Chapter C: B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at Brighton; and at (2)

Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs--than from any record by eyewitnesses--that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study--that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a whole--that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design--and then inked in the pen-line and masses.

Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”

Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on which stood two tall tapering candlesticks--the candlesticks without which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose whereon to lean for reputation.

* * * * *

His rapid increase of power--and one now begins to understand Vallance’s enthusiasm--induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let him have a printed proof from the _Morte d’Arthur_ of _The Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur_ to show to Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris.

Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an angry remonstrance to Dent.

_from “Le Morte D’Arthur”_]

How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_ were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the music die in him unsung.

William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival him in his “mediæval fake”--find himself--and give to the world in _The Savoy_ a series of decorations that have made his name immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an elaborate boredom.

* * * * *

Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s _Shaving of Shagpat_--a desire to which he returned and on which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.

However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely--here he could use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy _Morte d’Arthur_ convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque vein for _Bon Mots_, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him.

* * * * *

Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every hand his life long.

The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of _The Art Journal_, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together--and in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis Hind--and _The Studio_, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset--Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair as _his_ best asset.

So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced” pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in the style of Phil May--a pallid silent young man, but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful--with the inevitable black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for _Le Morte_ _d’Arthur_, the _Siegfried Act II_, the _Birthday of Madame Cigale_--_Les Revenants de Musique_--“Some _Salome_ drawings”--with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for the _Morte d’Arthur_. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the _Salome_ drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of _The Studio_ published three months later. Wilde’s _Salome_ did not see print until February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.

However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, _The Studio_, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to _The Studio_ offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.

Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley abroad--and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and was launching a new monthly to be called _The Pall Mall Magazine_. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, asked Hind to become editor of the weekly _Budget_ at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command of _The Studio_ in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the _Pall Mall Budget_, for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind.

So the first number of _The Studio_ was to appear in the April of 1893 glorifying a wonderful youth--his name Aubrey Beardsley!

* * * * *

It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive--and they forgave Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts men.

On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover design for _The Studio_ from the much gratified youth, who went home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire--here was _réclame_! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in the first number of _The Studio_ after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in his several styles--the Japanesque, and the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many--he gave it just and fair and full value.

All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness to the first number of _The Studio_ in bringing him before the public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did contain very remarkable work--at the same time it was scarcely world-shattering--and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art--and all of us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction won through--and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down and died.

The first number of _The Studio_ did not appear until the April of 1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around _The Studio_ that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. _The Studio_ itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world--and a very narrow inner circle at that--where _The Studio_ caused any talk, and Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a somewhat dinted toy--we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so--he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at the New Year had gone from _The Studio_ offices to edit the _Pall Mall Budget_, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the most wretched drawings imaginable--drawings without one redeeming shred of value--work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that were decorating the _Morte d’Arthur_, which however the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for _Morte d’Arthur_ were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in the _Pall Mall Budget_. The first volume of _Bon Mots_ appeared in the April of 1893--the _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_ volume--although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was pretty poor stuff.

* * * * *

Now, though the _Morte d’Arthur_ was in large part done before _The Studio_ eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in _The Studio_ article. There are examples from the _Morte d’Arthur_, of which the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most mediocre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Mantegna called _The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans_ was curiously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year gone by when he made it--so far had he now advanced beyond this commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly _Morte d’Arthur_ decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can scarce be blamed. The _Siegfried Act II_ of mid-1892, which Beardsley had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne-Jonesesque mimicry--it is his typically early or “hairy-line” Japanesque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The _Birthday of Madame_ _Cigale_ and _Les Revenants de Musique_ show the Japanesque more asserting itself over the mock mediæval, and are akin to _Le Debris d’un Poète_ and _La Femme Incomprise_. But there was also a Japanesque in _The Studio_ which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893 in French the play called _Salome_ by Oscar Wilde, which made an extraordinary sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.” Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque drawing, just in time to be included in _The Studio_ which was to appear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the destined illustrator of the English _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that _Salome_ was to be a marvellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley.

It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of _The Studio_, the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy design of this _Salome_ drawing to the more severe and restrained edition of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The hairy Japanesque line has departed.

Note also another fact: The title of the article published in _The Studio_ first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his work--the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pencil drawing of _Sandro Botticelli_ made in 1893 about the time that _The_ _Studio_ was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the year before.

Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Mediævalism is dead--and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Peacock Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones.

* * * * *

By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had practically done with the _Morte d’Arthur_; and it was only by the incessant prayers and supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast mediævalism from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and feverishly concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to understand Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He was steeping himself in study of phallic worship--and when all’s said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early.

It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of the decorations he wanted for the _Morte d’Arthur_ in the young fellow’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dying end of the year of 1892, to which half year the _Morte d’Arthur_ almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning his back on mediævalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to such as search the book that the _Morte d’Arthur_ was never completed--we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once--but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive reiteration.

There appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for June 1893, drawn in April 1893, as the first _Studio_ number was appearing, a design known as _The Neophyte_, or to give its full affected name, “_Of a Neophyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel_”; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 1893 called _The Kiss of Judas_--both drawings reveal an unmistakable change in handling, and the _Neophyte_ a remarkable firmness of andform, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore unexpressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the _Morte d’Arthur_ and kindred works in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so-called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through it--it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque possibilities.

It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recognise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more obvious to the lay mind a little further on.

It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s _Morte d’Arthur_ phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 that the book began to be published, Beardsley had turned his back upon it for months--indeed his principal drawings had been made for it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in his “hairy line” called _The Questing Beast_ is dated by Beardsley himself “March 8, 1893”--as for 1894, it would have been impossible for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more mediæval or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time the _Morte d’Arthur_ began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones convention.

The two cover-designs for _The Studio No. I_ in April 1893 were obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the _Morte d’Arthur_--in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the _Morte d’Arthur_ drawings. They make a good full stop to the record of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year.

There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasperating procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the _Morte d’Arthur_ on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding with:

There was a young man with a salary
Who had to do drawings for Malory;
When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure
You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.”

As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mimicry of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty, faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. And as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a Japanesque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be outdone in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque mark” of the three candles, with three flames--in the more elaborate later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke--or as Beardsley himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light that he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether the “Japanesque mark” be candles or not, from the time he began to employ the Japanesque convention alongside of his mediævalism, for three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from _The Yellow Book_--his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years--we shall find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition to his name. So it is well to dwell upon it here.

The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 1892 to mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill-shaped, and he employed it indifferently and incongruously on any type of his designs whether _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism or the Japanesque grotesques of his _Bon Mots_. And we have seen that it was in the middle of his twentieth year--he last used it in fact in the February of 1893--that he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his initials and signature. He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative years. He signs henceforth as A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as Aubrey B.

In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon his _Salome_ designs, as weary of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques as of the _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate--the V quite departed from his signature.

I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as he called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most amusing blunders by using the “Japanesque mark” in particular on forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it!

From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in craftsmanship by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at twenty-one except to a small artistic circle. The _Bon Mots_ grotesques, mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_, in the April of 1893; the second volume at the year’s end, _Lamb and Douglas Jerrold_, in December 1893; and the third, the last volume, _Foote and Hooke_, in the February of 1894. The _Morte d’Arthur_ began to be published in parts in June 1893. The feverish creation of the mediæval designs in the late part of 1892 alongside of the _Bon Mots_ grotesques had exhausted Beardsley’s enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his weariness--by mid-1893 he was finding the _Morte d’Arthur_ “very long-winded.” And what chilled him most, he found the public indifferent to both--yet Beardsley knew full well that his whole interest lay in publicity.

It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. This is a larger question and a serious question--but it _is_ a question. It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to that. But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly developed his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the mediævalism of the _Morte d’Arthur_, by that time he came near to the end of the book he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created for it; so also his next development was as rapid, and by the time he is at the end of his new Japanese phase in _Salome_ we shall see him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style that he grew weary of the _Salome_ before he completed it, and threw in a couple of illustrations as makeweight which are utterly alien to the work and disfigure it. And yet these two drawings were made immediately after working upon this _Salome_, and were thrown in only out of a certain sense of resentment owing to the suppression of two designs not deemed to be circumspect enough. But Beardsley did not refuse to make new drawings in key with the rest--he had simply advanced to a new style quite alien to _Salome_, and he found he could not go back. This will be clearer when we come to the _Salome_.

So precisely with the _Morte d’Arthur_; even the last decorations he made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in _The Yellow Book_.

* * * * *

Before we leave the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the difficulties with Beardsley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors are often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps to the ladder of Fame--and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M. Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with his song wholly unsung--there would have been for him no _Studio_ “réclame,” no _Yellow Book_, no _Salome_, no _Savoy_. Dent, employing with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal _Morte d’Arthur_ which is a triumph for English bookmaking--he gave us the supreme edition that can never be surpassed by mortal hands--he did so in a form within the reach of the ordinary man--and in the doing he made the much vaunted work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen appear second-rate, mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires.

_from “Salome”_]

VI

THE JAPANESQUES

Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-One

“SALOME”

Entered into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was on the edge of manhood.

We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in superficial fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They appear in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japanesque _Caricature of Whistler_ on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this time.

Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was of the early part of 1893--at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and craftsmanship burst forth in designs of the _Salome_ founded frankly upon the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry of Whistler have been delayed for two years?

But--as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at this time revealed to the seeing eye--it was now to the work of the better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so dominating a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley himself used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.” The Greek vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased power later on.

* * * * *

It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to publish the _Morte d’Arthur_ in parts in the June of 1893, as it had called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished edition of Oscar Wilde’s _Salome_, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. The young fellow leaped at it--not only as giving him scope for fantastic designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly disputing over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that Beardsley had made--either on reading the French edition, or on reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde published in the February of 1893--illustrating the lines that raised so hot a controversy in the Press, “j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche,” which as we have seen had appeared as one of the several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of “A New Illustrator” at the birth of _The Studio_ in the April of 1893, soon thereafter.

Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitterness he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the commission for _Salome_.

Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a publishing house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that day--they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they were bent on producing _belles lettres_ in an attractive and picturesque form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelmscott reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism of the hack publishers.

On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley rather on trust--the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Bon Mots_ were far from what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remembering that Beardsley was but little known.

It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar Wilde--but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less competent than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the times of King Herod--but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any more than in the _Morte d’Arthur_, but was wholly concerned with creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in the play--and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a touch of tragic power.

It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have been hard put to it to explain--it was a sort of philistine literary or journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line is perhaps more obvious in the _Salome_ drawings than in the _Savoy_, since the _Salome_ designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are even so-called critics to be found who place the _Salome_ drawings at the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day!

Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the _Salome_ drawings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line condemns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last surrendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mastery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sustained notes of a violin. His line became emotional--grave or gay. But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, nor when he completed, the _Salome_, wherein his line is yet hesitant, thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the self-dug grave of every academy. Set the _Salome_ against the genius of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses. It is “very clever for a young man.” In _Salome_ he got all that he could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in _The Stomach Dance_, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he could take it. By the time he had completed the _Salome_ he was done with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter, he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he increased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating originality of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the wide range of his flippant fantasy that the _Salome_ designs reveal the increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight. He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had completed the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents, he was done with emptiness--the groundless earth, the floating figures in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reckless lack of perspective--all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his triumphs in the _Morte d’Arthur_, and trained by his two conflicting guidances, the Japanesque and the mediævalesque, he creates a line that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand--neither the hand of Esau nor the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of _Salome_ he had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of _Salome_ he had found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite _Burial of Salome_ in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth century whose child he was.

_Salome_ finished, however, was not _Salome_ published. Elkin Mathews and John Lane realised that the drawings could not appear without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to be “difficult.” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he consulted me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the obloquy for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the original drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense of decorum--however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the _Title Page_, and _Enter Herodias_ were slightly altered simply to avoid offence to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, _The Stomach Dance_ appeared without change--was accepted without demur by the public and in silence by the censorious--indeed the lasciviousness of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; while the _Toilette of Salome_, a fine design, which only required a very slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite innocent but very second-rate design of _John and Salome_, and in place of the two had been inserted the wretched _Black Cape_ and Georgian _Toilette_ which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and cheap conceit--for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were canting or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately indecent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as virtue. In any case, the mediocre _Black Cape_ and the better Georgian _Toilette_, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as drawings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd.

_from “Salome”_]

The interpolated _Black Cape_ and the _Second Toilette_ we may here dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they are wholly outside the _Salome_ atmosphere. Of the pure _Salome_ designs, incomparably the finest are _The Stomach Dance_ and the _Peacock Skirt_. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he considered the best drawings to be _The Man in the Moon_, the _Peacock Skirt_, and _The Dancer’s Reward_--it should be noted by the way that Beardsley showed by his _Book of Fifty Drawings_ that his title was _The Man in the Moon_ not as the publishers have it, _The Woman in the Moon_. But it is in _The Climax_, one of the less noteworthy designs, that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride--for though the lower half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and “hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, drawn but a year before and shown in _The Studio_ first number, make us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a craftsmanship which he has utterly outgrown.

We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage?