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.
[Illustration: HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN
_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.
[Illustration: “OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED UNTO
HIM”]