Aubrey Beardsley

by Haldane Macfall

VIII

THE GREAT PERIOD

Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four

“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES

1. “THE SAVOY”

It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show sympathy, far less to help.

But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For, at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday, Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.

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In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny—a man who proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work. Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung.

Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley lying on a couch—“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.” Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to The Yellow Book which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons. A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art. The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and in their keen interest in the erotic emotions—Arthur Symons had not hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet of a Night.”

Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of The Savoy for the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable his work to be produced on a larger scale.

FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”

The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and he was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement. What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of his art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of his publisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work whatsoever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made him a free man.

The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from The Yellow Book in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age—these drawings, clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly Venus between Terminal Gods, designed for his novel of Venus and Tannhäuser, better known as Under the Hill, and the exquisite Mirror of Love, or as it was also called Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of a Mirror. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm, orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom.

The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, gossip whispered and pursed the lip—but gave no clue. He came to London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of questionable morality—a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how—whilst the henchman held the absent-minded seller in converse—Smithers slipped out and resold it for several hundred pounds—and how, the book being bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his daring coup with Burton’s unexpurgated Arabian Nights, which was to be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday morning—returned to town with the scrip—and spent the rest of the evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for—it is gossiped—some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning correspondence. It had been touch and go.

THE MIRROR OF LOVE

Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith to usurp The Yellow Book. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more—or at any rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an “exaggeration” to his own advantage—Beardsley’s bank-books alone can verify or refute it—he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill. He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers was the most loyal and devoted friend he had.

A CATALOGUE COVER

A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, M. A. P., a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at Walton-on-Naze....”

You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world his footstool—no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a good friend as well as a publisher.”

Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public. There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his novel entitled in its bowdlerised form Under the Hill, and later to illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.

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Disgusted with The Yellow Book, Beardsley put his immediate past and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again begun to dog his steps.

Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with The Savoy due to appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th century, and at once his art burst into full song.

Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered Beardsley immersed in his work for The Savoy; but finds him now more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard at work upon his obscene novel Venus and Tannhäuser, the so-called Under the Hill, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and scribbling phrases as they came to him.

ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)

THE ABBE

The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of the Prudential.”

It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial minds—the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city and scholastic circles.

Under the Hill was published in mutilated form in the coming Savoy, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing—if indeed he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning—a sheer laboured stupidity, revealing nothing—a posset, a poultice of affectations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only value out of it—a real revelation of life—and it yields us nothing but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to express emotion—even though in halting fashion it does discover the real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.

THE FRUIT BEARERS

A CHRISTMAS CARD

As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing—better uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” “reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”—what Tree used wittily to call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publication is impossible.

This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that vex the age—he is concerned solely with his health or some business of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling fellows, not a sign!

It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that others published.

In Under the Hill Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul, so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé—it sounded more real to him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley—a hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament—it explains his art, his life, his vision—and it proves the cant of all who try to excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it.

THE THREE MUSICIANS

from “The Savoy” No. 1.

TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”

The story of Venus and Tannhäuser, bowdlerised as Under the Hill—by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for even Beardsley feared to write the Mons Veneris,—he seemed undecided as to which to call it—the story was without consequence, without cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe. He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one was there—to flit awhile into the room where the children danced—the sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes. He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a phrase—he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of The Three Musicians with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies, as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the translation from Catullus. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional act—he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings—it was a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were obsolete, a dead language—he is more concerned with dead words than with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot make it alive even for himself—he cannot fulfil a character in it or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street of fine clothes—there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He is not greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly concerned with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this akin to Oscar Wilde.

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It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the picture he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to Beardsley’s infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see the author of one of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, La Dame aux Camélias—Alexandre Dumas, fils.

COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” NO. 1

THE BILLET-DOUX

Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm.

Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be “unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all except in the atmosphere of its workshop.

He was now working keenly at The Savoy drawings and the illustrations for his bowdlerised Under the Hill, to be produced serially in that magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed, in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for The Yellow Book, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for The Savoy, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for December, The Savoy eventually had to be put off until the New Year; meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the famous sequence of masterpieces for The Rape of the Lock, announced for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March.

In January 1896 The Savoy appeared, and made a sensation in the art world only to be compared with the public sensation of The Yellow Book. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like beauty of the superb Title Page—the two black-masked figures in white before a dressing table—the deft witty verses of the naughty Three Musicians, the Bathers on Dieppe Beach, the three sumptuously rich designs of The Abbé, the Toilet of Helen, and The Fruit-bearers for the novel Under the Hill which began in this number, capped by the stately Christmas Card of The Madonna and Child lifted the new magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.

The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest, with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his Morte d’Arthur experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to The Rape of the Lock—masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, The New Star—with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of The Dream, the exquisite Billet-Doux, the Toilet, the Baron’s Prayer, and the magnificent Rape of the Lock and Battle of the Beaux and Belles.

THE TOILET

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces—we find silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the two drawings of The Rape of the Lock and The Battle of the Beaux and Belles it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of the thing.

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By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his state—he was about to learn the dread verdict.

The second number of The Savoy appeared in April, as a quarterly, and its charming cover-design of Choosing the New Hat screened a sad falling off in the output of the stricken man—for the number contained but the Footnote portrait of himself; the Third Tableau of “Das Rheingold” which he had probably already done before going to Brussels; a scene from The Rape of the Lock; and but one illustration to Under the Hill, the Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima; whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II—in all but four new drawings!

Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next—the third—number of The Savoy to appear in July, the driving of Cupid from the Garden, and worked upon the poem of the Ballad of a Barber, making the wonderful line drawing for it called The Coiffing, with a silhouette cul-de-lampe of Cupid with the gallows; but his body was rapidly breaking down.

On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change, wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that “Note” for the July Savoy, No. 3, announcing the end of Under the Hill—Beardsley has made his first surrender.

THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES

THE BARON’S PRAYER

So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition to alien peoples—it was London that found him, London that raised him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual home with him—clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture and to his books and the inspiration of his genius—the engravings after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was never happy at his work.

By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves as a Christmas Book—for which presumably was the fine Ali Baba in the Wood. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his “entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he bends all his powers on illustrating Lysistrata! and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings for the Lysistrata as would have made any man’s reputation—but alas! masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately. However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe, and the plagued man had to prepare for another move—it is a miracle that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately the world at large can never look upon—the Lysistrata. It is almost unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for publication—that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order—they utter the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion—their very mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself full well that the work was masterwork—“I have just completed a set of illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the Lysistrata should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that Beardsley reached the Lysistrata of Aristophanes through the French translation of Maurice Donnay—he was so anxious to assert that the purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The Lysistrata finished, he turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the Sixth Satire of Juvenal.

But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the mischief.” Beardsley found relief—in the Juvenal drawings! “I am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.

THE COIFFING

COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” NO. 4.

With the July number, No. 3, The Savoy became a monthly magazine; and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the Lysistrata sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August Savoy, No. 4—but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze curtain, in the same month that he drew the Lysistrata sequence, and that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world a hint of what it lost.

August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the September Savoy, No. 5, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of The Woman in White which he had made from the Bon Mots line drawing long before—there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white.

It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the issues of The Savoy so as to prevent a sense of monotony—we shall see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature. Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at least one. The full signatures on the Death of Pierrot and the Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings are the last signatures in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are about to see.

Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of the bleeding from the lungs—a train journey always upset him. He had to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.”

The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic Death of Pierrot that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design, so the powerful Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold” had to be used as a cover for the October Savoy No. 5. The Death of Pierrot is wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual literary beauty of its written legend.

COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” NO. 7.

FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”

September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s winter.

It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the first offices of The Savoy at Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already done, and their publication in an Album of Fifty Drawings, to appear in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the Death of Pierrot. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings. The fifty drawings were collected and chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September, the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive Bookplate of the Artist for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm, however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.

The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful Cover for the November Savoy, No. 7, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing Ave atque Vale or “Hail and Farewell” for the Carmen C I of Catullus, whilst the third illustration for the November Savoy, the small Tristan and Isolde, shows his interest maintained in the musical sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October, Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of Tannhäuser returning to the Horselberg, was trying to induce Beardsley at this time to illustrate the Pilgrim’s Progress for him. The month of October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am quite paralysed with fear,” he cries—“I have told no one of it. It’s so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to start on her American theatrical tour.

HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS

TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”

November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the achievement of this great period of his art—he writes that he has just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of Ernest Dowson’s, The Pierrot of the Minute” which was published in the following year of 1897—a grim irony that a boredom should have brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work, he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to avail anything.”

There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one design in particular of the several good designs in the Pierrot of the Minute, that “cul-de-lampe” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework—a tragic comment on the wonderful Headpiece when Pierrot holds up the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of human hands.

It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the appearance of his own Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line, “an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some reason difficult to plumb—it is neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this time for the Book of Fifty Drawings. It is a pathetically tragic thought that the November of the exquisite Pierrot of the Minute was for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”

It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published prints for the cover and the title-page of Evelina—of his “own early designing.”

The Savoy for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.

It was soon clear that the days of The Savoy were numbered and the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful A Répétition of Tristan and Isolde—and he flung into the number all the drawings he now made or had made for Das Rheingold, which included the marvellously decorative Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold, that “sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the unimportant fragments Flosshilde and Erda and Alberich, which he, as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of musicians, the Mendelssohn and the Weber; he somewhat fumbles with his Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar from that Don Juan of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the Mrs. Margery Pinchwife from Wycherley’s Country Wife; he very sadly disappoints us with his Count Valmont from Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out such high hopes; and he ends with Et in Arcadia Ego.

A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”

FRONTISPIECE

It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for The Savoy that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces that The Savoy is in future to be half-yearly and a much higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.

Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the appearance of The Book of Fifty Drawings which he had completed in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design—an afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.

The December Savoy, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, and Stendhal’s Adolphe....

On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing himself for The Idler”—the interview that appeared in that magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.

About Christmas his edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses was taking shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the 170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to each of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s enthusiasm. At this Yuletide appeared The Book of Fifty Drawings, in which for the first time were seen the Ali Baba in the Wood, the Bookplate of the Artist, and the Atalanta in Calydon with the hound. This book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own estimate of his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty best drawings; it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did not always know what was his best work. It is interesting to note that Beardsley includes the mediocre and commonplace Merlin in a circle, yet omits some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting in that Beardsley not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his early work, but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant that he would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it, certain definite drawings—he particularly forbade anything from the Scrap Book then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected Ross’s malicious thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to exchange good, and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces and inadequacies. And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my presence solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley was dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the temptation until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous betrayal. However that was not as yet.... Evidently, though the fifty drawings were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed one October drawing for something thrown out, for the October Ave atque Vale appears; and it may be that the Atalanta in Calydon with the hound, sometimes called Diana, and the Beardsley Bookplate together with the Self-portrait silhouette that makes the Finis to the Iconography, may have been done as late, and replaced other drawings. Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to the man who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very beginning—Joseph Pennell. It was the least he could do.

ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND

BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE

December had begun with more hope for Beardsley—his lung gave him little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than anything else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he felt he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would be “abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.” And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he was becoming quite hopeful again when—taking a walk about New Year’s Eve he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a dreadful state” before he could get any help. And he began the New Year with the bitter cry: “So it all begins over again. It’s so disheartening.” He had “collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to take him to some more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved.

******

So ended the great Savoy period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated to the span of twelve moons.