Volume Five, and the _Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47_ of _The Studio_,
all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the double-page _Juvenal_ of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair, he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change, as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that followed Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_; for, being commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for _An Evil Motherhood_, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected _Black Cape_, of the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only under the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley made the now famous design of the _Evil Motherhood_ in which he entirely breaks from _The Yellow Book_ convention and craftsmanship, and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.
It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s _Posters_ for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a mediocre poster for _The Pseudonym Library_, a woman in a street opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest _Poster_ he ever designed--a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in black and purple, for _Christmas Books_--all three of _The Yellow Book_ phase.
* * * * *
There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s life--an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by.
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”--which was not at all typical of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.
Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him, cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply; and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of _St. Paul’s_; and the editor, Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:
114 Cambridge Street S. W. June 28th
SIR, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.”
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
Yours &c Aubrey Beardsley
This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be published--that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in seeking self-advertisement--but I was the last man in the world to allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with “Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply at the same time, as follows:
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.
SIR,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath--a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours truly Hal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to advertisement--the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt--before giving out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “masterpiece”--on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine to lash _at him_ but at Harry Quilter--at the same time perhaps he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of bitter regret was at hand.
* * * * *
Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_ in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was essentially “in the small.”
For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, John Lane whilst in America during the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his _Lady Gold’s Escort_ and his _Wagnerites_.... The decadent fad can’t long stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant wonder that the _Daily Chronicle_ asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offended Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but who still more resented this desire to show him as being really “quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested, not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist--he was none. A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”
* * * * *
At a loose end, on his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling _Venus and Tannhäuser_--it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as _Under the Hill_--a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings for _The Yellow Book_, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art.
The smallness of the page of _The Yellow Book_ had galled him by compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him; it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid as though he knew he had but a short way to go.
_Baron Verdigris_ was the transition from the _Morte d’Arthur_ phase to the _Yellow Book_ or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as _The Fat Woman_ was the transition from his Greek vase stage; _Black Coffee_ the end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of _The Yellow Book_ page and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own.
He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street, with his sister, when expelled from _The Yellow Book_. It was about this time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent movement and became a Roman Catholic priest--the friendship soon became more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was to have a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published Beardsley’s letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and were soon very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this time. Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,” from which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was from the first bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes and artistic temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, soon we find Gray priming the young fellow with arguments to refute his “Anglican” friends.
* * * * *
The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with _The Yellow Book_, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at 114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.
He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.
And _The Yellow Book_ went on without him, to die a long lingering ignoble death.
* * * * *
Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of 1895--and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original art of astounding power. It was the proof of the _Venus between Terminal Gods_. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite _Mirror of Love_, wrought just before the _Venus between Terminal Gods_. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.
VIII
THE GREAT PERIOD
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four
“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES
1. “THE SAVOY”
It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show sympathy, far less to help.
But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For, at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday, Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny--a man who proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work. Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung.
Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley lying on a couch--“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.” Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to _The Yellow Book_ which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons. A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art. The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and in their keen interest in the erotic emotions--Arthur Symons had not hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet of a Night.”
Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of _The Savoy_ for the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable his work to be produced on a larger scale.
The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and he was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement. What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of his art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of his publisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work whatsoever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made him a free man.
The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age--these drawings, clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly _Venus between Terminal Gods_, designed for his novel of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, better known as _Under the Hill_, and the exquisite _Mirror of Love_, or as it was also called _Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of a Mirror_. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm, orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom.
The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his daring _coup_ with Burton’s unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_, which was to be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday morning--returned to town with the scrip--and spent the rest of the evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for--it is gossiped--some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning correspondence. It had been touch and go.
Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith to usurp _The Yellow Book_. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more--or at any rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an “exaggeration” to his own advantage--Beardsley’s bank-books alone can verify or refute it--he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill. He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers was the most loyal and devoted friend he had.
A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, _M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at Walton-on-Naze....”
You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a good friend as well as a publisher.”
Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public. There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.
* * * * *
Disgusted with _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley put his immediate past and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again begun to dog his steps.
Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with _The Savoy_ due to appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th century, and at once his art burst into full song.
Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered Beardsley immersed in his work for _The Savoy_; but finds him now more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard at work upon his obscene novel _Venus and Tannhäuser_, the so-called _Under the Hill_, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and scribbling phrases as they came to him.
The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of the Prudential.”
It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city and scholastic circles.
_Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.
As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing--better uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” “reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”--what Tree used wittily to call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publication is impossible.
This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that vex the age--he is concerned solely with his health or some business of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling fellows, not a sign!
It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that others published.
In _Under the Hill_ Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul, so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé--it sounded more real to him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley--a hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament--it explains his art, his life, his vision--and it proves the cant of all who try to excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it.
The story of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, bowdlerised as _Under the Hill_--by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for even Beardsley feared to _write_ the Mons Veneris,--he seemed undecided as to which to call it--the story was without consequence, without cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe. He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one was there--to flit awhile into the room where the children danced--the sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes. He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a phrase--he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of _The Three Musicians_ with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies, as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the _translation from Catullus_. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional act--he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings--it was a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were obsolete, a dead language--he is more concerned with dead words than with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot make it alive even for himself--he cannot fulfil a character in it or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street of fine clothes--there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He is not greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly concerned with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this akin to Oscar Wilde.
* * * * *
It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the picture he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to Beardsley’s infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see the author of one of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, _La Dame aux Camélias_--Alexandre Dumas, fils.
Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm.
Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be “unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all except in the atmosphere of its workshop.
He was now working keenly at _The Savoy_ drawings and the illustrations for his bowdlerised _Under the Hill_, to be produced serially in that magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed, in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for _The Yellow Book_, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for _The Savoy_, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for December, _The Savoy_ eventually had to be put off until the New Year; meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the famous sequence of masterpieces for _The Rape of the Lock_, announced for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March.
In January 1896 _The Savoy_ appeared, and made a sensation in the art world only to be compared with the public sensation of _The Yellow Book_. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like beauty of the superb Title Page--the two black-masked figures in white before a dressing table--the deft witty verses of the naughty _Three Musicians_, the _Bathers on Dieppe Beach_, the three sumptuously rich designs of _The Abbé_, the _Toilet of Helen_, and _The Fruit-bearers_ for the novel _Under the Hill_ which began in this number, capped by the stately _Christmas Card_ of _The Madonna and Child_ lifted the new magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.
The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest, with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his _Morte d’Arthur_ experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to _The Rape of the Lock_--masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, _The New Star_--with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of _The Dream_, the exquisite _Billet-Doux_, the _Toilet_, the _Baron’s Prayer_, and the magnificent _Rape of the Lock_ and _Battle of the Beaux and Belles_.
The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces--we find silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the two drawings of _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Battle of the Beaux and Belles_ it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of the thing.
* * * * *
By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his state--he was about to learn the dread verdict.
The second number of _The Savoy_ appeared in April, as a quarterly, and its charming cover-design of _Choosing the New Hat_ screened a sad falling off in the output of the stricken man--for the number contained but the _Footnote portrait of himself_; the _Third Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ which he had probably already done before going to Brussels; a scene from _The Rape of the Lock_; and but one illustration to _Under the Hill_, the _Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima_; whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II--in all but four new drawings!
Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next--the third--number of The Savoy to appear in July, _the driving of Cupid from the Garden_, and worked upon the poem of the _Ballad of a Barber_, making the wonderful line drawing for it called _The Coiffing_, with a silhouette _cul-de-lampe_ of _Cupid with the gallows_; but his body was rapidly breaking down.
On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change, wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that “_Note_” for the July _Savoy, No. 3_, announcing the end of _Under the Hill_--Beardsley has made his first surrender.
So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition to alien peoples--it was London that found him, London that raised him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual home with him--clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture and to his books and the inspiration of his genius--the engravings after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was never happy at his work.
By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_ as a Christmas Book--for which presumably was the fine _Ali Baba in the Wood_. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his “entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he bends all his powers on illustrating _Lysistrata_! and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings for the _Lysistrata_ as would have made any man’s reputation--but alas! masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately. However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe, and the plagued man had to prepare for another move--it is a miracle that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately the world at large can never look upon--the _Lysistrata_. It is almost unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for publication--that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order--they utter the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion--their very mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself full well that the work was masterwork--“I have just completed a set of illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the _Lysistrata_ should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that Beardsley reached the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes through the French translation of Maurice Donnay--he was so anxious to assert that the purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The _Lysistrata_ finished, he turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the _Sixth Satire of Juvenal_.
But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the mischief.” Beardsley found relief--in the _Juvenal_ drawings! “I am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.
With the July number, _No. 3_, _The Savoy_ became a monthly magazine; and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the _Lysistrata_ sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August _Savoy, No. 4_--but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze curtain, in the same month that he drew the _Lysistrata_ sequence, and that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world a hint of what it lost.
August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the _September Savoy, No. 5_, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of _The Woman in White_ which he had made from the _Bon Mots_ line drawing long before--there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white.
It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the issues of _The Savoy_ so as to prevent a sense of monotony--we shall see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature. Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at least one. The full signatures on the _Death of Pierrot_ and the _Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings_ are the last signatures in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are about to see.
Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of the bleeding from the lungs--a train journey always upset him. He had to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.”
The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic _Death of Pierrot_ that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design, so the powerful _Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ had to be used as a cover for the October _Savoy No. 5_. The _Death of Pierrot_ is wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual literary beauty of its written legend.
September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s winter.
It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the first offices of _The Savoy_ at Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already done, and their publication in an _Album of Fifty Drawings_, to appear in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the _Death of Pierrot_. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the _Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings_. The fifty drawings were collected and chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September, the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive _Bookplate of the Artist_ for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm, however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.
The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful _Cover for the November Savoy, No. 7_, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing _Ave atque Vale_ or “Hail and Farewell” for the _Carmen C I of Catullus_, whilst the third illustration for the November _Savoy_, the small _Tristan and Isolde_, shows his interest maintained in the musical sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October, Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s _Das Rheingold_, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of _Tannhäuser returning to the Horselberg_, was trying to induce Beardsley at this time to illustrate the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ for him. The month of October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am quite paralysed with fear,” he cries--“I have told no one of it. It’s so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to start on her American theatrical tour.
November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the achievement of this great period of his art--he writes that he has just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of Ernest Dowson’s, _The Pierrot of the Minute_” which was published in the following year of 1897--a grim irony that a boredom should have brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work, he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to avail anything.”
There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one design in particular of the several good designs in the _Pierrot of the Minute_, that “_cul-de-lampe_” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework--a tragic comment on the wonderful _Headpiece_ when Pierrot holds up the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of human hands.
It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the appearance of his own _Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line_, “an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some reason difficult to plumb--it is neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this time for the _Book of Fifty Drawings_. It is a pathetically tragic thought that the November of the exquisite _Pierrot of the Minute_ was for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”
It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published prints for the cover and the title-page of _Evelina_--of his “own early designing.”
The _Savoy_ for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.
It was soon clear that the days of _The Savoy_ were numbered and the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful _A Répétition of Tristan and Isolde_--and he flung into the number all the drawings he now made or had made for _Das Rheingold_, which included the marvellously decorative _Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold_, that “sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the unimportant fragments _Flosshilde_ and _Erda_ and _Alberich_, which he, as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of musicians, the _Mendelssohn_ and the _Weber_; he somewhat fumbles with his _Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar_ from that _Don Juan_ of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the _Mrs. Margery Pinchwife_ from Wycherley’s _Country Wife_; he very sadly disappoints us with his _Count Valmont_ from Laclos’ _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out such high hopes; and he ends with _Et in Arcadia Ego_.
It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for _The Savoy_ that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces that _The Savoy_ is in future to be half-yearly and a much higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.
Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the appearance of _The Book of Fifty Drawings_ which he had completed in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design--an afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.
The December _Savoy_, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ by Laclos, and Stendhal’s _Adolphe_....
On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing himself for _The Idler_”--the interview that appeared in that magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.
About Christmas his edition of _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ was taking shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the 170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to each of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s enthusiasm. At this Yuletide appeared _The Book of Fifty Drawings_, in which for the first time were seen the _Ali Baba in the Wood_, the _Bookplate of the Artist_, and the _Atalanta in Calydon_ with the hound. This book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own estimate of his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty best drawings; it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did not always know what was his best work. It is interesting to note that Beardsley includes the mediocre and commonplace _Merlin_ in a circle, yet omits some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting in that Beardsley not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his early work, but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant that he would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it, certain definite drawings--he particularly forbade anything from the _Scrap Book_ then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected Ross’s malicious thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to exchange good, and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces and inadequacies. And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my presence solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley was dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the temptation until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous betrayal. However that was not as yet.... Evidently, though the fifty drawings were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed one October drawing for something thrown out, for the October _Ave atque Vale_ appears; and it may be that the _Atalanta in Calydon with the hound_, sometimes called _Diana_, and the Beardsley _Bookplate_ together with the _Self-portrait silhouette_ that makes the Finis to the Iconography, may have been done as late, and replaced other drawings. Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to the man who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very beginning--Joseph Pennell. It was the least he could do.
December had begun with more hope for Beardsley--his lung gave him little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than anything else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he felt he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would be “abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.” And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he was becoming quite hopeful again when--taking a walk about New Year’s Eve he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a dreadful state” before he could get any help. And he began the New Year with the bitter cry: “So it all begins over again. It’s so disheartening.” He had “collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to take him to some more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved.
* * * * *
So ended the great _Savoy_ period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated to the span of twelve moons.
IX
THE GREAT PERIOD
ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE
1897 to the End--Twenty-Five
II. THE AQUATINTESQUES
So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley was now twenty-four and a half years of age--the great _Savoy_ achievement at an end.
The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897 came in amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of carrying on _The Savoy_ had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition was so serious at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier View to a house called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where the change seemed to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He was very funny about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little from the name of this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he writes whimsically. He began to find so much relief at Muriel, notwithstanding, that he was soon planning to have rooms in London again--at Manchester Street.
By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was “sketching out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with Boussod Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his _Frontispiece_ for Theophile Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, for which he was now making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style of the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done--scant wonder that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after reproduce his works!--he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous _Bookplate for Miss Custance_, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, and he also designed the _Arbuscula_ for Gaston Vuillier’s _History of Dancing_. For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in Beardsley’s keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by death one of the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they hold, the subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that suffuses them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering display of Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he should have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man.
Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding had almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully, and made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two afterwards he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sunshine makes the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire and dreads to go out. “At present my mind is divided between the fear of getting too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough sunshine, or rather warmth near home.” But the doctors had evidently said more to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided now and in future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of February saw his doctor take him out to a concert--a great joy to the stricken man--and no harm done.
In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to draw. He also started a short story _The Celestial Lover_, for which he was making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March turned cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed a serious lip over his promise to let him go up to town--to Beardsley’s bitter disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South--if only even to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in his room were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months now.” Yet a day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in all directions are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with cold winds, and bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted fellow amongst the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made pair of boots.... I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved bitterness.” The move to London for the South was at last decided upon, for the first week in April--to the South of France by easy stages. He knew now that he could never be cured, but he hoped that the ravages of the disease could be prevented from becoming rapid.
On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even more eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought to have the right to beg for a few months more of life--“Don’t think me foolish to haggle about a few months”--as he has two or three pictured short stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, Wednesday the 31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church--on the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the Sacrament which had to be brought to him, to his great grief, since he could not go to the Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.”
There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art from his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual upheaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been drawing the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, or indeed steeping in that novel at all, or drawing the _Arbuscula_. For months he has been led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church; yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on _Under the Hill!_ and drawn the designs for _Lysistrata_ and the _Juvenal!_ not five months since he has drawn his _Bookplate!_ And by the grim irony of circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that there appeared in _The Idler_ his confession: “To my mind there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have the sun shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March _Idler_ by Lawrence, one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the framework and then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in the details, was as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend John Gray, written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just departing. That interview will therefore remain always as an important evidence by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It is true that he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having despatched it, was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I have not said too many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute to the complexity of the human soul that the correspondence with the poet-priest John Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are hidden from us, was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to Rome, he was lending him books and interesting him in books, side by side with lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their fellowship with the saints.
Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a week after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, staying a day or two at the Windsor Hotel--a happy halt for Beardsley as his friend John Gray was there to meet him--and crossed to France, where on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel Voltaire, quai Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted mother. Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. He loved to be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in May he was reading _The Hundred and One Nights_ for the first time, and inspired by it, drew his famous _Cover for Ali Baba_, a masterpiece of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure resplendent with gems--as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous design.”
Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the prospect of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sunshine. He felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he was soon able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again--perhaps it had been better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to the sun. There was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beardsley’s return from America and their early meeting. He could now write from a café: “I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though he could not get a sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove which, being shut off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a sitting-room and thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room--he could forget he was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a lift, the waiters would carry him up stairs--he could not risk the climbing. And the bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal joy to him.
With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his new religion; reads works of piety, and--goes on his way poring over naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out of his room awhile--talks even of getting strong again quite soon.
But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of his room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the following day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him. A month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised; and Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its picturesqueness--indeed St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to inspire him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the air was to make a new man of him.
The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had secured him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celebrities. And the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St. Germain, upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cautioned care.
Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye, where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch by assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet--if he went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth and the South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St. Germain. However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a walk in the forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s creaking body. The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of the lungs started again and made him wretched. The arrival of his sister, however, was a delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his delicious waggery that she showed only occasional touches of “an accent which I am sure she has only acquired since she left America.” His health at once improved with his better spirits.
Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living genius of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s _Evan Harrington_; it was about the time that the _Mercure_ published in French the _Essay on Comedy_ which started widespread interest in the works of Meredith.
By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; “everyone in the hotel notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sitting out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the means forbade.
Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high hopes, Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence he wrote of his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in the rue Halle au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that he was out and about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz Thaulow’s family welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of his improved health, it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best of all blessings, he was now able to work. It was in this August that he met Vincent O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty-fifth birthday. Before the month was half through he was fretting to be back in Paris for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He found this Hotel rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more sheltered lodgings in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado, hoping that Dieppe might still know a gentle September. Though the weather remained wet and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to Paris. His London doctor came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered him vastly with hopes of a complete recovery if he took care of himself, and advised Paris for the early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was for Paris, turned his back on Dieppe with a pang--he left many friends. However, late September saw him making for Paris with unfeigned joy, and settling in rooms at the Hotel Foyot in the rue Tournon near the Luxembourg Gardens.
His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again from a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doctor considered him curable still; he might have not only several years of life before him “but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching heat of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was--reading the _Memoirs of Casanova!_ But he had grown cautious; found that seeing many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and inspiring book.” But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake solemn heads--all the talk was henceforth of the South of France. “Every fresh person one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh objections to the places we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger late in Paris; but what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put aside on account of its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of it show it horribly “Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cœur sent him a bottle of water from Lourdes. “Yet all the same I get dreadfully nervous, & stupidly worried about little things.” However, the doctors sternly forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly, with fogs; and Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November saw his mother taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in the rooms at the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his last place of flitting.
Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have ever been since my school days”; but the fogs that drove him forth made him write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved so well: “If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go down hill rather quickly.”
At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque place. Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied again and was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eating well; was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement in him, to his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustrations for Ben Jonson’s _Volpone_, and was keenly interested in a new venture by Smithers who proposed a successor to _The Savoy_ which he wished to call _The Peacock_.
The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier and more peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.”
So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the _Cover of Volpone_ one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever brought splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book. He also made a pen drawing for the _Cover of a prospectus for Volpone_, which was after his death published in the book as a _Frontispiece_, for which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear in the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had developed and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All the same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs, or so it seems to me, as a Title Page, since _Volpone_ is lettered on a label upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor would have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at all; for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole style of the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction on the _Prospectus_. But in this _Prospectus Cover for Volpone_ his hand’s skill reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his body’s sorry state--its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical severity. And all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are there, the white robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands raised palm to palm suppliant-wise--the dark polished wood of the gilt doorway--the fabric of the curtains--the glitter of precious metals and gems.
In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete list of drawings for the _Volpone_,” suggested its being made a companion volume to _The Rape of the Lock_, and asked Smithers to announce it in _The Athenæum_. Besides the now famous and beautiful _Cover_, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of _Volpone_ to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did execute are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals that the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, _Volpone and his treasure_, but that is to be in line and wash--obviously in the style of _The Lady and the Monkey_--yet strangely enough, the remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! And it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate and line version of the _Frontispiece_--and that it is not to appear in the book. We have the line drawing for the _Prospectus_--and we can only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated in the manner of _The Lady and the Monkey_ or the _Initials_. That, in this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling in face of the fact that the _Initials_ were in the new method, line with pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month, that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything he had yet done, which the _Initials_ certainly were.
On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” sending the _Cover Design for Volpone_ and the _Design for the Prospectus of Volpone_, begging for proofs, especially of the _Design for the Prospectus_, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs of the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for Beardsley’s Christmas cheer. The beautiful _Miniature_ edition of _The_ _Rape of the Lock_, with Beardsley’s special _Cover-design in gold on scarlet_, had just been published--the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley called them.
However, these 24 designs for the _Volpone_ were never to be. But we know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on the 19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new magazine of _The Peacock_ projected by Smithers, of which more later. Whilst delighted with the idea of editing _The Peacock_, Beardsley expresses fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put the _Volpone_ into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so, that there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the _Initials_ with this letter, for he underlines that _Volpone_ is to be an important book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that Beardsley is now sending him--indeed the _Initials_ were, alas! all that he was ever destined to complete--the 24 illustrations were not to be. That these _Initials_ were the designs sent is further made clear by the remark that the new work is a complete, “a marked departure as illustrative and decorative work from any other arty book published for many years.” He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he has left behind him definitely all his former methods. He promises the drawings to be printed in the text by the first week in January, and that they shall be “good work, the best I have ever done.”
On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers, urging on the production of the _Prospectus for Volpone_; and it is interesting to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in line and wash, in his aquatint style, of _The Lady and the Monkey_, was originally intended for the _Volpone_ and not for the set of the _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ in which it eventually appeared; but was cast out of the _Volpone_ by Beardsley as “it will be quite out of keeping with the rest of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was clearly the method he had intended to employ for his illustrations.
What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed for the illustrations to _Volpone_ only _The Lady and the Monkey_ and the _Initials_ can hint to us--he was never to create them.
The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the place, the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued fellow; and again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depression left him. He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold or chill; indeed his only “grievance is mosquitoes.” He would weigh himself anxiously, fearful of a set-back at every turn.
* * * * *
Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career--a fact that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley has noticed--was the very brief period of the public interest in him. Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound--with _The Yellow Book_; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the last number of _The Savoy_ he had vanished from the public eye almost as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings; and his failure to keep the public interest with _The Savoy_, and all its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what new books he was producing. The _Book of Fifty Drawings_ seemed to have written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better cause to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to continue _The Savoy_ in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture--it had all ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the public homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper cutting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called _The Peacock_, to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of _The Savoy_; and had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the name of _The Peacock_ to _Books and Pictures_, which sounded commonplace enough to make _The Peacock_ appear quite good when otherwise it seemed somewhat pointless.
Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly in reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the editor of his new magazine _The Peacock_ and should design the cover and whatever else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one unswerving condition, and but one--that “it is quite _agreed that Oscar Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously or otherwise_.” The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s detestation of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public eye, is the more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the Church of Rome with much publicity. Beardsley would not have Wilde in any association with him at any price.... Before Beardsley leaves the subject of _The Peacock_ he undertakes to design “a resplendent peacock in black and white” and reminds Smithers that he has “already some fine wash drawings” of his from which he can choose designs for the first number of the magazine. So that we at least know that this first number of _The Peacock_ was to have had a resplendent peacock in black and white for its cover, and that it was to have been adorned with the superb decorations for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, the supreme artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent skill. He outstripped in beauty of handling even his already exquisite craftsmanship: and it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that he was to die before he had given the world the further fulfilment of his wondrous artistry--leaving us wondering as to what further heights he might have scaled.
Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in his “aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement.
We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off Bond Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, at Beardsley’s request, which had been beautifully reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley himself realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a mark in watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings.
But the gods had willed that it should not be.
Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to the planning of his prospectuses--he watched over them with fatherly anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture of _The Peacock_, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers, should not be produced “unless you have piles of stuff up your editorial sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis his ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions of the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns of _The Yellow Book_ and even _The Savoy_. “The thing,” he writes, “must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas about everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little backbone-less babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical infinitely more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory genius (especially when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives in more detail his mature attitude towards literature: “On the literary side, impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness should be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount. Let verse be printed very sparingly.... I should advise you to let Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together a staff. Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something to say.”... And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and antipathies in art--“On the art side, I suggest that it should attack _untiringly and unflinchingly_ the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of what picture making should be.”
There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed, his limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn confession of his artistic faith.
X
THE END
1898
Yet the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man with relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” It kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine again, and his hopes were reborn.
So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.
In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed--a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost heart--he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any further to clamber out of it.
The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his designs and decorations for the _Volpone_, and remembering the pushing forward of the _Prospectus_ that he had urged on the publisher, he had fallen back on the pencil--as the elaborately drawn _Initial_ letters show--for each of the scenes in _Volpone_, employing pencil with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of _The Savoy_ he had come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the fragile body failed him--at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his bloodless fingers--his work was done.
As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to fulfil--even had he had the will--for “the written word remains,” and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven:
Jesus is our Lord & Judge
Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy--all obscene drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley. In my death agony.
But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous achievement--and he did so without stooping to any attempt at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth--and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes--indeed, almost before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship.
On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity. The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the Cross--it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.”
Hail and Farewell!
A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE
PUERILIA
Mid-1888 he comes to town
JUVENILIA
Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement
FORMATIVE PERIOD--BURNE-JONESESQUES
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892
During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three initials A. V. B.
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
The _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Bon Mots_
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”--the _stunted_ mark.
In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of his signature. He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in ill-shaped “rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque mark,” even sometimes when he does employ it.
“SALOME”
Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes longer, more slender, and more graceful.
“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD
This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this _Yellow Book_ period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque mark” for the last time.
THE GREAT PERIOD
I. “_The Savoy_” and II. “_The Aquatintesques_” Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 1897
From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, right up to the end--the only difference being that in the last phase of the _Aquatintesque line and wash_ work with the few line drawings of this time, that is from Mid-1896, he signs as a rule only the initials A. B. in plain block capitals, but now usually _in a corner of his design_, either in or without a small square label.
“AUBREY BEARDSLEY” HAS BEEN DESIGNED BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY AND PRINTED UNDER HIS SUPERVISION BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS BINGHAMTON NEW YORK
Transcriber's Notes:
Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed.
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.