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LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III
On the 15th of April 1894 appeared The Yellow Book. It made Beardsley notorious.
In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl with the 3rd, the last, volume of Bon Mots; and Morte d’Arthur was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that Salome made Beardsley famous. Salome was an expensive book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the Morte d’Arthur and Salome passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But Salome did lead to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye.
Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of The Yellow Book developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes—to answer in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have fired a publisher. The Yellow Book quarterly, however, was a very different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth Club, founded the much discussed Yellow Book.” This quarterly, to be called The Yellow Book after the conventional name of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each number—not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the one on the other.
Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the Salome, as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of 1894, the Salome off his hands, that The Yellow Book was planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the Salome into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime flung aside the Morte d’Arthur Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it—through books—and he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done—employing line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the Morte d’Arthur now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world—he took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else—but we are coming to that.
It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German, Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic weekly, Pick-Me-Up, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the Graphic and Illustrated London News.” Struck by some article attacking the art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called St. Paul’s. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac—(remember, St. Paul’s was to begin as a monthly!)—and to illustrate the subjects to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “Man that holds the Water Pot” and the “Music,” but the paper did not appear in January—indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably meant for Dent’s Bon Mots—however they may have been intended for The Fashions and The Drama pages of St. Paul’s. He made in all four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I “might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value, however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of 1894—they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked increase of power over line—they end his Salome Japanesque phase.
It is somewhat curious that, whilst The Man that holds the Water Pot is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the fourth drawing he made for St. Paul’s seems to have been missed by all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of it!