morte d’Arthur_,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the work.
Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of any consequence--he was utterly unknown--and his superb master-work that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a trifle old for studentship--he was twenty before he made a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind--of what was expected of him.
At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.
Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott tradition, took the drawing to Dent--the elaborate and now famous Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as _The Achieving of the San Grael_, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the _Morte d’Arthur_.
Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; _and the design is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”_ It is his first use of the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark” is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for three candles and three flames--a baser explanation was given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all that Beardsley did.
Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the _Morte d’Arthur_, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter, in the June of 1893--the second volume in 1894.
So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind.
* * * * *
Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him.
One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to reach his full powers in making them.
Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his debt to Greece through Anning Bell.
We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_.
Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_ for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the more a marvel--almost a miracle.
It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that art.
Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only sketch he made for the completed design--when the pen and ink had next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber. The well-known pencil sketch of _A Girl_ owned by Mr. Evans shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough rhythm of his scrawls.
A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight; as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to recognition.
Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs--than from any record by eyewitnesses--that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study--that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a whole--that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design--and then inked in the pen-line and masses.
Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”
Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on which stood two tall tapering candlesticks--the candlesticks without which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose whereon to lean for reputation.
* * * * *
His rapid increase of power--and one now begins to understand Vallance’s enthusiasm--induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let him have a printed proof from the _Morte d’Arthur_ of _The Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur_ to show to Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris.
Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an angry remonstrance to Dent.
How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_ were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the music die in him unsung.
William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival him in his “mediæval fake”--find himself--and give to the world in _The Savoy_ a series of decorations that have made his name immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an elaborate boredom.
* * * * *
Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s _Shaving of Shagpat_--a desire to which he returned and on which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.
However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely--here he could use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy _Morte d’Arthur_ convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque vein for _Bon Mots_, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him.
* * * * *
Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every hand his life long.
The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of _The Art Journal_, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together--and in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis Hind--and _The Studio_, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset--Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair as _his_ best asset.
So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced” pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in the style of Phil May--a pallid silent young man, but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful--with the inevitable black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for _Le Morte_ _d’Arthur_, the _Siegfried Act II_, the _Birthday of Madame Cigale_--_Les Revenants de Musique_--“Some _Salome_ drawings”--with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for the _Morte d’Arthur_. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the _Salome_ drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of _The Studio_ published three months later. Wilde’s _Salome_ did not see print until February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.
However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, _The Studio_, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to _The Studio_ offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.
Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley abroad--and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and was launching a new monthly to be called _The Pall Mall Magazine_. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, asked Hind to become editor of the weekly _Budget_ at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command of _The Studio_ in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the _Pall Mall Budget_, for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind.
So the first number of _The Studio_ was to appear in the April of 1893 glorifying a wonderful youth--his name Aubrey Beardsley!
* * * * *
It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive--and they forgave Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts men.
On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover design for _The Studio_ from the much gratified youth, who went home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire--here was _réclame_! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in the first number of _The Studio_ after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in his several styles--the Japanesque, and the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many--he gave it just and fair and full value.
All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness to the first number of _The Studio_ in bringing him before the public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did contain very remarkable work--at the same time it was scarcely world-shattering--and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art--and all of us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction won through--and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down and died.
The first number of _The Studio_ did not appear until the April of 1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around _The Studio_ that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. _The Studio_ itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world--and a very narrow inner circle at that--where _The Studio_ caused any talk, and Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a somewhat dinted toy--we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so--he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at the New Year had gone from _The Studio_ offices to edit the _Pall Mall Budget_, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the most wretched drawings imaginable--drawings without one redeeming shred of value--work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that were decorating the _Morte d’Arthur_, which however the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for _Morte d’Arthur_ were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in the _Pall Mall Budget_. The first volume of _Bon Mots_ appeared in the April of 1893--the _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_ volume--although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was pretty poor stuff.
* * * * *
Now, though the _Morte d’Arthur_ was in large part done before _The Studio_ eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in _The Studio_ article. There are examples from the _Morte d’Arthur_, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Mantegna called _The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans_ was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year gone by when he made it--so far had he now advanced beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly _Morte d’Arthur_ decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The _Siegfried Act II_ of mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry--it is his typically early or “hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The _Birthday of Madame_ _Cigale_ and _Les Revenants de Musique_ show the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to _Le Debris d’un Poète_ and _La Femme Incomprise_. But there was also a Japanesque in _The Studio_ which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893 in French the play called _Salome_ by Oscar Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in _The Studio_ which was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the destined illustrator of the English _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that _Salome_ was to be a marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley.
It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of _The Studio_, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy design of this _Salome_ drawing to the more severe and restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed.
Note also another fact: The title of the article published in _The Studio_ first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his work--the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pencil drawing of _Sandro Botticelli_ made in 1893 about the time that _The_ _Studio_ was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the year before.
Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is dead--and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.
* * * * *
By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done with the _Morte d’Arthur_; and it was only by the incessant prayers and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping himself in study of phallic worship--and when all’s said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early.
It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the decorations he wanted for the _Morte d’Arthur_ in the young fellow’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end of the year of 1892, to which half year the _Morte d’Arthur_ almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as search the book that the _Morte d’Arthur_ was never completed--we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once--but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration.
There appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for June 1893, drawn in April 1893, as the first _Studio_ number was appearing, a design known as _The Neophyte_, or to give its full affected name, “_Of a Neophyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel_”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called _The Kiss of Judas_--both drawings reveal an unmistakable change in handling, and the _Neophyte_ a remarkable firmness of andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the _Morte d’Arthur_ and kindred works in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through it--it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities.
It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious to the lay mind a little further on.
It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s _Morte d’Arthur_ phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it for months--indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy line” called _The Questing Beast_ is dated by Beardsley himself “March 8, 1893”--as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time the _Morte d’Arthur_ began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.
The two cover-designs for _The Studio No. I_ in April 1893 were obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the _Morte d’Arthur_--in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the _Morte d’Arthur_ drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.
There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the _Morte d’Arthur_ on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with:
There was a young man with a salary Who had to do drawings for Malory; When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”
As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty, faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. And as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a Japanesque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be outdone in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque mark” of the three candles, with three flames--in the more elaborate later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke--or as Beardsley himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light that he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether the “Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to employ the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from _The Yellow Book_--his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years--we shall find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition to his name. So it is well to dwell upon it here.
The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 1892 to mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped, and he employed it indifferently and incongruously on any type of his designs whether _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism or the Japanesque grotesques of his _Bon Mots_. And we have seen that it was in the middle of his twentieth year--he last used it in fact in the February of 1893--that he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his initials and signature. He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative years. He signs henceforth as A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as Aubrey B.
In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon his _Salome_ designs, as weary of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques as of the _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate--the V quite departed from his signature.
I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as he called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it!
From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at twenty-one except to a small artistic circle. The _Bon Mots_ grotesques, mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_, in the April of 1893; the second volume at the year’s end, _Lamb and Douglas Jerrold_, in December 1893; and the third, the last volume, _Foote and Hooke_, in the February of 1894. The _Morte d’Arthur_ began to be published in parts in June 1893. The feverish creation of the mediæval designs in the late part of 1892 alongside of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his weariness--by mid-1893 he was finding the _Morte d’Arthur_ “very long-winded.” And what chilled him most, he found the public indifferent to both--yet Beardsley knew full well that his whole interest lay in publicity.
It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. This is a larger question and a serious question--but it _is_ a question. It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to that. But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism of the _Morte d’Arthur_, by that time he came near to the end of the book he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created for it; so also his next development was as rapid, and by the time he is at the end of his new Japanese phase in _Salome_ we shall see him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style that he grew weary of the _Salome_ before he completed it, and threw in a couple of illustrations as makeweight which are utterly alien to the work and disfigure it. And yet these two drawings were made immediately after working upon this _Salome_, and were thrown in only out of a certain sense of resentment owing to the suppression of two designs not deemed to be circumspect enough. But Beardsley did not refuse to make new drawings in key with the rest--he had simply advanced to a new style quite alien to _Salome_, and he found he could not go back. This will be clearer when we come to the _Salome_.
So precisely with the _Morte d’Arthur_; even the last decorations he made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in _The Yellow Book_.
* * * * *
Before we leave the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the difficulties with Beardsley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors are often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps to the ladder of Fame--and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M. Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with his song wholly unsung--there would have been for him no _Studio_ “réclame,” no _Yellow Book_, no _Salome_, no _Savoy_. Dent, employing with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal _Morte d’Arthur_ which is a triumph for English bookmaking--he gave us the supreme edition that can never be surpassed by mortal hands--he did so in a form within the reach of the ordinary man--and in the doing he made the much vaunted work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear second-rate, mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires.
VI
THE JAPANESQUES
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-One
“SALOME”
Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the edge of manhood.
We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque _Caricature of Whistler_ on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time.
Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of the early part of 1893--at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the _Salome_ founded frankly upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of Whistler have been delayed for two years?
But--as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this time revealed to the seeing eye--it was now to the work of the better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on.
* * * * *
It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to publish the _Morte d’Arthur_ in parts in the June of 1893, as it had called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition of Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The young fellow leaped at it--not only as giving him scope for fantastic designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley had made--either on reading the French edition, or on reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in the February of 1893--illustrating the lines that raised so hot a controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the birth of _The Studio_ in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.
Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for _Salome_.
Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day--they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on producing _belles lettres_ in an attractive and picturesque form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack publishers.
On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather on trust--the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Bon Mots_ were far from what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that Beardsley was but little known.
It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar Wilde--but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King Herod--but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the _Morte d’Arthur_, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play--and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power.
It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have been hard put to it to explain--it was a sort of philistine literary or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line is perhaps more obvious in the _Salome_ drawings than in the _Savoy_, since the _Salome_ designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are even so-called critics to be found who place the _Salome_ drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!
Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the _Salome_ drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional--grave or gay. But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor when he completed, the _Salome_, wherein his line is yet hesitant, thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the _Salome_ against the genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In _Salome_ he got all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in _The Stomach Dance_, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the _Salome_ he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the _Salome_ designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness--the groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective--all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the _Morte d’Arthur_, and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand--neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of _Salome_ he had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of _Salome_ he had found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite _Burial of Salome_ in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was.
_Salome_ finished, however, was not _Salome_ published. Elkin Mathews and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be “difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum--however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the _Title Page_, and _Enter Herodias_ were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, _The Stomach Dance_ appeared without change--was accepted without demur by the public and in silence by the censorious--indeed the lasciviousness of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the _Toilette of Salome_, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very second-rate design of _John and Salome_, and in place of the two had been inserted the wretched _Black Cape_ and Georgian _Toilette_ which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and cheap conceit--for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any case, the mediocre _Black Cape_ and the better Georgian _Toilette_, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.
The interpolated _Black Cape_ and the _Second Toilette_ we may here dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they are wholly outside the _Salome_ atmosphere. Of the pure _Salome_ designs, incomparably the finest are _The Stomach Dance_ and the _Peacock Skirt_. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he considered the best drawings to be _The Man in the Moon_, the _Peacock Skirt_, and _The Dancer’s Reward_--it should be noted by the way that Beardsley showed by his _Book of Fifty Drawings_ that his title was _The Man in the Moon_ not as the publishers have it, _The Woman in the Moon_. But it is in _The Climax_, one of the less noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride--for though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, drawn but a year before and shown in _The Studio_ first number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.
We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage?
Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts--or rather contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the _Salome_ drawings for instance have appeared in the _Morte d’Arthur_? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high achievement would have suffered--and Death was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure? Of the 544 or so decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_, several are repeated--some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for the _Morte d’Arthur_, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay his pound of flesh....
Even before Beardsley was done with _Salome_, he had exhausted the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has to evolve a _Title-page_, a _List of Contents_, and a _Finis_; and we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of _Salome_, weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his _Morte d’Arthur_ designs again, he was about to burst into a new song as hinted at by the last three designs for _Salome_. An artist is finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.
About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,” which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a new venture about to appear. For _The Yellow Book_ is the only contract that emerges out of this time.
It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they took their scheme to John Lane.
Whilst at work on the _Salome_, Beardsley began the long series of decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as _The Keynote Series_ of novels, published on the heels of the wide success of _Keynotes_ by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.
And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art Club.
Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their little home--a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.
VII
THE GREEK VASE PHASE
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds today!
Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London. Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play the host--and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his “tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.
Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her dressing-table known as _La Dame aux Camélias_. The couch in his studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much of his all too short life lying upon it.
* * * * *
When Beardsley began the _Salome_ drawings at twenty-one he was, as we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work upon the _Salome_ designs he was much at the British Museum and was intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in their line and mass fascinate Beardsley--not only was he struck by the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified” by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris, appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his _Salome_ drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.
* * * * *
On the 15th of April 1894 appeared _The Yellow Book_. It made Beardsley notorious.
In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl with the 3rd, the last, volume of _Bon Mots_; and _Morte d’Arthur_ was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that _Salome_ made Beardsley famous. _Salome_ was an expensive book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Salome_ passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But _Salome_ did lead to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye.
Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of _The Yellow Book_ developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes--to answer in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have fired a publisher. _The Yellow Book_ quarterly, however, was a very different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth Club, founded the much discussed _Yellow Book_.” This quarterly, to be called _The Yellow Book_ after the conventional name of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each number--not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the one on the other.
Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the _Salome_, as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of 1894, the _Salome_ off his hands, that _The Yellow Book_ was planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the _Salome_ into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime flung aside the _Morte d’Arthur_ Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it--through books--and he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done--employing line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the _Morte d’Arthur_ now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world--he took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else--but we are coming to that.
It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German, Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic weekly, _Pick-Me-Up_, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the _Graphic_ and _Illustrated London News_.” Struck by some article attacking the art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called _St. Paul’s_. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac--(remember, _St. Paul’s_ was to begin as a monthly!)--and to illustrate the subjects to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “_Man that holds the Water_ _Pot_” and the “_Music_,” but the paper did not appear in January--indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably meant for Dent’s _Bon Mots_--however they may have been intended for _The Fashions_ and _The Drama_ pages of _St. Paul’s_. He made in all four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I “might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value, however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of 1894--they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked increase of power over line--they end his _Salome_ Japanesque phase.
It is somewhat curious that, whilst _The Man that holds the Water Pot_ is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the fourth drawing he made for _St. Paul’s_ seems to have been missed by all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of it!
Before we leave _St. Paul’s_, it is interesting to note that at this time the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for _St. Paul’s_ and other papers.
It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the _Poster for the Avenue Theatre_ which really brought him before a London public more than anything he had so far done--a success, be it confessed, more due to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the Avenue Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which could not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. Needless to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw was to float into the public ken with his play of _Arms and the Man_ at this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house that from its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross Bridge, it was cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost Seagulls.” I shall always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster with Shaw’s rise to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being called before the curtain at the end of _Arms and the Man_, some man amongst the gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s ready Irish wit brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the darkness, his lank loose figure waited patiently until complete silence had fallen on the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I agree with that gentleman in the gallery, but”--shrugging his shoulders--“what are we amongst so many?”
Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s _Plays_ appeared about the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of a wide public.
* * * * *
Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.
It was the publication of _The Yellow Book_ in the mid-April of 1894 that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow circle so far interested in him.
London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, or at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room was sprinkled with the latest books--the well-to-do bought pictures and wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves on their literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London white in a night, so _The Yellow Book_ littered the London drawing-rooms with gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand. It “caught on.” And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the crest of its wave of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. After all, everything that was outstanding and remarkable about the book was Beardsley. _The Yellow Book_ was soon the talk of the town, and Beardsley “awoke to find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured his work; and soon he was himself caricatured by “Max” in the _Pall Mall Budget_; whilst the Oxford undergraduates were playing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like. But it was left to Mostyn Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque on any poem in our tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus:
’Twas rollog; and the minim potes Did mime and mimble in the cafe; All footly were the Philerotes And Daycadongs outstrafe....
Beware the Yellow Bock, my son! The aims that rile, the art that racks, Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun The stumious Beerbomax!
* * * * *
Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod, The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue, Came piffling through the Headley Bod, And flippered as it flew....
As one turns over the pages of _The Yellow Book_ today, it is a little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’s passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But it _was_ a sensation. And that sensation flung wide the doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He enjoyed his fame with gusto. He revelled in it. And the ineffable and offensive conceit that it engendered in the lad was very excusable and understandable. He was lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere and enjoyed every ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good fortune that his fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours, was enhanced by an increase of health and strength that promised recovery from the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and waking. His musical childhood had taught him the value of publicity early--the whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means and at every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes he even felt a little ashamed of it--and of his Jackals. But his vogue now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody--and he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained.
It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even at the publishing of the second volume of _The Yellow Book_ in July there was that which happened--had he had prophetic vision--that boded no good for the young fellow.
The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane fell in, and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane in sole possession of The Bodley Head--and _The Yellow Book_.
The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a twelvemonth was out.
It was on the designs of this second volume of _The Yellow Book_ of July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; for, in the _Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf Club_ on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given place to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.”
Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had no need to work--were above work. He liked to pose as one who did not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly appeared, he won an increase of notoriety--or obloquy, which was much the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that scared him--and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip. Meanwhile the Christmas number of _Today_ produced his very fine night-piece _Les Passades_.
Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue--as playwright and wit and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the _Salome_, with its erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites to go over to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship, and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified his condescension to that end--but the gross patronage of Wilde on the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an intimate--he never again sought to bask in the radiance.
To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a novel called _The Green Carnation_ of which Wilde and his associates were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination. The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He sprang at opportunity--and struck hard. With the reckless courage so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he struck--and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at a state of elegant decay.
Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which brought Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde but to bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social pariah. On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and charged at Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial; and on the 3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April amidst the wild enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested the same evening.
On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow Street with a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch during the fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde and Taylor were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, on the 26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. After a case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed and the prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again refused. A week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail for £5,000; and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor was put on trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May the 20th, and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed. The following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began at the Old Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” and with Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour.
The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. The fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of mark with like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general scare set in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but it also caused a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a short while before been in truculent vogue....
John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume III of _The Yellow Book_ in October 1894 and volume IV in the January of 1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number, volume V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number bound, when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook society. The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend of Oscar Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the writers of _The Yellow Book_; but whatever the cause, John Lane who was in America was suddenly faced with an ultimatum--it was said that one of his chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened that without further ado either he or Beardsley must leave _The Yellow Book_ at once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not alone but had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her vogue, with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits of the storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John Lane in his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet was a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, and anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. It may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship was solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a most unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts of moral cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley _The Yellow Book_ was doomed--it at once declined, and though it struggled on, it went to annihilation and foundered.
This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself.
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ was very bitterly resented by Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must be confessed that _The Yellow Book_ at once became a stale farce played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter--_Hamlet_ being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking, Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ placed Beardsley in a very awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings for _The Yellow Book_ must have been but small at best; and it is a mystery how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been dangerously staunched by his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_.
The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for