It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive—and they forgave Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts men.
On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover design for The Studio from the much gratified youth, who went home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire—here was réclame! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in the first number of The Studio after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in his several styles—the Japanesque, and the mediæval Morte d’Arthur blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many—he gave it just and fair and full value.
All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness to the first number of The Studio in bringing him before the public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did contain very remarkable work—at the same time it was scarcely world-shattering—and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art—and all of us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction won through—and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down and died.
The first number of The Studio did not appear until the April of 1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around The Studio that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. The Studio itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world—and a very narrow inner circle at that—where The Studio caused any talk, and Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a somewhat dinted toy—we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so—he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at the New Year had gone from The Studio offices to edit the Pall Mall Budget, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the most wretched drawings imaginable—drawings without one redeeming shred of value—work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that were decorating the Morte d’Arthur, which however the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for Morte d’Arthur were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in the Pall Mall Budget. The first volume of Bon Mots appeared in the April of 1893—the Sydney Smith and Sheridan volume—although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was pretty poor stuff.
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Now, though the Morte d’Arthur was in large part done before The Studio eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in The Studio article. There are examples from the Morte d’Arthur, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Mantegna called The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year gone by when he made it—so far had he now advanced beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly Morte d’Arthur decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The Siegfried Act II of mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry—it is his typically early or “hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The Birthday of Madame Cigale and Les Revenants de Musique show the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to Le Debris d’un Poète and La Femme Incomprise. But there was also a Japanesque in The Studio which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893 in French the play called Salome by Oscar Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in The Studio which was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the destined illustrator of the English Salome, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that Salome was to be a marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley.
It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of The Studio, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy design of this Salome drawing to the more severe and restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed.
Note also another fact: The title of the article published in The Studio first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his work—the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pencil drawing of Sandro Botticelli made in 1893 about the time that The Studio was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the year before.
Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is dead—and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.
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