Sir,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath—a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours truly
Hal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to advertisement—the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt—before giving out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “masterpiece”—on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine to lash at him but at Harry Quilter—at the same time perhaps he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of bitter regret was at hand.
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Beardsley during his early Yellow Book phase, about the July of 1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for The Comedy Ballet of Marionettes which appeared in the July Yellow Book; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, The Comedy Ballet No. 1, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a Lady with a Mouse on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said—“I only use flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
