The Savoy for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.
It was soon clear that the days of The Savoy were numbered and the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful A Répétition of Tristan and Isolde—and he flung into the number all the drawings he now made or had made for Das Rheingold, which included the marvellously decorative Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold, that “sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the unimportant fragments Flosshilde and Erda and Alberich, which he, as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of musicians, the Mendelssohn and the Weber; he somewhat fumbles with his Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar from that Don Juan of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the Mrs. Margery Pinchwife from Wycherley’s Country Wife; he very sadly disappoints us with his Count Valmont from Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out such high hopes; and he ends with Et in Arcadia Ego.
A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”
FRONTISPIECE
It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for The Savoy that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces that The Savoy is in future to be half-yearly and a much higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.
Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the appearance of The Book of Fifty Drawings which he had completed in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design—an afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.
The December Savoy, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, and Stendhal’s Adolphe....
On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing himself for The Idler”—the interview that appeared in that magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.