THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES
THE BARON’S PRAYER
So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition to alien peoples—it was London that found him, London that raised him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual home with him—clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture and to his books and the inspiration of his genius—the engravings after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was never happy at his work.
By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves as a Christmas Book—for which presumably was the fine Ali Baba in the Wood. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his “entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he bends all his powers on illustrating Lysistrata! and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings for the Lysistrata as would have made any man’s reputation—but alas! masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately. However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe, and the plagued man had to prepare for another move—it is a miracle that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately the world at large can never look upon—the Lysistrata. It is almost unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for publication—that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order—they utter the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion—their very mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself full well that the work was masterwork—“I have just completed a set of illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the Lysistrata should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that Beardsley reached the Lysistrata of Aristophanes through the French translation of Maurice Donnay—he was so anxious to assert that the purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The Lysistrata finished, he turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the Sixth Satire of Juvenal.
But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the mischief.” Beardsley found relief—in the Juvenal drawings! “I am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.
THE COIFFING
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” NO. 4.