Chapter 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.

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.

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.

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.

Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living genius of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s _Evan Harrington_; it was about the time that the _Mercure_ published in French the _Essay on Comedy_ which started widespread interest in the works of Meredith.

By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; “everyone in the hotel notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sitting out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the means forbade.

Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high hopes, Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence he wrote of his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in the rue Halle au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that he was out and about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz Thaulow’s family welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of his improved health, it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best of all blessings, he was now able to work. It was in this August that he met Vincent O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty-fifth birthday. Before the month was half through he was fretting to be back in Paris for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He found this Hotel rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more sheltered lodgings in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado, hoping that Dieppe might still know a gentle September. Though the weather remained wet and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to Paris. His London doctor came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered him vastly with hopes of a complete recovery if he took care of himself, and advised Paris for the early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was for Paris, turned his back on Dieppe with a pang--he left many friends. However, late September saw him making for Paris with unfeigned joy, and settling in rooms at the Hotel Foyot in the rue Tournon near the Luxembourg Gardens.

His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again from a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doctor considered him curable still; he might have not only several years of life before him “but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching heat of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was--reading the _Memoirs of Casanova!_ But he had grown cautious; found that seeing many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and inspiring book.” But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake solemn heads--all the talk was henceforth of the South of France. “Every fresh person one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh objections to the places we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger late in Paris; but what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put aside on account of its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of it show it horribly “Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cœur sent him a bottle of water from Lourdes. “Yet all the same I get dreadfully nervous, & stupidly worried about little things.” However, the doctors sternly forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly, with fogs; and Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November saw his mother taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in the rooms at the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his last place of flitting.

Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have ever been since my school days”; but the fogs that drove him forth made him write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved so well: “If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go down hill rather quickly.”

At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque place. Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied again and was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eating well; was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement in him, to his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustrations for Ben Jonson’s _Volpone_, and was keenly interested in a new venture by Smithers who proposed a successor to _The Savoy_ which he wished to call _The Peacock_.

The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier and more peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.”

So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the _Cover of Volpone_ one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever brought splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book. He also made a pen drawing for the _Cover of a prospectus for Volpone_, which was after his death published in the book as a _Frontispiece_, for which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear in the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had developed and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All the same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs, or so it seems to me, as a Title Page, since _Volpone_ is lettered on a label upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor would have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at all; for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole style of the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction on the _Prospectus_. But in this _Prospectus Cover for Volpone_ his hand’s skill reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his body’s sorry state--its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical severity. And all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are there, the white robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands raised palm to palm suppliant-wise--the dark polished wood of the gilt doorway--the fabric of the curtains--the glitter of precious metals and gems.

In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “complete list of drawings for the _Volpone_,” suggested its being made a companion volume to _The Rape of the Lock_, and asked Smithers to announce it in _The Athenæum_. Besides the now famous and beautiful _Cover_, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of _Volpone_ to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did execute are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He reveals that the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, _Volpone and his treasure_, but that is to be in line and wash--obviously in the style of _The Lady and the Monkey_--yet strangely enough, the remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! And it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Prospectus in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate and line version of the _Frontispiece_--and that it is not to appear in the book. We have the line drawing for the _Prospectus_--and we can only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated in the manner of _The Lady and the Monkey_ or the _Initials_. That, in this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling in face of the fact that the _Initials_ were in the new method, line with pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month, that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything he had yet done, which the _Initials_ certainly were.

On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” sending the _Cover Design for Volpone_ and the _Design for the Prospectus of Volpone_, begging for proofs, especially of the _Design for the Prospectus_, “on various papers at once.” Smithers sent the proofs of the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for Beardsley’s Christmas cheer. The beautiful _Miniature_ edition of _The_ _Rape of the Lock_, with Beardsley’s special _Cover-design in gold on scarlet_, had just been published--the “little Rapelets” as Beardsley called them.

However, these 24 designs for the _Volpone_ were never to be. But we know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on the 19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new magazine of _The Peacock_ projected by Smithers, of which more later. Whilst delighted with the idea of editing _The Peacock_, Beardsley expresses fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put the _Volpone_ into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so, that there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the _Initials_ with this letter, for he underlines that _Volpone_ is to be an important book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that Beardsley is now sending him--indeed the _Initials_ were, alas! all that he was ever destined to complete--the 24 illustrations were not to be. That these _Initials_ were the designs sent is further made clear by the remark that the new work is a complete, “a marked departure as illustrative and decorative work from any other arty book published for many years.” He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he has left behind him definitely all his former methods. He promises the drawings to be printed in the text by the first week in January, and that they shall be “good work, the best I have ever done.”

On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers, urging on the production of the _Prospectus for Volpone_; and it is interesting to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in line and wash, in his aquatint style, of _The Lady and the Monkey_, was originally intended for the _Volpone_ and not for the set of the _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ in which it eventually appeared; but was cast out of the _Volpone_ by Beardsley as “it will be quite out of keeping with the rest of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was clearly the method he had intended to employ for his illustrations.

What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed for the illustrations to _Volpone_ only _The Lady and the Monkey_ and the _Initials_ can hint to us--he was never to create them.

The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the place, the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued fellow; and again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depression left him. He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold or chill; indeed his only “grievance is mosquitoes.” He would weigh himself anxiously, fearful of a set-back at every turn.

* * * * *

Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career--a fact that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley has noticed--was the very brief period of the public interest in him. Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound--with _The Yellow Book_; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the last number of _The Savoy_ he had vanished from the public eye almost as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his doings; and his failure to keep the public interest with _The Savoy_, and all its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what new books he was producing. The _Book of Fifty Drawings_ seemed to have written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better cause to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to continue _The Savoy_ in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture--it had all ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the public homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper cutting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called _The Peacock_, to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of _The Savoy_; and had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beardsley’s flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the name of _The Peacock_ to _Books and Pictures_, which sounded commonplace enough to make _The Peacock_ appear quite good when otherwise it seemed somewhat pointless.

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

1898

Yet the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man with relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” It kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine again, and his hopes were reborn.

So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests.

In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, & yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely since I have known him.”... But the middle of the month saw the cold north-east wind come down on Mentone, and it blew the flickering candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to his bed--a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor plagued fellow had lost heart--he felt the grave deepening and could not summon the will any further to clamber out of it.

“_As the dawn broke, Pierrot fell into his last sleep. Then upon tip-toe, silently up the stair, noiselessly into the room, came the comedians Arlecchino, Pantaleone, il Dottore, and Columbina, who with much love carried away upon their shoulders, the white frocked clown of Bergamo; whither, we know not._”]

The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his designs and decorations for the _Volpone_, and remembering the pushing forward of the _Prospectus_ that he had urged on the publisher, he had fallen back on the pencil--as the elaborately drawn _Initial_ letters show--for each of the scenes in _Volpone_, employing pencil with the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of _The Savoy_ he had come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they were when cut in glasses “at Goodyears” in the Royal Arcade; just as he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as decorative as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the fragile body failed him--at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his bloodless fingers--his work was done.

As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days before he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leonard Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power to fulfil--even had he had the will--for “the written word remains,” and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven:

Jesus is our Lord & Judge

Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy--all obscene drawings.

Aubrey Beardsley.
In my death agony.

But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter repentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous achievement--and he did so without stooping to any attempt at palliation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth--and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes--indeed, almost before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking together for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship.

On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity. The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guardian throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “there was music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like the way of the Cross--it was long and steep and we walked.” They laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The Lord.”

Hail and Farewell!

A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE

PUERILIA

Mid-1888 he comes to town

JUVENILIA

Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement

FORMATIVE PERIOD--BURNE-JONESESQUES

Mid-1891 to Mid-1892

During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three initials A. V. B.

MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES

The _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Bon Mots_

Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”--the _stunted_ mark.

In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of his signature. He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in ill-shaped “rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque mark,” even sometimes when he does employ it.

“SALOME”

Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark” becomes longer, more slender, and more graceful.

“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD

This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this _Yellow Book_ period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque mark” for the last time.

THE GREAT PERIOD

I. “_The Savoy_” and II. “_The Aquatintesques_”
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896 1897

From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, right up to the end--the only difference being that in the last phase of the _Aquatintesque line and wash_ work with the few line drawings of this time, that is from Mid-1896, he signs as a rule only the initials A. B. in plain block capitals, but now usually _in a corner of his design_, either in or without a small square label.

“AUBREY BEARDSLEY”
HAS BEEN DESIGNED
BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
AND PRINTED UNDER HIS
SUPERVISION BY THE
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
BINGHAMTON
NEW YORK

Transcriber's Notes:

Repetative heading for - The Key to dates...- has been removed.

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.