On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even more eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought to have the right to beg for a few months more of life—“Don’t think me foolish to haggle about a few months”—as he has two or three pictured short stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, Wednesday the 31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church—on the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the Sacrament which had to be brought to him, to his great grief, since he could not go to the Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.”
There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art from his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual upheaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been drawing the designs for Mademoiselle de Maupin, or indeed steeping in that novel at all, or drawing the Arbuscula. For months he has been led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church; yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on Under the Hill! and drawn the designs for Lysistrata and the Juvenal! not five months since he has drawn his Bookplate! And by the grim irony of circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that there appeared in The Idler his confession: “To my mind there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have the sun shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March Idler by Lawrence, one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the framework and then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in the details, was as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend John Gray, written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just departing. That interview will therefore remain always as an important evidence by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It is true that he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having despatched it, was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I have not said too many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute to the complexity of the human soul that the correspondence with the poet-priest John Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are hidden from us, was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to Rome, he was lending him books and interesting him in books, side by side with lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their fellowship with the saints.
Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a week after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, staying a day or two at the Windsor Hotel—a happy halt for Beardsley as his friend John Gray was there to meet him—and crossed to France, where on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel Voltaire, quai Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted mother. Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. He loved to be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in May he was reading The Hundred and One Nights for the first time, and inspired by it, drew his famous Cover for Ali Baba, a masterpiece of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure resplendent with gems—as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous design.”
Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the prospect of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sunshine. He felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he was soon able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again—perhaps it had been better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to the sun. There was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beardsley’s return from America and their early meeting. He could now write from a café: “I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though he could not get a sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove which, being shut off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a sitting-room and thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room—he could forget he was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a lift, the waiters would carry him up stairs—he could not risk the climbing. And the bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal joy to him.
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES”
With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his new religion; reads works of piety, and—goes on his way poring over naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out of his room awhile—talks even of getting strong again quite soon.
But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of his room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the following day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him. A month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised; and Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its picturesqueness—indeed St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to inspire him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the air was to make a new man of him.
The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had secured him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celebrities. And the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St. Germain, upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cautioned care.
Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye, where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch by assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet—if he went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth and the South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St. Germain. However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a walk in the forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s creaking body. The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of the lungs started again and made him wretched. The arrival of his sister, however, was a delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his delicious waggery that she showed only occasional touches of “an accent which I am sure she has only acquired since she left America.” His health at once improved with his better spirits.