It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the first offices of The Savoy at Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already done, and their publication in an Album of Fifty Drawings, to appear in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the Death of Pierrot. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings. The fifty drawings were collected and chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September, the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive Bookplate of the Artist for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm, however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.
The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful Cover for the November Savoy, No. 7, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing Ave atque Vale or “Hail and Farewell” for the Carmen C I of Catullus, whilst the third illustration for the November Savoy, the small Tristan and Isolde, shows his interest maintained in the musical sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October, Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of Tannhäuser returning to the Horselberg, was trying to induce Beardsley at this time to illustrate the Pilgrim’s Progress for him. The month of October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am quite paralysed with fear,” he cries—“I have told no one of it. It’s so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to start on her American theatrical tour.
HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS
TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”
November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the achievement of this great period of his art—he writes that he has just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of Ernest Dowson’s, The Pierrot of the Minute” which was published in the following year of 1897—a grim irony that a boredom should have brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work, he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to avail anything.”
There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one design in particular of the several good designs in the Pierrot of the Minute, that “cul-de-lampe” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework—a tragic comment on the wonderful Headpiece when Pierrot holds up the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of human hands.
It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the appearance of his own Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line, “an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some reason difficult to plumb—it is neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this time for the Book of Fifty Drawings. It is a pathetically tragic thought that the November of the exquisite Pierrot of the Minute was for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”
It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published prints for the cover and the title-page of Evelina—of his “own early designing.”