Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-One
“SALOME”
Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the edge of manhood.
We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque Caricature of Whistler on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time.
Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of the early part of 1893—at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the Salome founded frankly upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of Whistler have been delayed for two years?
But—as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this time revealed to the seeing eye—it was now to the work of the better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on.
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It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to publish the Morte d’Arthur in parts in the June of 1893, as it had called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The young fellow leaped at it—not only as giving him scope for fantastic designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley had made—either on reading the French edition, or on reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in the February of 1893—illustrating the lines that raised so hot a controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the birth of The Studio in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.
Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for Salome.
Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day—they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on producing belles lettres in an attractive and picturesque form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack publishers.