By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done with the Morte d’Arthur; and it was only by the incessant prayers and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping himself in study of phallic worship—and when all’s said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early.
It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the decorations he wanted for the Morte d’Arthur in the young fellow’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end of the year of 1892, to which half year the Morte d’Arthur almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as search the book that the Morte d’Arthur was never completed—we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once—but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration.
There appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine for June 1893, drawn in April 1893, as the first Studio number was appearing, a design known as The Neophyte, or to give its full affected name, “Of a Neophyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called The Kiss of Judas—both drawings reveal an unmistakable change in handling, and the Neophyte a remarkable firmness of andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the Morte d’Arthur and kindred works in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through it—it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities.
“OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED
UNTO HIM”
It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling as The Neophyte. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious to the lay mind a little further on.
It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it for months—indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy line” called The Questing Beast is dated by Beardsley himself “March 8, 1893”—as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time the Morte d’Arthur began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.
The two cover-designs for The Studio No. I in April 1893 were obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the Morte d’Arthur—in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the Morte d’Arthur drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.
There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the Morte d’Arthur on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with:
There was a young man with a salary