Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde but to
bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social pariah.
On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and charged at
Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial; and on the
3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an extraordinary
public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April amidst the wild
enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested the same evening.
On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow Street with
a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch during the
fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde and Taylor
were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, on the
26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. After a
case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed and the
prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again refused. A
week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail for £5,000;
and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor was put on
trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May the 20th,
and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being postponed. The
following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began at the Old
Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” and with
Taylor was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour.
The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. The
fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of mark with
like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very general scare set
in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but it also caused
a vast timidity in places where blatant effrontery had a short while
before been in truculent vogue....
John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had published volume III of
_The Yellow Book_ in October 1894 and volume IV in the January of
1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number, volume
V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number bound,
when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook society.
The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend of Oscar
Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the writers of _The
Yellow Book_; but whatever the cause, John Lane who was in America
was suddenly faced with an ultimatum--it was said that one of his
chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened that without
further ado either he or Beardsley must leave _The Yellow Book_ at
once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not alone but
had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her vogue,
with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits of the
storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John Lane in
his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet was
a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own
business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision
could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s
drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, and
anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. It
may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship was
solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a most
unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sympathetic
in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts of moral
cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley _The Yellow
Book_ was doomed--it at once declined, and though it struggled on, it
went to annihilation and foundered.
This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of cant
that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John
Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in
deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it
might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such infinite
pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive him. But
Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly incident, in
that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing himself to be
thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had been made
responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had whole-heartedly
detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never ceased to blame himself.
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ was very bitterly resented by
Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height
of his triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him
by the time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did
with an association of which he was wholly innocent. And it must
be confessed that _The Yellow Book_ at once became a stale farce
played by all concerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the
scene-shifter--_Hamlet_ being attempted without the Prince of Denmark.
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow even
more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resentment
at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an
intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking,
Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude
towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous
price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at
least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled in
the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to his
very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable
personal charm that he possessed in no small degree.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL
_from “The Yellow Book,” Volume I_]
His expulsion from _The Yellow Book_ placed Beardsley in a very awkward
financial position. The income that he derived from his drawings for
_The Yellow Book_ must have been but small at best; and it is a mystery
how he lived. It has been said that he found generous patrons, and
that of these not the least generous was one André Raffalovich, a man
of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood must have been
dangerously staunched by his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_.
The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for
volume V of _The Yellow Book_, printed for April, but suppressed at
the last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and
craftsmanship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a
new craftsmanship; indeed towards this development he markedly moves
in the later _Yellow Book_ designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895,
at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an
interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was
about to astonish the world.
* * * * *
_The Yellow Book_ phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what
went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine
firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous _Lady
Gold’s Escort_ and _The Wagnerites_ are the type, and of which The
Nightpiece is the triumph--and a very thin delicate line, generally
for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn
head--of which the _Mrs. Patrick Campbell_ is the type and _L’Education
sentimentale_ a variant--whilst the three remarkable _Comedy-Ballets of
Marionettes I, II, and III_, show white masses used against black.
Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark” for the last time in mid-1894
in the July volume, No. 2, of _The Yellow Book_. The _Plays of John
Davidson_, several _Madame Réjanes_, the fine _Les Passades_, the
_Scarlet Pastorale_, and the _Tales of Mystery and Wonder_ by Edgar
Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894 _Yellow Book_ phase.
But in the third volume of _The Yellow Book_, the fanciful and
delightful portrait of _The Artist in bed_, “_Par les dieux jumeaux
tous les monstres ne sont pas en Afrique_,” and the famous _La Dame
aux Camélias_ standing before her dressing table, advance his handling
in freedom and rhythm; as does the exquisite _The Mysterious Rose
Garden_, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of
Biblical illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the
_Annunciation_”--indeed he could not understand the objections of the
prudish to it and resented its being misunderstood! The _Messalina with
her Companion_ is of this later _Yellow Book_ phase; and the _Atalanta
without the hound_ of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example of
it.
The beautifully wrought _Pierrot Invitation Card_ for John Lane; the
remarkable wash drawings _A Nocturne of Chopin_ from the suppressed
Volume Five, and the _Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47_ of _The Studio_,
all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, show
Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and in the
double-page _Juvenal_ of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan-chair,
he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change,
as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that
followed Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_; for, being
commissioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for _An Evil
Motherhood_, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected _Black Cape_, of
the suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only
under the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that
Beardsley made the now famous design of the _Evil Motherhood_ in which
he entirely breaks from _The Yellow Book_ convention and craftsmanship,
and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period.
[Illustration: THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN
_from “The Yellow Book” Volume IV_]
It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from _The Yellow Book_
that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beardsley’s
_Posters_ for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a
mediocre poster for _The Pseudonym Library_, a woman in a street
opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest _Poster_ he ever
designed--a lady reading, seated in a “groaning-chair,” a scheme in
black and purple, for _Christmas Books_--all three of _The Yellow Book_
phase.
* * * * *
There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from _The Yellow
Book_, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young Beardsley’s
life--an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and was to have a
curious and dramatic sequel before three years were passed by.
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and
it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to
criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in
the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for
it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying
what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d
campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient
philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and
conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full
career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter,
if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy
opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against
modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great
magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted
that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of
Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time.
I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English
Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was
ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and
Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples
of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and
Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff
Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists
at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement.
Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so
far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national”
in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not
as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his
art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and
Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were
not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken
English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through
borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision.
In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British
genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being
“effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”--which was not at all typical
of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very
brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD]
Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him,
cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply;
and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously
hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition
of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the
Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of _St. Paul’s_; and the editor,
Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to
its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but
contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:
114 Cambridge Street
S. W.
June 28th
SIR, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism,
or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic
surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I
may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am
“sexless and unclean.”
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if
he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
Yours &c
Aubrey Beardsley
This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic
delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to
answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be
published--that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in
seeking self-advertisement--but I was the last man in the world to
allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to
Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw
at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown
before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword
and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired
to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by
cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with
“Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his
naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply
at the same time, as follows:
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.
SIR,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee,
his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his
untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy
bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove
descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to
establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal
confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking
his morning bath--a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling
thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours truly
Hal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the
fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to
advertisement--the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a
weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt--before giving
out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s
“masterpiece”--on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be
too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed
to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on
me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that
Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys
more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his
mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention
of mine to lash _at him_ but at Harry Quilter--at the same time perhaps
he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I
thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts
to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites,
when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as
it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the
years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley
trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published
were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to
Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid
his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to
employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his
line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere
advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design,
Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told
me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him
a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at
Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy
whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly
when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who
had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group
that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly
agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more
than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton
lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died
about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of
craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the
containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired
the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered
Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as
masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but
both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying:
and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own
significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him
before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the
day of bitter regret was at hand.
* * * * *
Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894
or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with
oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The
Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_;
he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The
Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently
tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture;
and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the
unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style.
“I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints,
and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that
produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
[Illustration: THE SCARLET PASTORALE]
It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_
in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement
for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first
appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a
wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome
prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact,
Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men
in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec,
and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was
essentially “in the small.”
For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured
intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his
dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, John Lane whilst in America during
the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much
resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the
flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it
out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his _Lady
Gold’s Escort_ and his _Wagnerites_.... The decadent fad can’t long
stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant
wonder that the _Daily Chronicle_ asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr.
Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art
bitterly offended Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but
who still more resented this desire to show him as being really
“quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of
the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have
satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested,
not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused
of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling
together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the
vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to
try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist--he was none.
A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”
* * * * *
At a loose end, on his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley
drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and
began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling _Venus and
Tannhäuser_--it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as _Under
the Hill_--a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He
completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings
for _The Yellow Book_, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to
create his great style and supreme achievement in art.
The smallness of the page of _The Yellow Book_ had galled him by
compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size
of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him;
it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and
flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was
kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid
as though he knew he had but a short way to go.
[Illustration: ATALANTA]
_Baron Verdigris_ was the transition from the _Morte d’Arthur_ phase
to the _Yellow Book_ or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as _The Fat
Woman_ was the transition from his Greek vase stage; _Black Coffee_ the
end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of _The
Yellow Book_ page and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley
was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of
detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own.