Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his “Morte d’Arthur,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the work.
Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of any consequence—he was utterly unknown—and his superb master-work that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a trifle old for studentship—he was twenty before he made a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind—of what was expected of him.
At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.
Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott tradition, took the drawing to Dent—the elaborate and now famous Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as The Achieving of the San Grael, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the Morte d’Arthur.
Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; and the design is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.” It is his first use of the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark” is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for three candles and three flames—a baser explanation was given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all that Beardsley did.
Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the Morte d’Arthur, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter, in the June of 1893—the second volume in 1894.
So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking—to mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval woodcut and—to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the public—Lewis C. Hind.
******
Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of Bon Mots by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and Morte d’Arthur mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the Bon Mots he made no pretence of illustration—the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But the severe conditions and limitations of the Morte d’Arthur page held Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were the finest education in art that he ever went through—for he taught himself craftsmanship as he went in the Morte d’Arthur. It made him.
One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for the Bon Mots to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black decorations of the mediæval Morte d’Arthur put upon Beardsley for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career depended on those designs for the Morte d’Arthur, and he strove to reach his full powers in making them.