VII
THE GREEK VASE PHASE
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
Itwas 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 asLa Dame aux Camélias. The couch in hisstudio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much of his all too short life lying upon it.
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When Beardsley began theSalomedrawings 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 theSalomedesigns 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 hisSalomedrawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flungaway the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to make him famous.
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dameLA DAME AUX CAMÉLIASfrom “The Yellow Book,” Volume III
LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III
On the 15th of April 1894 appearedThe Yellow Book. It made Beardsley notorious.
In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl with the 3rd, the last, volume ofBon Mots; andMorte d’Arthurwas in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say thatSalomemade Beardsley famous.Salomewas an expensive book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing literary and artistic set, theMorte d’ArthurandSalomepassed quite unrecognised and unknown. ButSalomedid 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 ofThe Yellow Bookdeveloped 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 Bookquarterly, 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 wasdecided 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 discussedYellow Book.” This quarterly, to be calledThe Yellow Bookafter 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 theSalome, 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, theSalomeoff his hands, thatThe Yellow Bookwas 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 theSalomeinto the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime flung aside theMorte d’ArthurKelmscott 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 theMorte d’Arthurnow served him to splendidpurpose. 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 theGraphicandIllustrated 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 calledSt. 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’swas 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 WaterPot” 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’sBon Mots—however they may have been intended forThe FashionsandThe Dramapages ofSt. 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 hisSalomeJapanesque phase.
It is somewhat curious that, whilstThe Man that holds the Water Potis always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the fourth drawing he made forSt. Paul’sseems to have been missed by all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of it!
Before we leaveSt. 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 forSt. Paul’sand other papers.
messalinaMESSALINA
MESSALINA
It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew thePoster for the Avenue Theatrewhich 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 ofArms and the Manat 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 ofArms 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’sPlaysappeared about the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of a wide public.
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Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.
It was the publication ofThe Yellow Bookin 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, soThe Yellow Booklittered the London drawing-roomswith 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 Bookwas 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 thePall 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 potesDid mime and mimble in the cafe;All footly were the PhilerotesAnd Daycadongs outstrafe....Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!The aims that rile, the art that racks,Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shunThe 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....
’Twas rollog; and the minim potesDid mime and mimble in the cafe;All footly were the PhilerotesAnd Daycadongs outstrafe....Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!The aims that rile, the art that racks,Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shunThe 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....
’Twas rollog; and the minim potesDid mime and mimble in the cafe;All footly were the PhilerotesAnd Daycadongs outstrafe....
’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 shunThe stumious Beerbomax!
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....
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....
portraitPORTRAIT OF HIMSELFfrom “The Yellow Book” Volume IIIPAR LES DIEVXJVMEAVX TOVSLES MONSTRESNE SONT PAS ENAFRIQUE
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
from “The Yellow Book” Volume III
PAR LES DIEVXJVMEAVX TOVSLES MONSTRESNE SONT PAS ENAFRIQUE
As one turns over the pages ofThe Yellow Booktoday, it is a little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’spassions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But itwasa 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 ofThe Yellow Bookin 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—andThe Yellow Book.
The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a twelvemonth was out.
It was on the designs of this second volume ofThe Yellow Bookof July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; for, in theInvitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf Clubon Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given place to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.”
Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had no need to work—were above work. He liked to pose as one who did not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly appeared, he won an increase of notoriety—or obloquy, which was much the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that scared him—and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip. Meanwhile the Christmas number ofTodayproduced his very fine night-pieceLes Passades.
nightNIGHT PIECE
NIGHT PIECE
Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue—as playwright and wit and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in theSalome, with its erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellitesto go over to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship, and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified his condescension to that end—but the gross patronage of Wilde on the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an intimate—he never again sought to bask in the radiance.
To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a novel calledThe Green Carnationof which Wilde and his associates were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination. The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He sprang at opportunity—and struck hard. With the reckless courage so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he struck—and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at a state of elegant decay.
Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which brought Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde but to bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social pariah. On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and charged at Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial;and on the 3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April amidst the wild enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested the same evening.
On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow Street with a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch during the fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde and Taylor were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, on the 26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. After a case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed and the prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again refused. A week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail for £5,000; and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor was put on trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May the 20th, and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed. The following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began at the Old Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” and with Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour.
The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. The fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of mark with like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general scare set in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but it also caused a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a short while before been in truculent vogue....
John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume III ofThe Yellow Bookin October 1894 and volume IV in the January of 1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number,volume V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number bound, when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook society. The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend of Oscar Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the writers ofThe Yellow Book; but whatever the cause, John Lane who was in America was suddenly faced with an ultimatum—it was said that one of his chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened that without further ado either he or Beardsley must leaveThe Yellow Bookat once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not alone but had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her vogue, with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits of the storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John Lane in his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet was a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, and anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. It may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship was solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a most unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts of moral cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling BeardsleyThe Yellow Bookwas doomed—it at once declined, and though it struggled on, it went to annihilation and foundered.
This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage indeserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself.
His expulsion fromThe Yellow Bookwas very bitterly resented by Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must be confessed thatThe Yellow Bookat once became a stale farce played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter—Hamletbeing attempted without the Prince of Denmark.
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking, Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.
campbellPORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELLfrom “The Yellow Book,” Volume I
PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL
from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I
His expulsion fromThe Yellow Bookplaced Beardsley in a very awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings forThe Yellow Bookmust have been but small at best; and it is a mystery how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been dangerously staunched by his expulsion fromThe Yellow Book.
The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for volume V ofThe Yellow Book, printed for April, but suppressed at the last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and craftsmanship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a new craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves in the laterYellow Bookdesigns. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895, at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was about to astonish the world.
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The Yellow Bookphase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famousLady Gold’s EscortandThe Wagneritesare the type, and of which The Nightpiece is the triumph—and a very thin delicate line, generally for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn head—of which theMrs. Patrick Campbellis the type andL’Education sentimentalea variant—whilst the three remarkableComedy-Ballets of Marionettes I, II, and III, show white masses used against black.
Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time inmid-1894 in the July volume, No. 2, ofThe Yellow Book. ThePlays of John Davidson, severalMadame Réjanes, the fineLes Passades, theScarlet Pastorale, and theTales of Mystery and Wonderby Edgar Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894Yellow Bookphase.
But in the third volume ofThe Yellow Book, the fanciful and delightful portrait ofThe Artist in bed, “Par les dieux jumeaux tous les monstres ne sont pas en Afrique,” and the famousLa Dame aux Caméliasstanding before her dressing table, advance his handling in freedom and rhythm; as does the exquisiteThe Mysterious Rose Garden, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of Biblical illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than theAnnunciation”—indeed he could not understand the objections of the prudish to it and resented its being misunderstood! TheMessalina with her Companionis of this laterYellow Bookphase; and theAtalanta without the houndof the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example of it.
The beautifully wroughtPierrot Invitation Cardfor John Lane; the remarkable wash drawingsA Nocturne of Chopinfrom the suppressed Volume Five, and theChopin, Ballade III Op. 47ofThe Studio, all drawn on the eve of his expulsion fromThe Yellow Book, show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the double-pageJuvenalof the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair, he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change, as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that followed Beardsley’s expulsion fromThe Yellow Book; for, being commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews forAn Evil Motherhood, Beardsley promptly sent the rejectedBlack Cape, of the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only underthe dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley made the now famous design of theEvil Motherhoodin which he entirely breaks fromThe Yellow Bookconvention and craftsmanship, and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.
roseTHE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDENfrom “The Yellow Book” Volume IV
THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN
from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV
It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion fromThe Yellow Bookthat trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’sPostersfor Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a mediocre poster forThe Pseudonym Library, a woman in a street opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finestPosterhe ever designed—a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in black and purple, forChristmas Books—all three ofThe Yellow Bookphase.
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There happened at this time soon after his expulsion fromThe Yellow Book, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s life—an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by.
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance—and it was a regret to me that it so chanced—it fell to my lot to have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for it, ’tis true—had clamoured for it—and yet resented others saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, wasin full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of Wilde—I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitledThe Decay of English Art, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”—whichwas not at all typical of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.
designDESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD
DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD
Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him, cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply; and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the Press. He wrote a letter to the editor ofSt. Paul’s; and the editor, Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:
114 Cambridge StreetS. W.June 28thSir, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.”As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.Yours &cAubrey Beardsley
114 Cambridge StreetS. W.June 28th
Sir, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.”
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
Yours &cAubrey Beardsley
This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right toanswer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be published—that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in seeking self-advertisement—but I was the last man in the world to allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with “Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply at the same time, as follows:
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.Sir,When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath—a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist in it.Yours trulyHal Dane.July 3rd 1895
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.
Sir,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath—a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours trulyHal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to thefact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to advertisement—the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt—before giving out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “masterpiece”—on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine to lashat himbut at Harry Quilter—at the same time perhaps he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him apassage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of bitter regret was at hand.
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Beardsley during his earlyYellow Bookphase, about the July of 1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs forThe Comedy Ballet of Marionetteswhich appeared in the JulyYellow Book; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes,The Comedy Ballet No. 1, in William Nicholson’s manner.He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted aLady with a Mouseon the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said—“I only use flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
scarletTHE SCARLET PASTORALE
THE SCARLET PASTORALE
It is as likely as not that his attempt to paintThe Comedy Ballet Iin oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement for Geraudel’s Pastilles—as well as I can remember—which first appeared inLe Courier Françaison February 17th, 1895. It was a wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men in that realm—Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was essentially “in the small.”
For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dismissal fromThe Yellow Book, John Lane whilst in America during the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at hisLady Gold’s Escortand hisWagnerites.... The decadent fad can’t long stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant wonder that theDaily Chronicleasked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offendedBeardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but who still more resented this desire to show him as being really “quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested, not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist—he was none. A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”
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At a loose end, on his expulsion fromThe Yellow Book, Beardsley drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated callingVenus and Tannhäuser—it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state asUnder the Hill—a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings forThe Yellow Book, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art.
The smallness of the page ofThe Yellow Bookhad galled him by compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him; it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid as though he knew he had but a short way to go.
atalantaATALANTA
ATALANTA
Baron Verdigriswas the transition from theMorte d’Arthurphaseto theYellow Bookor Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler asThe Fat Womanwas the transition from his Greek vase stage;Black Coffeethe end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations ofThe Yellow Bookpage and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own.
He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street, with his sister, when expelled fromThe Yellow Book. It was about this time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent movement and became a Roman Catholic priest—the friendship soon became more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was to have a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published Beardsley’s letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and were soon very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this time. Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,” from which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was from the first bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes and artistic temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, soon we find Gray priming the young fellow with arguments to refute his “Anglican” friends.
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The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley withThe Yellow Book, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, orwhether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion fromThe Yellow Bookand all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at 114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.
He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.
AndThe Yellow Bookwent on without him, to die a long lingering ignoble death.
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Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of 1895—and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original art of astounding power. It was the proof of theVenus between Terminal Gods. A little while later was to be seen the exquisiteMirror of Love, wrought just before theVenus between Terminal Gods. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.