Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in mid-1894 in the July volume, No. 2, of The Yellow Book. The Plays of John Davidson, several Madame Réjanes, the fine Les Passades, the Scarlet Pastorale, and the Tales of Mystery and Wonder by Edgar Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 Yellow Book phase.
But in the third volume of The Yellow Book, the fanciful and delightful portrait of The Artist in bed, “Par les dieux jumeaux tous les monstres ne sont pas en Afrique,” and the famous La Dame aux Camélias standing before her dressing table, advance his handling in freedom and rhythm; as does the exquisite The Mysterious Rose Garden, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of Biblical illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the Annunciation”—indeed he could not understand the objections of the prudish to it and resented its being misunderstood! The Messalina with her Companion is of this later Yellow Book phase; and the Atalanta without the hound of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example of it.
The beautifully wrought Pierrot Invitation Card for John Lane; the remarkable wash drawings A Nocturne of Chopin from the suppressed Volume Five, and the Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47 of The Studio, all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from The Yellow Book, show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the double-page Juvenal of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair, he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change, as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that followed Beardsley’s expulsion from The Yellow Book; for, being commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for An Evil Motherhood, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected Black Cape, of the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only under the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley made the now famous design of the Evil Motherhood in which he entirely breaks from The Yellow Book convention and craftsmanship, and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.
THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN
from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV
It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from The Yellow Book that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s Posters for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a mediocre poster for The Pseudonym Library, a woman in a street opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest Poster he ever designed—a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in black and purple, for Christmas Books—all three of The Yellow Book phase.
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There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from The Yellow Book, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s life—an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by.
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance—and it was a regret to me that it so chanced—it fell to my lot to have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for it, ’tis true—had clamoured for it—and yet resented others saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of Wilde—I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled The Decay of English Art, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”—which was not at all typical of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.