Part 2

At one time it was customary for critics to plead that he was only a supreme imitator of the Japanese or somebody; but, in reality, as has been pointed out by Robert Ross in his admirable essays on his work, he was as intensely original as an illustrator as Sandro Botticelli was in his designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy, or William Blake for the drama of Job. None of them interpreted authors for dull people who could not understand what they read. Perhaps the very best way to appreciate his work of this kind is often to take it away from the text, and say this is the way Beardsley saw _The Rape of the Lock_. As for all the supposed influences he is pretended to have laboured under, it can be at once said, he was too restless a personality to accept merely one influence at a time. If he took from anywhere, he took from everywhere, and the result is a great and original draughtsman, the music of whose line has been the theme of many artists. With little stippled lines in the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us the colour of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong; but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what knowledge went to their composition! ‘He sketched everything in pencil, at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines, afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built up, and completed on the same sheet of paper.’[4] ‘But Beardsley’s subtlety does not lie only in his technique, but also in what he expresses thereby. Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest; and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment of the artist’s unique personality.’[5]

[4] _Aubrey Beardsley_, by Robert Ross, pp. 38-39. 1909.

[5] _The Renaissance of the Nineties_, by W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, p. 29. 1911.

This charming personality stood him in good stead when the Beardsley craze burst upon London. He had literally set the Thames on fire. It was in 1894, when he became art editor of _The Yellow Book_ (which I discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. His poster for Dr. John Todhunter’s _The Comedy of Sighs_, at the Avenue Theatre, a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink dress standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising Fisher Unwin’s _Pseudonym Library_, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid commercial advertising. _Punch_ parodied ‘The Blessed Damozel’ with a new version of lauds for ‘The Beardsley Girl.’ A famous tea-shop exploited the type of female beauty.

Oscar Wilde’s play _Salomé_ was illustrated by the newly arrived young artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or more often belittled it. The new art magazine, _The Studio_, not only raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the black and white art of the world. He was to be at once accepted in Paris. He was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or less detrimentally dozens of good artists.

Yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming personality in the least. He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted to enjoy life.

Max Beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend, in which he says: ‘For him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are near their close, every hour--every minute, even--had its value. His drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading--these things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. He was an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and seldom when he was in London did he miss a “Wagner night” at Covent Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind.... He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’ In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was at home and happy. ‘I am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in Paris.’ And it was Beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him--a world of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social parasites and gullible idiots. He always had an engaging smile that was delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible.

After he vacated _The Yellow Book_ art editorship, and _The Savoy_ had been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher. There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had a courage of his own--a courage great enough to issue _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. It was Smithers who issued _The Savoy_, the two books of _Fifty Drawings_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, and among others the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than _A Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1897), and _A Second Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful method of design. Indeed, the _Salomé_ decorations (1894) had bridged this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of _The Rape of the Lock_ (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he ‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it--I mean it.”’

In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in the _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For example, the true Beardsley type of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley:

Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes pâlies? Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté Met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies?

They belong to the same world as the women of Toulouse Lautrec, Rops, Odélon Redon, Bayros, and Rassenfosse--the type known as _la loupeuse insatiable et cupide_. They move and have their being in French erotica and novels like _La Faustine_.

Beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes, and of the two the palm should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. No one has yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some day, when the kinship between Beardsley and those old Greek Masters who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this truism may also come to light. It is unlikely, however, to become revealed until Aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar tongue, for not even the most generous Editor in his monumental edition has essayed that impertinence to Mrs. Grundy. The illustrations or rather critical decorations of Beardsley are also not likely to become generally circulated to all because of their frankness. For phallism is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. But unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the _Lysistrata_, as every scholar knows. Beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating Aristophanes and not Donnay’s French version of the same. And never was he more cynical or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect; never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity. He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists Rowlandson and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil dying wanted to destroy his Æneids, and Beardsley _in articulo mortis_ wrote ‘to destroy all copies of _Lysistrata_ and bawdy drawings.’ Yet he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his _Erotische Kunst_ has to say: ‘Beardsley is specially to be noticed for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. No harsh or discordant notes, no violent tones. On the contrary, a wheedling finesse. In some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time incarnate.’ Beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an Alfred Kubin or to the tone of certain of Bayros’s designs. He was neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like Rassenfosse or any one else who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. In his Juvenal drawings (1897), his five Lucian sketches (1894), and the _Lysistrata_ (1896) he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via, I believe, those wonderful Greek vase designers[6] which he, so assiduous a haunter of the British Museum, must have not only seen, but revelled in. But of these the best and freest are the _Lysistrata_ conceptions; and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to receive.

[6] Ross says in his _Aubrey Beardsley_, p. 45, one of the events which contributed ‘to give Beardsley a fresh impetus and stimulate his method of expression’ about the _Salomé_ time was ‘a series of visits to the collection of Greek vases in the British Museum (prompted by an essay of Mr. D. S. MacColl).’

We are, however, more interested here with the literary side of his work, which divides itself into poetry and prose. As a poet Beardsley has been accused of over-cleverness. Whatever that criticism means I do not know. Probably it implies some similar reflection to the statement that a dandy is over-dressed. I cannot, however, discover any such affectation in, for example, that charming poem, _The Three Musicians_, which recounts how the soprano ‘lightly frocked,’ the slim boy who dies ‘for réclame and recall at Paris,’ and the Polish pianist, pleased with their thoughts, their breakfast, and the summer day, wend their way ‘along the path that skirts the wood’:

The Polish genius lags behind, And, with some poppies in his hand, Picks out the strings and wood and wind Of an imaginary band. Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.

The charming cantatrice reclines And rests a moment where she sees Her château’s roof that hotly shines Amid the dusky summer trees, And fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smooths the frock about her knees.

The gracious boy is at her feet, And weighs his courage with his chance; His fears soon melt in noonday heat. The tourist gives a furious glance, Red as his guide-book, moves on, and offers up a prayer for France.

In _The Ballad of a Barber_, again, there is nothing but a trill of song in limpid verse. How Carrousel, the barber of Meridian Street, who could ‘curl wit into the dullest face,’ became _fou_ of the thirteen-year-old King’s daughter, so that

His fingers lost their cunning quite, His ivory combs obeyed no more;

is a typical ninety _jeu d’esprit_, only much better done than the average one. With the fewest words Beardsley can sketch a scene or character, as he used the fewest of lines in his drawings. This is even better exemplified in his prose. Time and again a single sentence of _Under the Hill_ gives us a complete picture:

Sporion was a tall, depraved young man, with a slight stoop, a troubled walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long Japanese eyes, and a great gilt toupet.

We seem to gaze with the Abbé Fanfreluche at the prints on his bedroom wall:

Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque and domino, smiling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and huge, bird-like women mingling in some rococo room.

One rubs one’s eyes. Are these not the drawings Franz von Bayros of Vienna realised later? But Beardsley’s output of both prose and verse is actually so limited that one cannot compare his double art work to that of an artist like Rossetti. When all is said and done, his great literary work is the unfinished ‘fairy’ tale of _Under the Hill_. In its complete form it belongs to the class of works like Casanova’s _Mémoires_, the _Reigen_ of Schnitzler, the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, and some of the _Thousand and One Nights_. It is an enchanting book in the same way as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ or _Le Roi Pausole_ are enchanting books. In its rococo style it surpasses the best rhythms of Wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of beautiful things, while Aubrey Beardsley suggests more than he says in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties. Indeed, the purple patches of Beardsley are as rich in fine phrases as any paragraphs of the period--as _faisandée_ as any French writer has written. Elizabethan euphuists, Restoration conceit-makers, later Latins with all the rich byzantium _floræ_ of brains like Apuleius, can make as finely-sounding phrases, but I doubt whether they can pack away in them as rich a pictorial glamour as many of the writers of the nineties, and Beardsley amongst them, achieved. We have Helen in ‘a flutter of frilled things’ at ‘taper-time’ before her mirror displaying her neck and shoulders ‘so wonderfully drawn,’ and her ‘little malicious breasts ... full of the irritation of loveliness that can never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.’ Whole scenes of the book are unrolled before us like priceless tapestries. The ‘_ombre_ gateway of the mysterious hill’ stands before us:

The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base each one was carved with loving sculptures....

To read _The Toilet of Helen_, with its faint echoes perhaps of Max Beerbohm’s ‘Toilet of Sabina’ in _The Perversion of Rouge_, is to be lured on by the sound of the sentences:

Before a toilet-table that shone like the altar of Nôtre Dame des Victoires, Helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black and heliotrope. The Coiffeur Cosmé was caring for her scented chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and clustered like tendrils round her neck. Her three favourite girls, Pappelarde, Blanchemains, and Loureyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate flaçons and frail cassolettes, and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by Châteline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair, and Sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin. Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender gloves, La Popelinière--mistress of the robes--was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough.

There you have a Beardsley drawing transfused into words. The same is true of his description of the woods of Auffray. The same is true of the wonderful supper served on the terrace to Helen and her guests amid the gardens. To find such another supper in literature one has to turn to some French author, or, better still, to the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’ of Petronius himself. From this it will be seen that Beardsley’s literary work,[7] like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. His age may die, but he remains. Even now he has outlived the fad period, while many of the books that were written at that date by others and decorated by him are only valuable to-day because of his frontispiece or wrapper. One has not forgotten those wrappers, for as one will not forget the work of William Blake, one will not forget that of Aubrey Beardsley. His enthusiasts treasure the smallest fragment.

[7] _In The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England_, by G. Turquet-Milnes, pp. 277-280 (1913), there is an interesting study of his Baudelairism.

II

Like all artistic and literary movements this one had, in the shape of various periodicals, its manifestoes. In fact, it was a period particularly rich in this kind of fruit. In _The Hobby Horse_ the voices of the new spirit were mingled for the first time with those of the past. There were, among other magazines, _The Rose Leaf_, _The Chameleon_, _The Spirit Lamp_, _The Pageant_, _The Evergreen_, _The Parade_, _The Quarto_, _The Dome_, _The Chord_, while among the popular papers _The Idler_, _To-Day_, and _Pick-me-Up_ produced the work of men like Edgar Wilson and S. H. Sime; and, further, _The Butterfly_, _The Poster_, and _The Studio_ must be carefully studied for the tendencies of the time. But the two principal organs of the movement were, beyond all doubt, _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_. Round them, as around the shrines of old beside the Ægean, gather the faithful and the chosen. In the other publications there was too much jostling with the profane, but here ‘_Procul profani_.’ It will be well, therefore, although it has been done more or less before, to study these two magazines in some detail, and also their literary editors who gathered the clan together. In both cases Beardsley was the art editor, though he was ‘fired,’ to put it plainly, from _The Yellow Book_ after its fourth number. His influence, therefore, permeated both. In fact, he made them both works of value for the coming generations, and particularly in the case of _The Savoy_ he bore the burden of the day and saved the monthly from fatuity. When he leaves _The Yellow Book_ it will be found to be never the same. When he is too ill to be active in _The Savoy_ it becomes very small beer. So interwoven with the lives and values of these publications is the genius of Beardsley that one cannot speak of the one without referring to the other. Of Beardsley himself I have already spoken, so I propose to confine myself strictly to the art editor, while dealing first with _The Yellow Book_ and its literary editor, Henry Harland, and then with _The Savoy_ and Mr. Arthur Symons.