Part 10

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.

It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the appearance of his own _Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line_, “an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some reason difficult to plumb--it is neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this time for the _Book of Fifty Drawings_. It is a pathetically tragic thought that the November of the exquisite _Pierrot of the Minute_ was for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.”

It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published prints for the cover and the title-page of _Evelina_--of his “own early designing.”

The _Savoy_ for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.

It was soon clear that the days of _The Savoy_ were numbered and the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of public support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful _A Répétition of Tristan and Isolde_--and he flung into the number all the drawings he now made or had made for _Das Rheingold_, which included the marvellously decorative _Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold_, that “sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the unimportant fragments _Flosshilde_ and _Erda_ and _Alberich_, which he, as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of “most of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of musicians, the _Mendelssohn_ and the _Weber_; he somewhat fumbles with his _Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar_ from that _Don Juan_ of Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the _Mrs. Margery Pinchwife_ from Wycherley’s _Country Wife_; he very sadly disappoints us with his _Count Valmont_ from Laclos’ _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out such high hopes; and he ends with _Et in Arcadia Ego_.

[Illustration: A RÉPÉTITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE”]

[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE]

It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for _The Savoy_ that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number announces that _The Savoy_ is in future to be half-yearly and a much higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out.

Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in the appearance of _The Book of Fifty Drawings_ which he had completed in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design--an afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an advance copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896.

The December _Savoy_, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley unload all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ by Laclos, and Stendhal’s _Adolphe_....

On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “interviewing himself for _The Idler_”--the interview that appeared in that magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897.