Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts—or rather contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the Salome drawings for instance have appeared in the Morte d’Arthur? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high achievement would have suffered—and Death was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure? Of the 544 or so decorations for the Morte d’Arthur, several are repeated—some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for the Morte d’Arthur, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay his pound of flesh....
Even before Beardsley was done with Salome, he had exhausted the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has to evolve a Title-page, a List of Contents, and a Finis; and we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of Salome, weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his Morte d’Arthur designs again, he was about to burst into a new song as hinted at by the last three designs for Salome. An artist is finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.
TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”
About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,” which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a new venture about to appear. For The Yellow Book is the only contract that emerges out of this time.
It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they took their scheme to John Lane.
Whilst at work on the Salome, Beardsley began the long series of decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as The Keynote Series of novels, published on the heels of the wide success of Keynotes by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.
And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art Club.
Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their little home—a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.
