On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather on trust—the Morte d’Arthur and the Bon Mots were far from what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that Beardsley was but little known.
It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar Wilde—but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King Herod—but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the Morte d’Arthur, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play—and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power.
It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have been hard put to it to explain—it was a sort of philistine literary or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line is perhaps more obvious in the Salome drawings than in the Savoy, since the Salome designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are even so-called critics to be found who place the Salome drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!
Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the Salome drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional—grave or gay. But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor when he completed, the Salome, wherein his line is yet hesitant, thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the Salome against the genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In Salome he got all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in The Stomach Dance, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the Salome he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the Salome designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness—the groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective—all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the Morte d’Arthur, and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand—neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of Salome he had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of Salome he had found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite Burial of Salome in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was.
Salome finished, however, was not Salome published. Elkin Mathews and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be “difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum—however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the Title Page, and Enter Herodias were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, The Stomach Dance appeared without change—was accepted without demur by the public and in silence by the censorious—indeed the lasciviousness of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the Toilette of Salome, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very second-rate design of John and Salome, and in place of the two had been inserted the wretched Black Cape and Georgian Toilette which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and cheap conceit—for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any case, the mediocre Black Cape and the better Georgian Toilette, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.
THE STOMACH DANCE
from “Salome”
The interpolated Black Cape and the Second Toilette we may here dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they are wholly outside the Salome atmosphere. Of the pure Salome designs, incomparably the finest are The Stomach Dance and the Peacock Skirt. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he considered the best drawings to be The Man in the Moon, the Peacock Skirt, and The Dancer’s Reward—it should be noted by the way that Beardsley showed by his Book of Fifty Drawings that his title was The Man in the Moon not as the publishers have it, The Woman in the Moon. But it is in The Climax, one of the less noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride—for though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, drawn but a year before and shown in The Studio first number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.
We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling as The Neophyte. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage?