This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself.
His expulsion from The Yellow Book was very bitterly resented by Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must be confessed that The Yellow Book at once became a stale farce played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter—Hamlet being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking, Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.
PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL
from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I
His expulsion from The Yellow Book placed Beardsley in a very awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings for The Yellow Book must have been but small at best; and it is a mystery how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been dangerously staunched by his expulsion from The Yellow Book.
The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for volume V of The Yellow Book, printed for April, but suppressed at the last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and craftsmanship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a new craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves in the later Yellow Book designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895, at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was about to astonish the world.
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The Yellow Book phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous Lady Gold’s Escort and The Wagnerites are the type, and of which The Nightpiece is the triumph—and a very thin delicate line, generally for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn head—of which the Mrs. Patrick Campbell is the type and L’Education sentimentale a variant—whilst the three remarkable Comedy-Ballets of Marionettes I, II, and III, show white masses used against black.