a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is
said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled.
However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition
growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his
friends, to dare all and make for art.
Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember
that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of
Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a
very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament.
Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young
fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had
learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training
of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in
high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the
steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.
This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday;
and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis de
Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged
him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune
artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”
Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all
intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and
Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s
night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with
his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to
be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his
art--the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios
talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it
is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor
Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly
influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is
spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism
is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and
Burne-Jones at this very time--Whistler had published his _Gentle Art
of Making Enemies_ in 1890, and London had not recovered from its
enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to
say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but
his eager eyes were quick to see.
However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an
occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city
and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the
Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.
And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth
now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most
impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The
generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris--or Beardsley; but
his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted
boy’s cause.
Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves
of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all,
Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made
a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement.
Next--and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting
fact--Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of
the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content!
Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling
rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that
to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse--probably not very
exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the
conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this.
And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to
Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker,
not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender
finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or
drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made
the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore
intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist
in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings,
with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he
knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared
nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social
injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern
him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored
him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the
society of the great--his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed
society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the
middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic
whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing
each one as the mood took him--only doing it with an air and dressing
well for the part.
Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of
these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done
into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible
years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a
priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or
social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were
racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy--they
even lack manhood--they do not suggest quite a fully developed
intelligence.
However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his
troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott
books--he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then
anxious to produce--_Sidonia the Sorceress_. Vallance leaped at
the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once
persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all
being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892,
his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to
Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received
the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a
ridiculous pill.
We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but
mediocrity--a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on
the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter
unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques
for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what
the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know--and to achieve. Can
one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to
Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in
grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black
cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of
his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to
this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat
black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young
fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go
much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling
it--far less any of his sponsors. And yet!----
Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few
narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting
of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival
publication to the Kelmscott Press--he was to smash it to pieces and
make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been
able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood
awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point--and Frederick Evans
was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull
futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence
than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was
set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he
did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who
was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris
least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank
young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which
he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection
and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be
aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s
portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little
of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful
nor attractive, but probably trying to find _something_ to praise,
at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added
fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”--and so saying he
dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed;
but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being
repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his
drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he
was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care
for his drawings--he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone
for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris
with a fixed determination never to go there again--and he could never
be induced to go.
Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott
House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead
another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad
refused to go, and Vallance went alone--but that is another story.
For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was
to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far
wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in
the doing--one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer
Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for
the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for
ever--desert the night-school at Westminster--burn his boats behind
him--and launch on his destiny as an artist.
V
BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to twenty-one
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”
John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to
put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way
that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly
costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott
Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s _Le Morte d’Arthur_ to
lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend
Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street,
Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts--300
copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies;
but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and
illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist.
[Illustration: HAIL MARY]
Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in
the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he
believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent
Beardsley’s _Hail Mary_, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he
comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one
risen from the well-dressed dead--Aubrey Beardsley had happened in,
according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from
the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst
the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the
other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s
your man!”
To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he
was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to
discover to be the well-known publisher.
So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.
Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his
“_Morte d’Arthur_,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden
splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback.
Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of
Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him
a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he
would at once commission him to illustrate the work.
Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a
specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties.
Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of
any consequence--he was utterly unknown--and his superb master-work
that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to
mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he
had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for
a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a
trifle old for studentship--he was twenty before he made a drawing that
was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books,
and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him
some idea of what was in Dent’s mind--of what was expected of him.
At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at
the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a
chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans
assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.
Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create
the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott
tradition, took the drawing to Dent--the elaborate and now famous
Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as _The Achieving of the San
Grael_, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the
youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear
in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the _Morte
d’Arthur_.
Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious
original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold
effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque
mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; _and the design
is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”_ It is his first use of
the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time
reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark”
is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of
mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for
three candles and three flames--a baser explanation was given by some,
but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all
that Beardsley did.
Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the
_Morte d’Arthur_, which was to begin to appear in parts a year
thereafter, in the June of 1893--the second volume in 1894.
So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic
the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval
woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem
of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John
Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might
enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have
the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt
him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind.
* * * * *
Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate
and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging
and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship
in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back
on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the
National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the
studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in
close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked
to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by
famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that
Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_
mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the
grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no
pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic
designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and
were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of
an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were
trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than
others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally
dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But
the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held
Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were
the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught
himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him.
One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for
the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black
decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the
utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career
depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to
reach his full powers in making them.
Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred
designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell
which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To
Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was
not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to
make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious
enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his
debt to Greece through Anning Bell.
We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during
this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and,
whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for
Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_.
Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the
glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of
achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written
“after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been
forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance
masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_
for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see
him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the
more a marvel--almost a miracle.
It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the
decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew
that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he
poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds
drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere
that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to
all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had
now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that
true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry
or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious
increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create
it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that
ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the
British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls,
delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him
work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he
was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley
worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully,
his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet
no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art
that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or
enhanced that art.
Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his
effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to
fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the
only sketch he made for the completed design--when the pen and ink had
next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber.
The well-known pencil sketch of _A Girl_ owned by Mr. Evans shows
Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough
rhythm of his scrawls.
A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight;
as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of
the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into
day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was
quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to
recognition.
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.
[Illustration: PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD]
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.
* * * * *