THE GREAT PERIOD
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four
“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES
1. “THE SAVOY”
It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show sympathy, far less to help.
But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For, at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday, Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.
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In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny—a man who proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work. Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung.
Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley lying on a couch—“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.” Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to The Yellow Book which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons. A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art. The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and in their keen interest in the erotic emotions—Arthur Symons had not hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet of a Night.”
Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of The Savoy for the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable his work to be produced on a larger scale.