censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be
on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to
the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time
of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to
carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be
produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man
should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence
of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book.
Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow
that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening
effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an
utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to
such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the
enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour
after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact
position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a
living wage?
Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen
and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given
the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between
his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was
compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust
upon him, in having accepted long contracts--or rather contracts that
took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his
commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have
fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him,
passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step
back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted
at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can
the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then
could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of
the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the
_Salome_ drawings for instance have appeared in the _Morte d’Arthur_?
But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high
achievement would have suffered--and Death was beckoning to him not
to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the
artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it
in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement
of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the
letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating
a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone
forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by
doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure?
Of the 544 or so decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_, several are
repeated--some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate,
just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for
the _Morte d’Arthur_, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get
a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100
for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings
a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300
would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what
he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not
permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain
usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist
to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know
the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of
flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up
self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to
pay his pound of flesh....
Even before Beardsley was done with _Salome_, he had exhausted the
Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has
to evolve a _Title-page_, a _List of Contents_, and a _Finis_; and
we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of _Salome_,
weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield
his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of
his _Morte d’Arthur_ designs again, he was about to burst into a new
song as hinted at by the last three designs for _Salome_. An artist is
finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance.
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”]
About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley
wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new
book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,”
which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said:
that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a
new venture about to appear. For _The Yellow Book_ is the only contract
that emerges out of this time.
It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this
time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they
took their scheme to John Lane.
Whilst at work on the _Salome_, Beardsley began the long series of
decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back,
forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews
and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as
_The Keynote Series_ of novels, published on the heels of the wide
success of _Keynotes_ by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist
stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time.
And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art
Club.
Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists
and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother
and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after
their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his
sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental
roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought
their little home--a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III]
VII
THE GREEK VASE PHASE
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister
Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home
in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance
decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much
talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds
today!
Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London.
Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother,
were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care
to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play
the host--and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities
were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young
man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his
“tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white
forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for
it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed.
Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running
from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs
of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at
her dressing-table known as _La Dame aux Camélias_. The couch in his
studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much
of his all too short life lying upon it.
* * * * *
When Beardsley began the _Salome_ drawings at twenty-one he was, as
we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the Japanese
masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did the
craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his faces
was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the grotesque
features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst at work
upon the _Salome_ designs he was much at the British Museum and was
intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the British Museum
is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry of the Greeks in
their line and mass fascinate Beardsley--not only was he struck by
the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satirical, uttered
by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek genius
which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more obscene of
the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the public eye
towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been “purified”
by prudish philistinism painting out certain “naughtinesses”; but it
was precisely the skill with which the great Greek painters uttered
erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass that most keenly
intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecherous old satyrs
upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as Brygos and Duris,
appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and mood of Beardsley as they
had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had scarce finished his _Salome_
drawings under the Japanese erotic influence before the Greek satyr
peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung away the Japanesque, left it
behind him, and boldly entered into rivalry with the Greeks. It was to
make him famous.
* * * * *
[Illustration: LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III_]
On the 15th of April 1894 appeared _The Yellow Book_. It made Beardsley
notorious.
In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl
with the 3rd, the last, volume of _Bon Mots_; and _Morte d’Arthur_
was in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say
that _Salome_ made Beardsley famous. _Salome_ was an expensive
book, published in a very limited edition. Except in a small but
ever-increasing literary and artistic set, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and
_Salome_ passed quite unrecognised and unknown. But _Salome_ did lead
to an act which was to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public
eye.
Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of publishing
a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should gather
together the quite remarkable group of young writers and artists that
had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by the
so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe
or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea of
_The Yellow Book_ developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was rich
in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby he was to
make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatsoever, of a sort
of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes--to answer in the pictorial
realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not seem to have
fired a publisher. _The Yellow Book_ quarterly, however, was a very
different affair, bringing together, as it did, the scattered art
of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley
dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It
was decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the
literary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne
witness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and
himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth
Club, founded the much discussed _Yellow Book_.” This quarterly, to
be called _The Yellow Book_ after the conventional name of a “yellow
back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in itself in each
number--not only was it to be rid of the serial or sequence idea of a
magazine, but the art and the literature were to have no dependence the
one on the other.
Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the _Salome_, as
we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them
and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of
1894, the _Salome_ off his hands, that _The Yellow Book_ was planned in
detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery
ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the
expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning
to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near
at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the _Salome_ into the wastepaper
basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime
flung aside the _Morte d’Arthur_ Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now
gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it--through books--and
he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of
his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with
flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done--employing
line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and
enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the
_Morte d’Arthur_ now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking
subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was
cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan
and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of
social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world--he
took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of
the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts;
its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than
the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little
insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his
own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own
class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience
whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else--but we are coming to
that.
It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German,
Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic
weekly, _Pick-Me-Up_, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a
monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that
it should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the _Graphic_
and _Illustrated London News_.” Struck by some article attacking the
art critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly
review of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called _St.
Paul’s_. Although at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the
general public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an
opening for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make
some drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac--(remember, _St.
Paul’s_ was to begin as a monthly!)--and to illustrate the subjects
to which each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books,
Fashions, The Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “_Man that holds
the Water_ _Pot_” and the “_Music_,” but the paper did not appear
in January--indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and
fobbed off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably
meant for Dent’s _Bon Mots_--however they may have been intended for
_The Fashions_ and _The Drama_ pages of _St. Paul’s_. He made in all
four which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not
greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said that I
“might have the lot.” They have never reached me! They have this value,
however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the New Year of
1894--they show him ridding himself of the “hairy line,” with a marked
increase of power over line--they end his _Salome_ Japanesque phase.
It is somewhat curious that, whilst _The Man that holds the Water Pot_
is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the
fourth drawing he made for _St. Paul’s_ seems to have been missed by
all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print of
it!
Before we leave _St. Paul’s_, it is interesting to note that at this
time the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by
the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental
headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for _St. Paul’s_ and other
papers.
[Illustration: MESSALINA]
It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the _Poster for the
Avenue Theatre_ which really brought him before a London public more
than anything he had so far done--a success, be it confessed, more due
to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the Avenue
Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which could
not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. Needless
to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw was
to float into the public ken with his play of _Arms and the Man_ at
this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house that from
its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross Bridge, it was
cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost Seagulls.” I shall
always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre poster with Shaw’s rise
to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being called before
the curtain at the end of _Arms and the Man_, some man amongst the
gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s ready Irish wit
brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the darkness, his lank
loose figure waited patiently until complete silence had fallen on
the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I agree with that
gentleman in the gallery, but”--shrugging his shoulders--“what are we
amongst so many?”
Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s _Plays_ appeared about the
April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest of
a wide public.
* * * * *
Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley.
It was the publication of _The Yellow Book_ in the mid-April of 1894
that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the narrow
circle so far interested in him.
London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, or
at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing-room
was sprinkled with the latest books--the well-to-do bought pictures and
wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided themselves on their
literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London white in a
night, so _The Yellow Book_ littered the London drawing-rooms with
gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand. It “caught on.”
And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the crest of its wave
of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. After all, everything
that was outstanding and remarkable about the book was Beardsley. _The
Yellow Book_ was soon the talk of the town, and Beardsley “awoke to
find himself famous.” Punch promptly caricatured his work; and soon he
was himself caricatured by “Max” in the _Pall Mall Budget_; whilst the
Oxford undergraduates were playing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like.
But it was left to Mostyn Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque
on any poem in our tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus:
’Twas rollog; and the minim potes
Did mime and mimble in the cafe;
All footly were the Philerotes
And Daycadongs outstrafe....
Beware the Yellow Bock, my son!
The aims that rile, the art that racks,
Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun
The stumious Beerbomax!
* * * * *
Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod,
The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue,
Came piffling through the Headley Bod,
And flippered as it flew....
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
_from “The Yellow Book” Volume III_
PAR LES DIEVX
JVMEAVX TOVS
LES MONSTRES
NE SONT PAS EN
AFRIQUE]
As one turns over the pages of _The Yellow Book_ today, it is a
little difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth.
Indeed, London’s passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic
weeds in the sear and yellow leaf. But it _was_ a sensation. And that
sensation flung wide the doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He
enjoyed his fame with gusto. He revelled in it. And the ineffable and
offensive conceit that it engendered in the lad was very excusable and
understandable. He was lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere
and enjoyed every ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good
fortune that his fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours,
was enhanced by an increase of health and strength that promised
recovery from the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and
waking. His musical childhood had taught him the value of publicity
early--the whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means
and at every opportunity. When fame came to him he was proud of it and
loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes
he even felt a little ashamed of it--and of his Jackals. But his vogue
now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody--and
he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained.
It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even at
the publishing of the second volume of _The Yellow Book_ in July there
was that which happened--had he had prophetic vision--that boded no
good for the young fellow.
The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane fell in,
and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane in sole
possession of The Bodley Head--and _The Yellow Book_.
The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a head
considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected about The
Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley before a
twelvemonth was out.
It was on the designs of this second volume of _The Yellow Book_ of
July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last
time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; for,
in the _Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf
Club_ on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given place
to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.”
Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his
work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had
no need to work--were above work. He liked to pose as one who did
not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly
appeared, he won an increase of notoriety--or obloquy, which was much
the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was
to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that
scared him--and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip.
Meanwhile the Christmas number of _Today_ produced his very fine
night-piece _Les Passades_.
[Illustration: NIGHT PIECE]
Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue--as playwright and wit and
man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the _Salome_, with its
erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a
false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never
were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer
of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented
Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley
delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what
was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that
Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young
talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It
came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites to go over
to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship,
and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified
his condescension to that end--but the gross patronage of Wilde on
the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had
flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an
intimate--he never again sought to bask in the radiance.
To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a
novel called _The Green Carnation_ of which Wilde and his associates
were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination.
The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s
intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even
if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very
well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to
pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He
sprang at opportunity--and struck hard. With the reckless courage
so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he
struck--and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a
leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the
healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his
vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening
public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at
a state of elegant decay.