Hill_--by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for
even Beardsley feared to _write_ the Mons Veneris,--he seemed undecided
as to which to call it--the story was without consequence, without
cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of
little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and
desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life
burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons
that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly
coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe.
He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except
in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never
walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night
fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life
that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one
was there--to flit awhile into the room where the children danced--the
sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the
inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes.
He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a
phrase--he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like
a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits
to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of _The
Three Musicians_ with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the
old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies,
as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the _translation from
Catullus_. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse
rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in
literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand
the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make
literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional
act--he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because
he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument
for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to
order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of
all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe
whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was
more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It
was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings--it was
a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the
aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the
eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were
obsolete, a dead language--he is more concerned with dead words than
with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot
make it alive even for himself--he cannot fulfil a character in it
or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street
of fine clothes--there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He
is not greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly
concerned with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this
akin to Oscar Wilde.
* * * * *
It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques
Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable
friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the
picture he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to
Beardsley’s infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see
the author of one of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, _La Dame aux
Camélias_--Alexandre Dumas, fils.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO. 1_]
[Illustration: THE BILLET-DOUX]
Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beardsley
in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits of
Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm.
Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to be
“unable to draw anywhere but in England.” This was not necessarily an
affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is painfully
common to the artistic temperament which often cannot work at all
except in the atmosphere of its workshop.
He was now working keenly at _The Savoy_ drawings and the illustrations
for his bowdlerised _Under the Hill_, to be produced serially in that
magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, and the
rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, showed,
in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for _The Yellow
Book_, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second edition of
the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for _The Savoy_,
being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first number for
December, _The Savoy_ eventually had to be put off until the New Year;
meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley commenced work upon the
famous sequence of masterpieces for _The Rape of the Lock_, announced
for publication in February, and which we know was being sold in March.
In January 1896 _The Savoy_ appeared, and made a sensation in the art
world only to be compared with the public sensation of _The Yellow
Book_. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward
with a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like
beauty of the superb Title Page--the two black-masked figures in white
before a dressing table--the deft witty verses of the naughty _Three
Musicians_, the _Bathers on Dieppe Beach_, the three sumptuously rich
designs of _The Abbé_, the _Toilet of Helen_, and _The Fruit-bearers_
for the novel _Under the Hill_ which began in this number, capped by
the stately _Christmas Card_ of _The Madonna and Child_ lifted the new
magazine at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year.
The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the rest,
with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the ’Sixties which
Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided him
to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved from
it all, ’prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his _Morte
d’Arthur_ experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation
even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the
artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath
from its astonishment when about the end of February there appeared
the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to _The Rape of the
Lock_--masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the
first rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, _The New
Star_--with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of _The Dream_, the
exquisite _Billet-Doux_, the _Toilet_, the _Baron’s Prayer_, and the
magnificent _Rape of the Lock_ and _Battle of the Beaux and Belles_.
[Illustration: THE TOILET]
[Illustration: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK]
The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on returning
to the influences which were his true inspiration, at once coming
nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an
extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces--we find
silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal,
each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to
and interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a
freedom of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his
design as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In
the two drawings of _The Rape of the Lock_ and _The Battle of the Beaux
and Belles_ it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the
white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the
single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the
muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and
satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially
as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the
cohesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of
the thing.
* * * * *
By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s
life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the
February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous
scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable
time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon
that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended
in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his
state--he was about to learn the dread verdict.
The second number of _The Savoy_ appeared in April, as a quarterly,
and its charming cover-design of _Choosing the New Hat_ screened a
sad falling off in the output of the stricken man--for the number
contained but the _Footnote portrait of himself_; the _Third Tableau
of “Das Rheingold”_ which he had probably already done before going
to Brussels; a scene from _The Rape of the Lock_; and but one
illustration to _Under the Hill_, the _Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima_;
whilst the beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No.
II--in all but four new drawings!
Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next--the
third--number of The Savoy to appear in July, _the driving of Cupid
from the Garden_, and worked upon the poem of the _Ballad of a Barber_,
making the wonderful line drawing for it called _The Coiffing_, with a
silhouette _cul-de-lampe_ of _Cupid with the gallows_; but his body was
rapidly breaking down.
On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writing the
letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, in which
Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his condition this
day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible immediate change,
wringing from the afflicted man the anguished cry: “I am beginning
to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” From this dread
he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. It was to stand
within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. He was about to
start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be the rest of his
wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than he sees it taking
stealthy possession of the shadows almost within reach of his hand. It
is now become for Beardsley a question of how long he can flit from the
Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he can keep him from his side
if but for a little while.... In this June of 1896 was written that
“_Note_” for the July _Savoy, No. 3_, announcing the end of _Under the
Hill_--Beardsley has made his first surrender.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES]
[Illustration: THE BARON’S PRAYER]
So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his last
restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the
terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had
to turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the
fatuous falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write
as if London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition
to alien peoples--it was London that found him, London that raised
him to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley
himself feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It
was the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the
bedizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed for
the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but
it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And though
Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his spiritual
home with him--clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippendale furniture
and to his books and the inspiration of his genius--the engravings
after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; above all he
clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without which he was
never happy at his work.
By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at Epsom;
where he set to work on illustrating _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_
as a Christmas Book--for which presumably was the fine _Ali Baba in the
Wood_. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is now fretted by his
“entire inability to walk or exert himself in the least.” Suddenly he
bends all his powers on illustrating _Lysistrata_! and in this July of
1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe and masterly drawings
for the _Lysistrata_ as would have made any man’s reputation--but alas!
masterpieces so obscene that they could only be printed privately.
However, the attacks of hemorrhage from the lungs were now very severe,
and the plagued man had to prepare for another move--it is a miracle
that, with death staring him in the face, and with his tormented
body torn with disease, Beardsley could have brought forth these gay
lyrical drawings wrought with such consummate skill that unfortunately
the world at large can never look upon--the _Lysistrata_. It is almost
unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind could have allowed his exquisite
art to waste itself upon the frank obscenity which he knew, when he
drew these wonderful designs, must render them utterly impossible for
publication--that he should have deliberately sacrificed so much to
the naughtinesses. Yet as art they are of a high order--they utter
the emotions of unbridled sexuality in reckless fashion--their very
mastery renders them the more impossible to publish. He knew himself
full well that the work was masterwork--“I have just completed a set of
illustrations to Lysistrata, I think they are in a way the best things
I have ever done,” he writes to his friend the priest, John Gray,
who is now striving his hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic
Church. Gray realises that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the
_Lysistrata_ should be printed in pale purple.... It was probable that
Beardsley reached the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes through the French
translation of Maurice Donnay--he was so anxious to assert that the
purple illustrations were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in
book form, not with Donnay’s translation! The _Lysistrata_ finished, he
turned to the translation and obscene illustration of the _Sixth Satire
of Juvenal_.
But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed off
hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a sad
state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place made
his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop the
mischief.” Beardsley found relief--in the _Juvenal_ drawings! “I am
beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for
the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe.
[Illustration: THE COIFFING]
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 4.]
With the July number, _No. 3_, _The Savoy_ became a monthly magazine;
and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to arouse
Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an almost
passionate love for the magazine. Yet this July that gave us the
_Lysistrata_ sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August
_Savoy, No. 4_--but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this
beautiful design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze
curtain, in the same month that he drew the _Lysistrata_ sequence, and
that it is the only design that could be published! It at least gives
the world a hint of what it lost.
August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the Two
Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the _September
Savoy, No. 5_, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the
uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of _The
Woman in White_ which he had made from the _Bon Mots_ line drawing long
before--there was now much searching amongst the drawings and scraps
lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked body, the cover-design
showed him at his most sumptuous employment of black and white.
It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after
signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work
with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his
drawing within, or without, a small square label. It is true that three
drawings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but
they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings were
most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed that they
should not be “unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle through the
issues of _The Savoy_ so as to prevent a sense of monotony--we shall
see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded in a bunch” at
the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian drawings with
the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form of signature.
Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, and Arthur
Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he might get from
month to month, though there was always a Wagner to count upon as at
least one. The full signatures on the _Death of Pierrot_ and the _Cover
for the Book of Fifty Drawings_ are the last signatures in full; and
both were drawn in early September soon after his birthday, as we are
about to see.
Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on urgent
business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with return of
the bleeding from the lungs--a train journey always upset him. He had
to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in so enfeebled a
state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter at Boscombe
as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. A despairing
cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out of the wood.”
The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic _Death of
Pierrot_ that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was now
brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover design,
so the powerful _Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold”_ had to be used
as a cover for the October _Savoy No. 5_. The _Death of Pierrot_ is
wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and the
sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual
literary beauty of its written legend.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO_. 7.]
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”]
September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beardsley’s
winter.
It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new offices
at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved from the
first offices of _The Savoy_ at Effingham House, Arundel Street,
Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade
that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works already
done, and their publication in an _Album of Fifty Drawings_, to appear
in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beardsley in his
suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its suggestion of the
end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the _Death of
Pierrot_. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the _Cover
for A Book of Fifty Drawings_. The fifty drawings were collected and
chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this makes
it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before September,
the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive _Bookplate of the
Artist_ for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the
Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm,
however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely
to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path
in drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the
extraordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have
upon a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade
greatly extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on
view to passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort.
The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful _Cover for the
November Savoy, No. 7_, of spectacled old age boring youth “by the
book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase of
“Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beautiful
translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous drawing _Ave
atque Vale_ or “Hail and Farewell” for the _Carmen C I of Catullus_,
whilst the third illustration for the November _Savoy_, the small
_Tristan and Isolde_, shows his interest maintained in the musical
sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended
to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October,
Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s _Das
Rheingold_, “most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he
himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of _Tannhäuser
returning to the Horselberg_, was trying to induce Beardsley at this
time to illustrate the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ for him. The month of
October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright fire
with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber
from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly
ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am
quite paralysed with fear,” he cries--“I have told no one of it. It’s
so dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer
ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” Yet
before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took “quite a
long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my fortnight’s
bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His only distress
made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, about to
start on her American theatrical tour.
[Illustration: HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS]
[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE”]
November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It was
to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that
ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown the
achievement of this great period of his art--he writes that he has
just finished “rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet
of Ernest Dowson’s, _The Pierrot of the Minute_” which was published
in the following year of 1897--a grim irony that a boredom should have
brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work,
he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November
a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to
avail anything.”
There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to
illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one
design in particular of the several good designs in the _Pierrot of
the Minute_, that “_cul-de-lampe_” in which Pierrot, his jesting
done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing
wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework--a
tragic comment on the wonderful _Headpiece_ when Pierrot holds up the
hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob,
blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of
human hands.