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The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with The Yellow Book, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from The Yellow Book and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at 114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.
He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.
And The Yellow Book went on without him, to die a long lingering ignoble death.
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Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of 1895—and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original art of astounding power. It was the proof of the Venus between Terminal Gods. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite Mirror of Love, wrought just before the Venus between Terminal Gods. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.
TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” NOS. 1 AND 2