ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE
1897 to the End—Twenty-Five
II. THE AQUATINTESQUES
So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley was now twenty-four and a half years of age—the great Savoy achievement at an end.
The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897 came in amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of carrying on The Savoy had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition was so serious at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier View to a house called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where the change seemed to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He was very funny about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little from the name of this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he writes whimsically. He began to find so much relief at Muriel, notwithstanding, that he was soon planning to have rooms in London again—at Manchester Street.
THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY
By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was “sketching out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with Boussod Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his Frontispiece for Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, for which he was now making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style of the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done—scant wonder that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after reproduce his works!—he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous Bookplate for Miss Custance, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, and he also designed the Arbuscula for Gaston Vuillier’s History of Dancing. For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in Beardsley’s keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by death one of the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they hold, the subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that suffuses them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering display of Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he should have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man.
Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding had almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully, and made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two afterwards he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sunshine makes the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire and dreads to go out. “At present my mind is divided between the fear of getting too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough sunshine, or rather warmth near home.” But the doctors had evidently said more to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided now and in future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of February saw his doctor take him out to a concert—a great joy to the stricken man—and no harm done.
In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to draw. He also started a short story The Celestial Lover, for which he was making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March turned cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed a serious lip over his promise to let him go up to town—to Beardsley’s bitter disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South—if only even to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in his room were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months now.” Yet a day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in all directions are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with cold winds, and bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted fellow amongst the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made pair of boots.... I think of the past winter and autumn with unrelieved bitterness.” The move to London for the South was at last decided upon, for the first week in April—to the South of France by easy stages. He knew now that he could never be cured, but he hoped that the ravages of the disease could be prevented from becoming rapid.