tired, either at work or at play--a man who, knowing his days would be
few on this earth, found each fair as it passed and, if he could not bid
it stay, was at least determined to fill it as full as it would hold.
There was no resisting his restless energy when with him, and it was
because he could so little resist it himself, that he was continually
seeking new outlets--new forms for its expression. He had just the
temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the
Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in
papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back
to the _Hobby-horse_ of the Eighties, or, in a further access of
pedantry to the _Germ_ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as
late as the _Blast_ of yesterday and _The Gypsy_ of to-day. But I do
not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and see
there the _Dial_ and the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_ and the
_Butterfly_ and the _Pageant_ and the _Dome_ and the _Evergreen_, each
with its special train of memories and associations, and I know better
than the greatest pedant of them all that the fashion, no matter when it
began, no matter when it may end, belongs as essentially to the Nineties
as the fashion for the crinoline belongs to the Sixties. Harland was not
original in wanting to set up a pulpit for himself--the originality was
in the design for it. The _Yellow Book_ was not like any other quarterly
from which any other young man or group did his preaching.
VI
Harland shared his pulpit. He would not have found the same design for
it without Beardsley, nor would our Thursday nights, where a good deal
of that design was thought out and talked out, have been the same
without Beardsley. I would find it hard, even had there been no _Yellow
Book_, not to remember Harland and Beardsley together. For it was from
Mrs. Harland that we first heard of the wonderful youth, unknown still,
an insignificant clerk in some Insurance Company, who made the most
amazing drawings--it was she who first sent him to us that J. might look
at his work and help him to escape from the office he hated and from the
toils of Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Press in which he was entangled.
[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
AUBREY BEARDSLEY]
He came, the first time, one afternoon in the winter dusk--a boy, tall
and slight, long narrow pale clean-shaven face, hair parted in the
middle and hanging over his forehead, nose prominent, eyes alight,
certain himself of the worth of his drawings, too modest not to fear
that other artists might not agree with him. The drawings in his little
portfolio were mostly for the _Morte d' Arthur_, with one or two of
those, now cherished by the collector, that have a hint of the Japanese
under whose influence he momentarily passed. J. enjoys the reputation,
which he deserves, of telling the truth always, no matter how unpleasant
to those to whom he tells it. Truth to Beardsley was pleasant and his
face was radiant when he left us. J. has also the courage of his
convictions, and all he said to Beardsley he repeated promptly to the
public in the first number of _The Studio_, a magazine started not as a
pulpit but as a commercial enterprise--started, however, at the right
moment to be kindled into life and steered toward success by the
enthusiasm and the energy of the Young Men of the Nineties.
Beardsley was bound to become known whether articles were written about
him or not. But J.'s was the first and made recognition come the sooner.
The heads of many young men grow giddy with the first success; at the
exultant top of the winding stair that leads to it, they no longer see
those who gave them a hand when they balanced on the lowest rung. But
Beardsley was not made that way. He kept his head cool, his eyesight
clear. He never forgot. Gratitude coloured the friendship with us that
followed, even in the days when he was one of the most talked about men
in London. He knew that always by his work alone he would be judged at
Buckingham Street, and to J. he brought his drawings and his books for
criticism. He brought his schemes as well, just as he brought the youth
not only of years but of temperament to our Thursday nights. He came
almost as regularly as Henley and Henley's Young Men, adding his young
voice to the uproar of discussion, as full of life as if he too, like
Harland, grudged a minute of the years he knew for him were counted. In
no other house where it was my pleasure to meet him did he seem to me to
show to such advantage. In his own home I thought him overburdened by
the scheme of decoration he had planned for it. In many houses to which
he was asked he was amiable enough to assume the pose expected of him.
The lion-hunters hoped that Beardsley would be like his drawings.
Strange, decadent, morbid, bizarre, weird, were adjectives bestowed upon
them, and he played up to the adjectives for the edification or
mystification of the people who invented them and for his own infinite
amusement. But with us he did not have to play up to anything and could
be just the simple, natural youth he was--as simple and natural as I
have always found the really great, more interested in his work than
most young men, and keener for success.
I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him
by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his
affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?
They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted
dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a
suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why
the mediæval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and
incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity
upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great
churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest
thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out
upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to
record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at
the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and
its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the
humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes
the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels,
that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own
methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the
grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that
we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist
to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly
young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the
curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right
of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the
fun of the youth destined to do and to triumph. Already, in his later
work, are signs of the passing of the first youthful stage of his art.
It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the
grinning little monstrosities in some of the illustrations for the _Rape
of the Lock_; the few drawings for his _Volpone_ have a dignity he had
not hitherto achieved.
Nobody can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun
got no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to
shield their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a
keen sense of humour that helped him to snatch all the joy there is
in the old, time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of
established respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend,
has said of him, "he possessed what is _called_ an artificial
manner"; that is, his manner was called affected, as was his art,
because it wasn't exactly like everybody else's. I have never yet
come across the genius whose manner was exactly like everybody
else's, and shyness, self-consciousness, counted for something in
his, at least at the start. He had only to exaggerate this manner,
or mannerism, to set London talking. It was the easier because
rumours quickly began to go about of the darkened room in which he
worked, of his turning night into day and day into night like
Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange habit or taste,
until people began to see all sorts of things in him that weren't
there, just as they read all sorts of things into his drawings that
he never put into them, always seeking what they were determined to
find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his
knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art,
for, if he had not been an artist, he most assuredly would have been
a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice
he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was
imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type
leaped into fashion.
Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have
enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at
his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than
when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the
fresh, gay laughter of the boy--the wonderful boy--he was. Arthur Symons
wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself
enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and
was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amusement
it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or
his notoriety.
It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked
advice, if Harland had not, for _The Yellow Book_ which went through
several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street
chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of
Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of
the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as
intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be
mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of
his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was
characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have
insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is
the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy,
called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little
inscription from him on the fly-leaf--I have just taken down the volume
from the near book shelf--"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I
read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but,
reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street
room where I used to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and,
coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his
hands.
And there followed the dinner--the amazing dinner as unlike the usual
formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room
of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony
as our Thursday nights. The men were in dress suits or tweeds as they
chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their
convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were
expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know
I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and
Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to
talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and
hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and
Ménie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane
and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to
"uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other
of the fine things that were to make the _Yellow Book_ a force and
famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the
two editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen
the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.
was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of
Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly
flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as débutantes
at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming
speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could
they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the _menu_--plate after
plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in
self-defence, to pass the time, wondering if, in my rôle of the _Pall
Mall's_ "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin
of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my
habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would assure me,
could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on
cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they
were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the
same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches
were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed
floods of talk;--on the way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley
Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all
that we might see the place from which the _Yellow Book_ was to be
published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in
the basement of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland and Mrs.
Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces
have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the
meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with
these ceremonies the _Yellow Book_ was launched into life.
I am not sure what the _Yellow Book_ means to others--to those others
who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it
as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far
removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound
volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and
Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the
_Yellow Book_ was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not
represent only _les Jeunes_, who would have kept it all to themselves in
their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not
strong enough to stand alone, as _les Jeunes_ seldom are, or have been
through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its
literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's,
while some who actually were "discovered" by the _Yellow Book_ have
faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.
Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full
splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already
assured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who
had never printed a line before. So identified with "this passage of
literary history"--in his words--was Henry James that he has recorded
the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a
Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend
of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my
interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most
original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in
this readiness for hero-worship--youth in this tribute to the older men
whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their
work in the eyes of the new generation--the fragrance of youth exudes
from the pages of the _Yellow Book_ as I turn them over again, in
places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to
seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and
zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us
all a great deal to talk about, so that I see in it now a sort of link
to join on Thursday nights the different groups from their opposing
corners, supplying to writers and artists one subject of the same
interest to both. It even opened the door to the architects, one of whom
went so far as to neglect architecture and to emulate Ibsen in a play.
The last thing I foresaw for the _Yellow Book_ was a speedy end or, for
the matter of that, any end at all, so overflowing was it with the
spirit of youth and energy, war and enthusiasm. But the end came
surprisingly soon. To remind me, were I in danger of forgetting, another
book stands on our shelves close to the First Volume of the _Yellow
Book_:--the First Volume of the _Savoy_, on its fly-leaf again
Beardsley's inscription simple as himself, "Mrs. Pennell, with kindest
regards from Aubrey Beardsley," and only a little less than two years
between the dates of the two. And the beginning of the _Savoy_ meant the
end of the _Yellow Book_, whose life was short after Beardsley left it.
Why he left it has nothing to do with the story of our Thursday nights,
when no obstacle, great or small, would have been put in its way by us
who held youth and energy, war and enthusiasm above most things in
demand and honour. But I question if the time has come for the full
telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an
objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the _Yellow Book_,
though without Beardsley there would have been no _Yellow Book_, is
known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham
prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the
hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was
not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the
_Savoy_, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet
conquered on this earth held him in deadly grip, and the fight he had to
fight sent him from London to Bournemouth, to Saint-Germain, to Dieppe,
to Mentone in search of health. He was the youngest of that old Thursday
night crowd and he was the first to go, and the _Savoy_ went with him,
and before he had gone our Thursday nights were already but a landmark
in memory, so quickly does the flame of youth burn out.
VII
By another of our happy chances Phil May came as assiduously on our
Thursday nights as Beardsley, and they were two of the artists, though
their art was as the poles apart, who had most influence on the
black-and-white of the Nineties--it will be seen from this that I
refrain from saying what I think of J. and his influence, but it is
considered almost as indiscreet, almost as bad form, to admit the
excellence or importance of one's husband's work as to pretend to any in
one's own.
If no drawings could have been less like Beardsley's than Phil May's
neither could two men have been more utterly unlike. Some friends of
Beardsley's believe that he was happiest where there was most noise,
most people, most show, which, however, was not my impression. But when
there was the noise of people about him, he might be relied upon to
contribute his share and to take part in whatever show was going. I
question if Phil May was happy at all unless in the midst of many people
and much noise, whether at home or abroad, but to their noise, anyway,
he had not the least desire to add. Beardsley was fond of talk, always
had something to say, was always eager to say it. All Phil May asked
was not to be expected to say anything, to be allowed to smile amiably
his dissent or approval. Had the rest of our company been of his mind in
the matter, it would not have been so much easier for us to start the
talk at once than to stop it at a reasonable hour, our Thursday nights
would not have been so deafening with talk that I do not yet understand
why the other tenants in the house did not unite in an indignant protest
to the landlord.
It was not laziness that kept him silent. He had not a touch of laziness
in his composition. His drawings look so simple that people thought they
were dashed off at odd moments. But over them he took the infinite pains
and time considered by the wise to be the true secret of genius. It may
be he expressed himself so well in lines he had no use for words. The
one indisputable fact is that he would do anything to escape talking. I
recall a night--not a Thursday night though he finished it in our
rooms--when he had been invited to lecture to a Woman's Club at the
Society of Arts. He appeared on the platform with a formidable-looking
MS. in his hand, but he put it down at once and spent his appointed hour
in making drawings on big sheets of paper arranged for an occasional
illustration. He had more to say than I ever heard him say anywhere,
when we got back to Buckingham Street. The MS. was all right, he assured
us, a capital lecture written for him by a friend, but it began "Far be
it from me" something or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far
as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly
agree that it did not.
[Illustration: Drawing by Himself
PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS]
He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some
of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him
as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single
companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always
relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.
I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not
merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and
waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all
sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company--I could never
define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his
last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his
appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his
ideals. Beardsley was not more of a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy
of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the
race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look
that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out
largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl buttons. I
have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress
by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy
costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal
with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it
degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet
jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin
Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde
and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually
into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had
brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring
in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their
workshop. And one young genius of an illustrator, who could not afford
to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life,
could not mount the bus in his near suburb without putting on riding
breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.