AUBREY BEARDSLEY

THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,

THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE

PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY

by F. H. Evans

AUBREY

BEARDSLEY

THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,

THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE

HALDANE MACFALL

NEW YORK

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

MCMXXVII

COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

EARL E. FISK

THIS SMALL TRIBUTE

TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP

H. M.

“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.”

“I may claim to have some command of line. I try to get as much as possible out of a single curve or straight line.”

[AUBREY BEARDSLEY.]

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in Hampstead Church—the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by—and there had forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation came pouring out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of God’s acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrists showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his “tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his forehead in a “quiff” almost to his eyes—then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken—he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.

The Yellow Book had come upon the town three months gone by. Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a night. He was the talk of the town—was seen everywhere—was at the topmost height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was out he was to be expelled from The Yellow Book! As he had come up, so he was to come down—like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out of the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and for some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed young dandy—fling him from The Yellow Book—and dim for him the splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. Within a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was to drop out of the public eye almost as though he had never been.

But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered there—and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered there—this young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year or so the masterpieces of his great period—the drawings for a new venture to be called The Savoy—and was soon to begin work on the superb designs for The Rape of the Lock, which were to thrust him at a stroke into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years were run out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave.

As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the dead, so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be—one long struggle to crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that yawned for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being dragged back to it again and again by unseen hands—was to spend his strength in the frantic struggle to escape—he was to get almost out of sight of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to find himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge of the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat plays with a mouse—with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of the grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we, who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room. For, realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and charm of The Rape of the Lock. Surely the hideous nightmares that now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject for bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his facile pen!

Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood, and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows—he knew that he had but a little while to which to look forward, and had best live his life to-day. And he lived it like one possessed.

Haldane Macfall.

AUBREY BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
1872-1898

I

BIRTH AND FAMILY

To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something in the city,” of the name of Beardsley—one Vincent Paul Beardsley—and to his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of the family of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first day of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the army surgeon at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, a boy, whom they christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing that in a short hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie a-dying, having made the picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous.

Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does not appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive, stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the chronicles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades away, departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his work of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it be that so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us wondering by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called to the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name and raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it should stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of the age. For, when all’s said, it was a significance—if his only significance—to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying at twenty-five, had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording tablets of the genius of his race in the indelible ink of high fulfilment. However, in the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a brief moment into the limelight and is gone, whether “something in the city” or whatnot, does not now matter—his destiny was in fatherhood. But at least it was granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to him, that, from whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he should live to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son, who, as at the touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line into very music—the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age....

As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with unceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and character—therefore the man’s—in so far as the moulding of mind and character be beyond the knees of the gods—a mother whose affection and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as a girl.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY

(Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy)

II

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL

THE “PUERILIA”

Of a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road, Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred and cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably became a forcing-house to any intelligent child—and both children were uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or three years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as things turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely a healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward spirit.

It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Caldecott which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s life—yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest illustrators that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure test of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their children are given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the somewhat empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given Kate Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons in drawing and in “seeing” character in line and form, and in the wholesome joy of country sights and sounds.

A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing his pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music.

Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced lessons, but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or drawing or decoration.

The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell disease which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was sent to a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years. Here the child seems to have made his chief impression on his little comrades and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an extreme reserve—which sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled waters. However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat of consumption; and a change had to be made.

At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a profound influence over his future.

In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age so skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an infant prodigy—the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy in the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologising for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the plea that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feeling for sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the years to come, he was to give forth line that “sings” like the notes of a violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation-cards in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or not, the little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite considerable sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome things. As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched and unpromising stuff.

A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the very loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history, eagerly reading Freeman and Green.

In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; and in the January of 1885 he became a boarder.

Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half years at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King, greatly liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by letting him have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey Beardsley was happy as the day was long. His “quaint personality” soon made its mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday, he wrote a little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The delicate boy, as might be expected, found all athletic sports distasteful and a strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to be found with a book when the others were at play. His early love for Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Restoration dramatists, was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read “Erewhon” and “enjoyed it immensely,” though it had been lent to him with grave doubts as to whether it were not too deep for him. His unflagging industry became a byword. He caricatured the masters; acted in school plays—appearing even before large audiences at the Pavilion—and was the guiding spirit in the weekly performances at the school got up by Mr. King and for which he designed programmes. His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a kindly attitude towards the lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively encouraged his artistic leanings, as Mr. King his theatrical.

Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these “puerilia” have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as revelations of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain unvarnished truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Probably his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as the grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such unutterable trash.

Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind at school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of the “Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giving amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays. By the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he had a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it, very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French he worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile reader—but such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the dog-Latin of a public school classical education.

Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that Aubrey Beardsley drew the designs for the “Pied Piper” before he left the school in mid-1888—though the play was not performed until Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December the 19th 1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen and wash drawing of Holywell Street was made in mid-1888 before he left the school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red hair—worn á la Bretonne,” which I take it means “bobbed,” as the modern girl now calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work, but writes verse and is very musical. His “stage-struck mood” we have seen encouraged by his house-master, Mr. King.

C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at Brighton; and at one of these is played “L’Enfant Prodigue” without words—it was to make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley.

There is no question that L’Enfant Prodigue and the rococo of Bright Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beardsley; and he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked mediævalism; he was to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to Pierrot and the bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion.

Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, though how exactly he fitted the red hair “a la Bretonne” to his theory of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the wearer, would require more than a little guesswork.

The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it came to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a marked personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely proud of him. But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding farewell and leaving for London, straightway to become a clerk in an architect’s office.

At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his “puerilia”—or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant, inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the “Pied Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing of Holywell Street. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him a month or two false—it is difficult to see why Beardsley should have made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London that he had not yet learnt to frequent—but even granting that the Holywell Street was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in the Holywell Street (1888) there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley leaves his school and his “puerilia” cease—he enters at once on a groping attempt to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his ideas and impressions. So far, of promise there has been not a tittle—one searches the “puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign—but there is none.

In the Holywell Street there is the sign—and a portent.

It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic wayfaring.

HOLYWELL STREET

III

YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK

Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen

THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”

At sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an Insurance office.

The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and shy and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat solitary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first little Pimlico home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly appreciative, sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of his devoted mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother and sister was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite unimportant, an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the end of his day’s drudgery in the city, and—with the loud bang of the hall-door—shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and sister were happy in their own life.

But it is that Holywell Street drawing which unlocks the door. It is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy old ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row—that made an untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary le Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych—was the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the toes of Prime Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with equal absence of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, its fantastic jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions—and its devotion to books—was nearing its theatric end. In many ways Holywell Street was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow spent every moment he could snatch from his city office in such fascinating haunts as these second-hand bookshops.

We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A Brown Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; and that before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.”

A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the National Gallery to browse amongst antique art.

His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his behalf from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening he really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night by consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London was filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with any sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices to hear good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even dreamed of pursuing an artistic career.

The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged Beardsley’s artistic leanings. Beardsley had only been a year in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth birthday—August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of Aubrey Beardsley—and as blank of achievement as they were black.

From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the Insurance Office in the city.

The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon—it was enough to have broken the courage of the strongest man. Beardsley’s first three years in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion, during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in which his eyes gazed in terror at death.

His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo—especially the human fetus—with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy.

Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures—to Beardsley the supreme treasure.

It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor, but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost daily frequenter.

The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside, which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so well—indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth—was but a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his achievement and his vogue.

Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate. At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the bookshop in Cheapside.

“We know by the Scrap Book, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890, what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time, and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the pictorial idea—only an increasing sense of selection—that is all. His “juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there begins to appear a certain personal vision.

From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books—saw life only through books—was aloof from his own age and his own world, which he did not understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather vulgar to understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his daily toil, he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere with Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux Camélias, as his intimates. He sketched them as yet with but an amateur scribbling. But he dressed for the part of a dandy in his narrow home circle, affecting all the airs of superiority of the day—contempt for the middle-class—contempt of Mrs. Grundy—elaborately cultivating a flippant wit—a caustic tongue. He had the taint of what Tree used to whip with contempt as “refainement”—he affected a voice and employed picturesque words in conversation. He pined for the day when he might mix with the great ones as he conceived the great ones to be; and he sought to acquire their atmosphere as he conceived it. Beardsley was always theatrical. He noticed from afar that people of quality, though they dressed well, avoided ostentation or eccentricity—dressed “just so.” He set himself that ideal. He tried to catch their manner. The result was that he gave the impression of intense artificiality. And just as he was starting for the race, this black hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made him despair. In 1890 had appeared Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies—Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself to form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic ambition.

As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached mid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from him, his courage returned with health—and his belief in himself. So far he had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided to make an effort to become an artist.

The sun shone for him.

He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured an introduction to Burne-Jones.

IV

FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP

Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty

THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”

On a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.

Beardsley being still a clerk in the city—his week-ends given to drudgery at the Insurance Office—he had to seize occasion by the forelock—therefore Sunday.

The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave; and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise of renewed health.

We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show Burne-Jones—we have seen what he had gathered together in the Scrap Book as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time—a sorry thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British Museum—an act which, had Beardsley known the betrayal that was to be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet. We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably promising Molière, which it is difficult to believe as having been made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s style for a while.

Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to pour forth from his hands for a couple of years.

Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy—the solemnities reigned, and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned with serious fresco—’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness.

As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise whereon to found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance.

Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered London as she had conquered France—if rather a pallid ghost of Japan. The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it was so.

It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of pure line by the Japs—he saw prints in shops and they interested him, but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.

Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F. Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf. It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness, and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme, carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art, to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed to be adopted by Beardsley as the basis of his drawings of furniture a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the sensitive brain of the younger man—those peacocks that were to bring forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of years later when he was to give his Salome to the world.

It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father—as quickly to vanish again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking and he and his “pater” alone in the house.

Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a little magazine called The Bee; and it was in the November of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his Hamlet in which he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.

It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one of note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling for line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some six months after the summer that had brought hope and life to Beardsley out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer Vallance, one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went to call on the lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half the urgings of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known the boy when at Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoon at Charlwood Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away wildly enthusiastic over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at his demand. It is to Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and then turned the lad’s ambition towards becoming an artist by profession—an idea that up to this time Beardsley had not thought possible or practicable.

Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled us in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile “puerilia”—the Pied Piper stuff—which one cannot believe that Beardsley would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque Hamlet from the Bee just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques. He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had not done anything better than the Hamlet. Then there was the Scrap Book! However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won so powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal friend as Aymer Vallance.

On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the winter was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross and Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert Ross wrote of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any case his record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed with the personality of the youth—Ross was always more interested in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for his was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the antique dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a powerful friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the doors of fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a kindly man enough; and he had not only come to have considerable authority on matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the great, but with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. Ross, with his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was fascinated by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy youth whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of being ebouriffé as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the impression of being brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better as “tortoise-shell”—it was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as his voice and manner. The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was always cadaverous. The young fellow seems gradually to have thawed at this forgathering at Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company, and was soon found to have an intimate knowledge of the British Museum and National Gallery. He talked more of literature and of music than of art. Ross was so affected by the originality of the young fellow’s conversation that he even attributed to Beardsley the oft-quoted jape of the old French wit that “it only takes one man to make an artist but forty to make an Academician.”

It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting—what precisely did Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under his arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were in the portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the Procession of Joan of Arc in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans, a work which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with any merit from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced to part for all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a pen-and-ink replica from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the May of 1892. The youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his own work than had his admirers.

It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic promise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace Procession of Joan of Arc could stand out at the forefront of his career, and was, as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order to get him public recognition—in which it distinctly and deservedly failed. He himself was later to go hot and cold about the very mention of it and to be ashamed of it.

We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,” his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking for him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship of that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom he loved to glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is canting and stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged down. Nothing of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste drew about him, he was not compelled into, the company of the erotic and the precious in craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small share in opening wide the doors to him.

But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a curious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best. It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the French writers—it was their challenge to the past—it was their very inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was to run riot in eroticism—he was to treat sex with a marked frankness that showed it to be his god—but it is only right to say that the artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree. And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race. It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.

Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit—it was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class—he was one of the most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it, as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and witty companion.

Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley after a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled. However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his friends, to dare all and make for art.

Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament. Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.

This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday; and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis de Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”

Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his art—the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and Burne-Jones at this very time—Whistler had published his Gentle Art of Making Enemies in 1890, and London had not recovered from its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but his eager eyes were quick to see.

However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.

And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris—or Beardsley; but his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted boy’s cause.

Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement. Next—and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting fact—Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse—probably not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the society of the great—his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him—only doing it with an air and dressing well for the part.

Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy—they even lack manhood—they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelligence.

However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott books—he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then anxious to produce—Sidonia the Sorceress. Vallance leaped at the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a ridiculous pill.

We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but mediocrity—a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know—and to achieve. Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling it—far less any of his sponsors. And yet!——

Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival publication to the Kelmscott Press—he was to smash it to pieces and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point—and Frederick Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful nor attractive, but probably trying to find something to praise, at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”—and so saying he dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care for his drawings—he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again—and he could never be induced to go.

Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused to go, and Vallance went alone—but that is another story. For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in the doing—one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for ever—desert the night-school at Westminster—burn his boats behind him—and launch on his destiny as an artist.

V

BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST

Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to twenty-one

MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES

“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”

John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts—300 copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist.

HAIL MARY

Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent Beardsley’s Hail Mary, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one risen from the well-dressed dead—Aubrey Beardsley had happened in, according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s your man!”

To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to discover to be the well-known publisher.

So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.

Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his “Morte d’Arthur,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the work.

Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of any consequence—he was utterly unknown—and his superb master-work that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a trifle old for studentship—he was twenty before he made a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind—of what was expected of him.

At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.

Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott tradition, took the drawing to Dent—the elaborate and now famous Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as The Achieving of the San Grael, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the Morte d’Arthur.

Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; and the design is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.” It is his first use of the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark” is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for three candles and three flames—a baser explanation was given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all that Beardsley did.

Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the Morte d’Arthur, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter, in the June of 1893—the second volume in 1894.

So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking—to mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval woodcut and—to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the public—Lewis C. Hind.

******

Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of Bon Mots by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and Morte d’Arthur mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the Bon Mots he made no pretence of illustration—the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But the severe conditions and limitations of the Morte d’Arthur page held Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were the finest education in art that he ever went through—for he taught himself craftsmanship as he went in the Morte d’Arthur. It made him.

One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for the Bon Mots to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black decorations of the mediæval Morte d’Arthur put upon Beardsley for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career depended on those designs for the Morte d’Arthur, and he strove to reach his full powers in making them.

Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his debt to Greece through Anning Bell.

We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s Evelina and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for Hawthorne’s Tales and Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.

Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the Rape of the Lock and The Savoy for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once—we are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the more a marvel—almost a miracle.

It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the decoration of the Morte d’Arthur with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds drawn, and London asleep—poured them forth in that secret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley worked—he was everywhere—but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that art.

Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only sketch he made for the completed design—when the pen and ink had next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber. The well-known pencil sketch of A Girl owned by Mr. Evans shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough rhythm of his scrawls.

A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight; as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to recognition.

Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs—than from any record by eyewitnesses—that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study—that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a whole—that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design—and then inked in the pen-line and masses.

PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD

Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”

Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on which stood two tall tapering candlesticks—the candlesticks without which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose whereon to lean for reputation.

******

His rapid increase of power—and one now begins to understand Vallance’s enthusiasm—induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let him have a printed proof from the Morte d’Arthur of The Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur to show to Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris.

Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an angry remonstrance to Dent.

HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN

from “Le Morte D’Arthur”

How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the Morte d’Arthur were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the music die in him unsung.

William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival him in his “mediæval fake”—find himself—and give to the world in The Savoy a series of decorations that have made his name immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an elaborate boredom.

******

Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s Shaving of Shagpat—a desire to which he returned and on which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.

However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely—here he could use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy Morte d’Arthur convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque vein for Bon Mots, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him.

******

Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every hand his life long.

The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of The Art Journal, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together—and in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis Hind—and The Studio, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset—Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair as his best asset.

So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced” pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in the style of Phil May—a pallid silent young man, but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful—with the inevitable black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for Le Morte d’Arthur, the Siegfried Act II, the Birthday of Madame Cigale—Les Revenants de Musique—“Some Salome drawings”—with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for the Morte d’Arthur. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the Salome drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of The Studio published three months later. Wilde’s Salome did not see print until February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.

However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, The Studio, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to The Studio offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.

Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley abroad—and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily Pall Mall Gazette and the weekly Pall Mall Budget and was launching a new monthly to be called The Pall Mall Magazine. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, asked Hind to become editor of the weekly Budget at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command of The Studio in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the Pall Mall Budget, for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind.

So the first number of The Studio was to appear in the April of 1893 glorifying a wonderful youth—his name Aubrey Beardsley!

******

It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive—and they forgave Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts men.

On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover design for The Studio from the much gratified youth, who went home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire—here was réclame! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in the first number of The Studio after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in his several styles—the Japanesque, and the mediæval Morte d’Arthur blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many—he gave it just and fair and full value.

All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness to the first number of The Studio in bringing him before the public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did contain very remarkable work—at the same time it was scarcely world-shattering—and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art—and all of us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction won through—and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down and died.

The first number of The Studio did not appear until the April of 1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around The Studio that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. The Studio itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world—and a very narrow inner circle at that—where The Studio caused any talk, and Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a somewhat dinted toy—we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so—he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at the New Year had gone from The Studio offices to edit the Pall Mall Budget, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the most wretched drawings imaginable—drawings without one redeeming shred of value—work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that were decorating the Morte d’Arthur, which however the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for Morte d’Arthur were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in the Pall Mall Budget. The first volume of Bon Mots appeared in the April of 1893—the Sydney Smith and Sheridan volume—although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was pretty poor stuff.

******

Now, though the Morte d’Arthur was in large part done before The Studio eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in The Studio article. There are examples from the Morte d’Arthur, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Mantegna called The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year gone by when he made it—so far had he now advanced beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly Morte d’Arthur decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The Siegfried Act II of mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry—it is his typically early or “hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The Birthday of Madame Cigale and Les Revenants de Musique show the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to Le Debris d’un Poète and La Femme Incomprise. But there was also a Japanesque in The Studio which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893 in French the play called Salome by Oscar Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in The Studio which was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the destined illustrator of the English Salome, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that Salome was to be a marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley.

It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of The Studio, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy design of this Salome drawing to the more severe and restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed.

Note also another fact: The title of the article published in The Studio first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his work—the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pencil drawing of Sandro Botticelli made in 1893 about the time that The Studio was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the year before.

Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is dead—and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.

******

By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done with the Morte d’Arthur; and it was only by the incessant prayers and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping himself in study of phallic worship—and when all’s said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early.

It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the decorations he wanted for the Morte d’Arthur in the young fellow’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end of the year of 1892, to which half year the Morte d’Arthur almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as search the book that the Morte d’Arthur was never completed—we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once—but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration.

There appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine for June 1893, drawn in April 1893, as the first Studio number was appearing, a design known as The Neophyte, or to give its full affected name, “Of a Neophyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called The Kiss of Judas—both drawings reveal an unmistakable change in handling, and the Neophyte a remarkable firmness of andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the Morte d’Arthur and kindred works in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through it—it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities.

“OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED
UNTO HIM”

It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling as The Neophyte. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious to the lay mind a little further on.

It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it for months—indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy line” called The Questing Beast is dated by Beardsley himself “March 8, 1893”—as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time the Morte d’Arthur began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.

The two cover-designs for The Studio No. I in April 1893 were obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the Morte d’Arthur—in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the Morte d’Arthur drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.

There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the Morte d’Arthur on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with:

There was a young man with a salary

Who had to do drawings for Malory;

When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure

You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”

As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty, faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. And as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a Japanesque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be outdone in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque mark” of the three candles, with three flames—in the more elaborate later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke—or as Beardsley himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light that he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether the “Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to employ the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from The Yellow Book—his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years—we shall find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition to his name. So it is well to dwell upon it here.

The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 1892 to mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped, and he employed it indifferently and incongruously on any type of his designs whether Morte d’Arthur mediævalism or the Japanesque grotesques of his Bon Mots. And we have seen that it was in the middle of his twentieth year—he last used it in fact in the February of 1893—that he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his initials and signature. He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative years. He signs henceforth as A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as Aubrey B.

In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon his Salome designs, as weary of the Bon Mots grotesques as of the Morte d’Arthur mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate—the V quite departed from his signature.

I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as he called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it!

From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at twenty-one except to a small artistic circle. The Bon Mots grotesques, mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, Sydney Smith and Sheridan, in the April of 1893; the second volume at the year’s end, Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, in December 1893; and the third, the last volume, Foote and Hooke, in the February of 1894. The Morte d’Arthur began to be published in parts in June 1893. The feverish creation of the mediæval designs in the late part of 1892 alongside of the Bon Mots grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his weariness—by mid-1893 he was finding the Morte d’Arthur “very long-winded.” And what chilled him most, he found the public indifferent to both—yet Beardsley knew full well that his whole interest lay in publicity.

It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. This is a larger question and a serious question—but it is a question. It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to that. But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism of the Morte d’Arthur, by that time he came near to the end of the book he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created for it; so also his next development was as rapid, and by the time he is at the end of his new Japanese phase in Salome we shall see him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style that he grew weary of the Salome before he completed it, and threw in a couple of illustrations as makeweight which are utterly alien to the work and disfigure it. And yet these two drawings were made immediately after working upon this Salome, and were thrown in only out of a certain sense of resentment owing to the suppression of two designs not deemed to be circumspect enough. But Beardsley did not refuse to make new drawings in key with the rest—he had simply advanced to a new style quite alien to Salome, and he found he could not go back. This will be clearer when we come to the Salome.

So precisely with the Morte d’Arthur; even the last decorations he made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in The Yellow Book.

******

Before we leave the Morte d’Arthur, and the difficulties with Beardsley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors are often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps to the ladder of Fame—and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M. Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with his song wholly unsung—there would have been for him no Studio “réclame,” no Yellow Book, no Salome, no Savoy. Dent, employing with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal Morte d’Arthur which is a triumph for English bookmaking—he gave us the supreme edition that can never be surpassed by mortal hands—he did so in a form within the reach of the ordinary man—and in the doing he made the much vaunted work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear second-rate, mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires.

HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR”

THE PEACOCK SKIRT

from “Salome”

VI

THE JAPANESQUES

Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-One

“SALOME”

Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the edge of manhood.

We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque Caricature of Whistler on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time.

Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of the early part of 1893—at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the Salome founded frankly upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of Whistler have been delayed for two years?

But—as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this time revealed to the seeing eye—it was now to the work of the better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on.

******

It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to publish the Morte d’Arthur in parts in the June of 1893, as it had called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The young fellow leaped at it—not only as giving him scope for fantastic designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley had made—either on reading the French edition, or on reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in the February of 1893—illustrating the lines that raised so hot a controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the birth of The Studio in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.

Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for Salome.

Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day—they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on producing belles lettres in an attractive and picturesque form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack publishers.

On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather on trust—the Morte d’Arthur and the Bon Mots were far from what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that Beardsley was but little known.

It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar Wilde—but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King Herod—but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the Morte d’Arthur, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play—and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power.

It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have been hard put to it to explain—it was a sort of philistine literary or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line is perhaps more obvious in the Salome drawings than in the Savoy, since the Salome designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are even so-called critics to be found who place the Salome drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!

Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the Salome drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional—grave or gay. But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor when he completed, the Salome, wherein his line is yet hesitant, thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the Salome against the genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In Salome he got all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in The Stomach Dance, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the Salome he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the Salome designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness—the groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective—all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the Morte d’Arthur, and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand—neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of Salome he had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of Salome he had found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite Burial of Salome in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was.

Salome finished, however, was not Salome published. Elkin Mathews and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be “difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum—however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the Title Page, and Enter Herodias were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, The Stomach Dance appeared without change—was accepted without demur by the public and in silence by the censorious—indeed the lasciviousness of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the Toilette of Salome, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very second-rate design of John and Salome, and in place of the two had been inserted the wretched Black Cape and Georgian Toilette which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and cheap conceit—for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any case, the mediocre Black Cape and the better Georgian Toilette, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.

THE STOMACH DANCE

from “Salome”

The interpolated Black Cape and the Second Toilette we may here dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they are wholly outside the Salome atmosphere. Of the pure Salome designs, incomparably the finest are The Stomach Dance and the Peacock Skirt. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he considered the best drawings to be The Man in the Moon, the Peacock Skirt, and The Dancer’s Reward—it should be noted by the way that Beardsley showed by his Book of Fifty Drawings that his title was The Man in the Moon not as the publishers have it, The Woman in the Moon. But it is in The Climax, one of the less noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride—for though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, drawn but a year before and shown in The Studio first number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.

We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling as The Neophyte. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage?

Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts—or rather contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the Salome drawings for instance have appeared in the Morte d’Arthur? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high achievement would have suffered—and Death was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure? Of the 544 or so decorations for the Morte d’Arthur, several are repeated—some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for the Morte d’Arthur, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay his pound of flesh....

Even before Beardsley was done with Salome, he had exhausted the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has to evolve a Title-page, a List of Contents, and a Finis; and we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of Salome, weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his Morte d’Arthur designs again, he was about to burst into a new song as hinted at by the last three designs for Salome. An artist is finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.

TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”

About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,” which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a new venture about to appear. For The Yellow Book is the only contract that emerges out of this time.

It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they took their scheme to John Lane.

Whilst at work on the Salome, Beardsley began the long series of decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as The Keynote Series of novels, published on the heels of the wide success of Keynotes by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.

And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art Club.

Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their little home—a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.

COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III

VII

THE GREEK VASE PHASE

New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three

“THE YELLOW BOOK”

It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds today!

Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London. Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play the host—and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his “tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.

Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her dressing-table known as La Dame aux Camélias. The couch in his studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much of his all too short life lying upon it.

******

When Beardsley began the Salome drawings at twenty-one he was, as we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work upon the Salome designs he was much at the British Museum and was intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in their line and mass fascinate Beardsley—not only was he struck by the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified” by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris, appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his Salome drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.

******

LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS

from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III

On the 15th of April 1894 appeared The Yellow Book. It made Beardsley notorious.

In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl with the 3rd, the last, volume of Bon Mots; and Morte d’Arthur was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that Salome made Beardsley famous. Salome was an expensive book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the Morte d’Arthur and Salome passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But Salome did lead to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye.

Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of The Yellow Book developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes—to answer in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have fired a publisher. The Yellow Book quarterly, however, was a very different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth Club, founded the much discussed Yellow Book.” This quarterly, to be called The Yellow Book after the conventional name of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each number—not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the one on the other.

Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the Salome, as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of 1894, the Salome off his hands, that The Yellow Book was planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the Salome into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime flung aside the Morte d’Arthur Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it—through books—and he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done—employing line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the Morte d’Arthur now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world—he took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else—but we are coming to that.

It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German, Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic weekly, Pick-Me-Up, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the Graphic and Illustrated London News.” Struck by some article attacking the art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called St. Paul’s. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac—(remember, St. Paul’s was to begin as a monthly!)—and to illustrate the subjects to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “Man that holds the Water Pot” and the “Music,” but the paper did not appear in January—indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably meant for Dent’s Bon Mots—however they may have been intended for The Fashions and The Drama pages of St. Paul’s. He made in all four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I “might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value, however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of 1894—they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked increase of power over line—they end his Salome Japanesque phase.

It is somewhat curious that, whilst The Man that holds the Water Pot is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the fourth drawing he made for St. Paul’s seems to have been missed by all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of it!

Before we leave St. Paul’s, it is interesting to note that at this time the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for St. Paul’s and other papers.

MESSALINA

It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the Poster for the Avenue Theatre which really brought him before a London public more than anything he had so far done—a success, be it confessed, more due to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the Avenue Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which could not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. Needless to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw was to float into the public ken with his play of Arms and the Man at this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house that from its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross Bridge, it was cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost Seagulls.” I shall always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster with Shaw’s rise to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being called before the curtain at the end of Arms and the Man, some man amongst the gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s ready Irish wit brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the darkness, his lank loose figure waited patiently until complete silence had fallen on the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I agree with that gentleman in the gallery, but”—shrugging his shoulders—“what are we amongst so many?”

Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s Plays appeared about the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of a wide public.

******

Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.

It was the publication of The Yellow Book in the mid-April of 1894 that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow circle so far interested in him.

London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, or at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room was sprinkled with the latest books—the well-to-do bought pictures and wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves on their literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London white in a night, so The Yellow Book littered the London drawing-rooms with gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand.
It “caught on.” And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the crest of its wave of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. After all, everything that was outstanding and remarkable about the book was Beardsley. The Yellow Book was soon the talk of the town, and Beardsley “awoke to find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured his work; and soon he was himself caricatured by “Max” in the Pall Mall Budget; whilst the Oxford undergraduates were playing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like. But it was left to Mostyn Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque on any poem in our tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus:

’Twas rollog; and the minim potes

Did mime and mimble in the cafe;

All footly were the Philerotes

And Daycadongs outstrafe....

Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!

The aims that rile, the art that racks,

Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun

The stumious Beerbomax!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod,

The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue,

Came piffling through the Headley Bod,

And flippered as it flew....

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF

from “The Yellow Book” Volume III

PAR LES DIEVX
JVMEAVX TOVS
LES MONSTRES
NE SONT PAS EN
AFRIQUE

As one turns over the pages of The Yellow Book today, it is a little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’s passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But it was a sensation. And that sensation flung wide the doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He enjoyed his fame with gusto. He revelled in it. And the ineffable and offensive conceit that it engendered in the lad was very excusable and understandable. He was lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere and enjoyed every ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good fortune that his fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours, was enhanced by an increase of health and strength that promised recovery from the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and waking. His musical childhood had taught him the value of publicity early—the whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means and at every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes he even felt a little ashamed of it—and of his Jackals. But his vogue now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody—and he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained.

It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even at the publishing of the second volume of The Yellow Book in July there was that which happened—had he had prophetic vision—that boded no good for the young fellow.

The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane fell in, and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane in sole possession of The Bodley Head—and The Yellow Book.

The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a twelvemonth was out.