Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his art—the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and Burne-Jones at this very time—Whistler had published his Gentle Art of Making Enemies in 1890, and London had not recovered from its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but his eager eyes were quick to see.
However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.
And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris—or Beardsley; but his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted boy’s cause.
Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement. Next—and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting fact—Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse—probably not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the society of the great—his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him—only doing it with an air and dressing well for the part.
Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy—they even lack manhood—they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelligence.
However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott books—he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then anxious to produce—Sidonia the Sorceress. Vallance leaped at the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a ridiculous pill.
We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but mediocrity—a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know—and to achieve. Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling it—far less any of his sponsors. And yet!——
Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival publication to the Kelmscott Press—he was to smash it to pieces and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point—and Frederick Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful nor attractive, but probably trying to find something to praise, at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”—and so saying he dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care for his drawings—he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again—and he could never be induced to go.
Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused to go, and Vallance went alone—but that is another story. For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in the doing—one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for ever—desert the night-school at Westminster—burn his boats behind him—and launch on his destiny as an artist.