Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his debt to Greece through Anning Bell.
We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s Evelina and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for Hawthorne’s Tales and Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.
Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the Rape of the Lock and The Savoy for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once—we are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the more a marvel—almost a miracle.
It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the decoration of the Morte d’Arthur with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds drawn, and London asleep—poured them forth in that secret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley worked—he was everywhere—but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that art.
Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only sketch he made for the completed design—when the pen and ink had next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber. The well-known pencil sketch of A Girl owned by Mr. Evans shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough rhythm of his scrawls.
A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight; as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to recognition.
Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs—than from any record by eyewitnesses—that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study—that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a whole—that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design—and then inked in the pen-line and masses.
PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD
Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”