with his sister, when expelled from _The Yellow Book_. It was about
this time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent
movement and became a Roman Catholic priest--the friendship soon became
more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was to have
a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published Beardsley’s
letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and were soon
very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear intimate
insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this time.
Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately “My dear Mentor,” from
which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was from the first
bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes and artistic
temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, soon
we find Gray priming the young fellow with arguments to refute his
“Anglican” friends.
* * * * *
The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with _The
Yellow Book_, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health
began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to
his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it.
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or
whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from _The
Yellow Book_ and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at
114 Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 St.
James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon.
He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was so
ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man.
And _The Yellow Book_ went on without him, to die a long lingering
ignoble death.
* * * * *
Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley
Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that shook
his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him to the
making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early summer of
1895--and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the first rank
in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth an original
art of astounding power. It was the proof of the _Venus between
Terminal Gods_. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite
_Mirror of Love_, wrought just before the _Venus between Terminal
Gods_. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black gloom
of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS. 1 AND 2_]
VIII
THE GREAT PERIOD
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four
“THE SAVOY” and THE AQUATINTESQUES
1. “THE SAVOY”
It was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even
the present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good
fortune, thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That
fickle and heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for
his smile, that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his
art, these were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or
put hand in pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve
his art. The greater public was inimical and little likely to show
sympathy, far less to help.
But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to
venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man
who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. For,
at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birthday,
Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement.
* * * * *
In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, sought
out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange a
providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny--a man who
proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as literary editor
and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors revealed this
fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard Smithers; and it was to
this dandified fantastic adventurer that Beardsley was wholly to owe
the great opportunity of his life to achieve his supreme master-work.
Had it not been for Smithers it is absolutely certain that Aubrey
Beardsley would have died with the full song that was within him unsung.
Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beardsley
lying on a couch--“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too late.”
Beardsley was supposed to be dying. But the idea of this rival to _The
Yellow Book_ which had at once begun to feel the cold draught of the
fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed hugely
to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the scheme
for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal partner for
Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than Arthur Symons.
A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, he had far more
than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for pictorial art.
The two men had also a common bond in their contempt of Mrs. Grundy and
in their keen interest in the erotic emotions--Arthur Symons had not
hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet by writing of a “Juliet
of a Night.”
Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of _The Savoy_ for
the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so vital to
Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order to enable
his work to be produced on a larger scale.
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER”]
The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and he
was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement.
What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of
his art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of
his publisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work
whatsoever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of
Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see
working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made him a
free man.
The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives
us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from _The
Yellow Book_ in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for
Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two
drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him
into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age--these drawings,
clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the one
hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly _Venus between
Terminal Gods_, designed for his novel of _Venus and Tannhäuser_,
better known as _Under the Hill_, and the exquisite _Mirror of Love_,
or as it was also called _Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape of
a Mirror_. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past and
utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s skill
is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the
different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician drew
subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, rhythm,
orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These two
masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense of
sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom.
The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a
fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious
figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to
be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the
north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked,
gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to
London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature
and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the
life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and
set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its
narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of
questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at
the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean
and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such
rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there
drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the
original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation
of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman
held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and
resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought
and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put
up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained
door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his
henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed
their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his
daring _coup_ with Burton’s unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_, which was to
be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing
Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a
London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the
country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it
clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work
would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an
ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced
her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully
delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the
bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible
for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday
morning--returned to town with the scrip--and spent the rest of the
evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing
frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or
eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the
Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for--it
is gossiped--some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the
bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the
doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with
a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money
into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for
this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning
correspondence. It had been touch and go.
[Illustration: THE MIRROR OF LOVE]
Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine
editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came
about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers
with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from
him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith
to usurp _The Yellow Book_. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly
humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable
flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and
Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more--or at any
rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an
“exaggeration” to his own advantage--Beardsley’s bank-books alone can
verify or refute it--he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley
from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free
from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what
song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that
he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth
Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had
to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley
should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he
won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every
appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a
show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful
way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair
means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill.
He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when
Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers
was the most loyal and devoted friend he had.
[Illustration: A CATALOGUE COVER]
A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper,
_M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as
he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal
Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden;
as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place
in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a
subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and
interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception
to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come
under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden,
Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room
painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the
walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey
Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his
brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and
very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and
has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be
noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power
of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great
palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy
and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at
Walton-on-Naze....”
You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world
his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious
mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for
ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was
Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s
life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the
humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a
good friend as well as a publisher.”
Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which
was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one
of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public.
There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be
published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to
exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow
was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his
novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to
illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare
craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.
* * * * *
Disgusted with _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley put his immediate past
and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his
beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest
achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated
this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now
opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the
early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again
begun to dog his steps.
Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed
to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley
in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from
money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with _The Savoy_ due to
appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th
century, and at once his art burst into full song.
Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered
Beardsley immersed in his work for _The Savoy_; but finds him now more
concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard
at work upon his obscene novel _Venus and Tannhäuser_, the so-called
_Under the Hill_, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the
inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and
scribbling phrases as they came to him.
[Illustration: ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)]
[Illustration: THE ABBE]
The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a
city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city
he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk
for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked
violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of
the Prudential.”
It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his
master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters,
his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world
of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature
proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial
type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary
gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate,
let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university
magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay
art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead.
He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of
bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise
proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound
sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is
precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial
minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product
not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city
and scholastic circles.
_Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_,
and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to
understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons
could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any
say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without
cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured
stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The
real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another
matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling
in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish
it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground
press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the
real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would
be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour
to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant
erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only
value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing
but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with
an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite
as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to
express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the
real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any
rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the
world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.
[Illustration: THE FRUIT BEARERS]
[Illustration: A CHRISTMAS CARD]
As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us
Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy
images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing--better
uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for
literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical
essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and
art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of
using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a
pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of
mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined
English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere”
than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,”
“reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,”
and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl
with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever
were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”--what Tree used wittily to
call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other
at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic
phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose,
and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of
cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,”
“Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and
refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet
little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant
chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat
old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a
sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and
the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings
of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the
constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary
achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that
publication is impossible.
This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate
or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we
read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had
been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace,
unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour
of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved
Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows
so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals
no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that
vex the age--he is concerned solely with his health or some business of
his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion
shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of
any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling
fellows, not a sign!
It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that
he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned
him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid
contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that
others published.
In _Under the Hill_ Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art
except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul,
so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé--it sounded more real to
him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley--a
hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or
generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable
of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on
satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome
garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings
over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind
as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being
nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament--it explains
his art, his life, his vision--and it proves the cant of all who try to
excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil,
he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as
being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it.
[Illustration: THE THREE MUSICIANS
_from “The Savoy” No. 1._]
[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”]