FOREWORD
Aboutthe 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 Bookhad 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 fromThe 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 fromThe 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 calledThe Savoy—and was soon to begin work on the superb designs forThe 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 catplays 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 ofThe 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.