With the July number, No. 3, The Savoy became a monthly magazine; and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the Lysistrata sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August Savoy, No. 4—but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze curtain, in the same month that he drew the Lysistrata sequence, and that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world a hint of what it lost.
August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the September Savoy, No. 5, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of The Woman in White which he had made from the Bon Mots line drawing long before—there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white.
It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the issues of The Savoy so as to prevent a sense of monotony—we shall see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature. Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at least one. The full signatures on the Death of Pierrot and the Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings are the last signatures in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are about to see.
Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of the bleeding from the lungs—a train journey always upset him. He had to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.”
The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic Death of Pierrot that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design, so the powerful Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold” had to be used as a cover for the October Savoy No. 5. The Death of Pierrot is wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual literary beauty of its written legend.
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” NO. 7.
FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”
September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s winter.