THE TOILET
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces—we find silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the two drawings of The Rape of the Lock and The Battle of the Beaux and Belles it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of the thing.
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By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his state—he was about to learn the dread verdict.
The second number of The Savoy appeared in April, as a quarterly, and its charming cover-design of Choosing the New Hat screened a sad falling off in the output of the stricken man—for the number contained but the Footnote portrait of himself; the Third Tableau of “Das Rheingold” which he had probably already done before going to Brussels; a scene from The Rape of the Lock; and but one illustration to Under the Hill, the Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima; whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II—in all but four new drawings!
Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next—the third—number of The Savoy to appear in July, the driving of Cupid from the Garden, and worked upon the poem of the Ballad of a Barber, making the wonderful line drawing for it called The Coiffing, with a silhouette cul-de-lampe of Cupid with the gallows; but his body was rapidly breaking down.
On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change, wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that “Note” for the July Savoy, No. 3, announcing the end of Under the Hill—Beardsley has made his first surrender.
