[5] The Renaissance of the Nineties, by W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, p. 29. 1911.
This charming personality stood him in good stead when the Beardsley craze burst upon London. He had literally set the Thames on fire. It was in 1894, when he became art editor of The Yellow Book (which I discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. His poster for Dr. John Todhunter’s The Comedy of Sighs, at the Avenue Theatre, a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink dress standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid commercial advertising. Punch parodied ‘The Blessed Damozel’ with a new version of lauds for ‘The Beardsley Girl.’ A famous tea-shop exploited the type of female beauty.
Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé was illustrated by the newly arrived young artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or more often belittled it. The new art magazine, The Studio, not only raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the black and white art of the world. He was to be at once accepted in Paris. He was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or less detrimentally dozens of good artists.
Yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming personality in the least. He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted to enjoy life.
Max Beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend, in which he says: ‘For him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are near their close, every hour—every minute, even—had its value. His drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading—these things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. He was an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and seldom when he was in London did he miss a “Wagner night” at Covent Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind.... He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’ In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was at home and happy. ‘I am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in Paris.’ And it was Beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him—a world of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social parasites and gullible idiots. He always had an engaging smile that was delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible.
After he vacated The Yellow Book art editorship, and The Savoy had been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher. There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had a courage of his own—a courage great enough to issue The Ballad of Reading Gaol when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. It was Smithers who issued The Savoy, the two books of Fifty Drawings, The Rape of the Lock, The Pierrot of the Minute, the designs for Mademoiselle de Maupin, and among others the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897), and A Second Book of Fifty Drawings (1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature Le Morte d’Arthur series. For when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful method of design. Indeed, the Salomé decorations (1894) had bridged this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of The Rape of the Lock (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he ‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it—I mean it.”’
In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in the Le Morte d’Arthur series. For example, the true Beardsley type of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley:
Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes pâlies?
Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté
Met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies?
They belong to the same world as the women of Toulouse Lautrec, Rops, Odélon Redon, Bayros, and Rassenfosse—the type known as la loupeuse insatiable et cupide. They move and have their being in French erotica and novels like La Faustine.
Beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with The Rape of the Lock and The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, and of the two the palm should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. No one has yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some day, when the kinship between Beardsley and those old Greek Masters who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this truism may also come to light. It is unlikely, however, to become revealed until Aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar tongue, for not even the most generous Editor in his monumental edition has essayed that impertinence to Mrs. Grundy. The illustrations or rather critical decorations of Beardsley are also not likely to become generally circulated to all because of their frankness. For phallism is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. But unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the Lysistrata, as every scholar knows. Beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating Aristophanes and not Donnay’s French version of the same. And never was he more cynical or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect; never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity. He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists Rowlandson and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil dying wanted to destroy his Æneids, and Beardsley in articulo mortis wrote ‘to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bawdy drawings.’ Yet he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his Erotische Kunst has to say: ‘Beardsley is specially to be noticed for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. No harsh or discordant notes, no violent tones. On the contrary, a wheedling finesse. In some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time incarnate.’ Beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an Alfred Kubin or to the tone of certain of Bayros’s designs. He was neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like Rassenfosse or any one else who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. In his Juvenal drawings (1897), his five Lucian sketches (1894), and the Lysistrata (1896) he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via, I believe, those wonderful Greek vase designers[6] which he, so assiduous a haunter of the British Museum, must have not only seen, but revelled in. But of these the best and freest are the Lysistrata conceptions; and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to receive.