INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE”
Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly in reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the editor of his new magazine The Peacock and should design the cover and whatever else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one unswerving condition, and but one—that “it is quite agreed that Oscar Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudonymously or otherwise.” The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s detestation of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public eye, is the more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the Church of Rome with much publicity. Beardsley would not have Wilde in any association with him at any price.... Before Beardsley leaves the subject of The Peacock he undertakes to design “a resplendent peacock in black and white” and reminds Smithers that he has “already some fine wash drawings” of his from which he can choose designs for the first number of the magazine. So that we at least know that this first number of The Peacock was to have had a resplendent peacock in black and white for its cover, and that it was to have been adorned with the superb decorations for Mademoiselle de Maupin, the supreme artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent skill. He outstripped in beauty of handling even his already exquisite craftsmanship: and it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that he was to die before he had given the world the further fulfilment of his wondrous artistry—leaving us wondering as to what further heights he might have scaled.
Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in his “aquatint” style, were his supreme achievement.
We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off Bond Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the Mademoiselle de Maupin, at Beardsley’s request, which had been beautifully reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley himself realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a mark in watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings.
But the gods had willed that it should not be.
Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to the planning of his prospectuses—he watched over them with fatherly anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture of The Peacock, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers, should not be produced “unless you have piles of stuff up your editorial sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis his ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions of the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns of The Yellow Book and even The Savoy. “The thing,” he writes, “must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas about everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little backbone-less babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical infinitely more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory genius (especially when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives in more detail his mature attitude towards literature: “On the literary side, impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness should be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount. Let verse be printed very sparingly.... I should advise you to let Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together a staff. Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something to say.”... And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and antipathies in art—“On the art side, I suggest that it should attack untiringly and unflinchingly the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediæval business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of what picture making should be.”
There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed, his limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn confession of his artistic faith.
X
THE END