Part 3

But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a curious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best. It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the French writers--it was their challenge to the past--it was their very inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was to run riot in eroticism--he was to treat sex with a marked frankness that showed it to be his god--but it is only right to say that the artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree. And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race. It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.

Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit--it was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class--he was one of the most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it, as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and witty companion.

Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley after a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled. However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his friends, to dare all and make for art.

Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament. Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.

This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday; and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis de Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”

Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his art--the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and Burne-Jones at this very time--Whistler had published his _Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ in 1890, and London had not recovered from its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but his eager eyes were quick to see.

However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.

And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The generous soul of Vallance little understood Morris--or Beardsley; but his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted boy’s cause.

Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement. Next--and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting fact--Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse--probably not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things. Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the society of the great--his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him--only doing it with an air and dressing well for the part.

Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy--they even lack manhood--they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelligence.

However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott books--he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then anxious to produce--_Sidonia the Sorceress_. Vallance leaped at the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a ridiculous pill.

We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but mediocrity--a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know--and to achieve. Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling it--far less any of his sponsors. And yet!----

Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival publication to the Kelmscott Press--he was to smash it to pieces and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point--and Frederick Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foresee it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful nor attractive, but probably trying to find _something_ to praise, at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”--and so saying he dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care for his drawings--he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again--and he could never be induced to go.

Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused to go, and Vallance went alone--but that is another story. For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in the doing--one John Dent, a publisher. This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for ever--desert the night-school at Westminster--burn his boats behind him--and launch on his destiny as an artist.

V

BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST

Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to twenty-one

MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES

“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”

John M. Dent, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition to put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly costly bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott Press. Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s _Le Morte d’Arthur_ to lead the way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend Frederick Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside. He planned to publish the handsome book in parts--300 copies on Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; but he was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and illustrator. He must have a fresh and original artist.

[Illustration: HAIL MARY]

Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity in the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent that he believed he had found for him the very man; and he was showing to Dent Beardsley’s _Hail Mary_, when, looking up, he whispered: “and here he comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow of a young man like one risen from the well-dressed dead--Aubrey Beardsley had happened in, according to his daily wont, strolling over at the luncheon hour from the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for his midday rummage amongst the books. It was like a gift from the gods! Frederick Evans nudged the other’s arm, pointing towards the strange youth, and repeated: “There’s your man!”

To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk where he was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow was now to discover to be the well-known publisher.

So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met.

Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for his “_Morte d’Arthur_,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recommendation of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the work.

Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of any consequence--he was utterly unknown--and his superb master-work that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to mediævalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well enough for a mediæval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was becoming a trifle old for studentship--he was twenty before he made a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elaborate Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelmscott in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind--of what was expected of him.

At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and, speaking low, said: “It’s too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of it.” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and all would be well.

Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott tradition, took the drawing to Dent--the elaborate and now famous Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as _The Achieving of the San Grael_, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to appear in gravure as the frontispiece to the Second volume of the _Morte d’Arthur_.

Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque mediævalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; _and the design is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.”_ It is his first use of the Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque mark” is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was meant for three candles and three flames--a baser explanation was given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to see evil in all that Beardsley did.

Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the _Morte d’Arthur_, which was to begin to appear in parts a year thereafter, in the June of 1893--the second volume in 1894.

So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking--to mimic the mediæval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the mediæval woodcut and--to better his instruction. Frederick Evans set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beardsley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the public--Lewis C. Hind.

* * * * *

Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elaborate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Being now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of _Bon Mots_ by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and _Morte d’Arthur_ mediævalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to which was the grotesque and which the mediævalism. For the _Bon Mots_ he made no pretence of illustration--the florid scribbling lines drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But the severe conditions and limitations of the _Morte d’Arthur_ page held Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were the finest education in art that he ever went through--for he taught himself craftsmanship as he went in the _Morte d’Arthur_. It made him.

One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques for the _Bon Mots_ to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid black decorations of the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ put upon Beardsley for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his whole career depended on those designs for the _Morte d’Arthur_, and he strove to reach his full powers in making them.

Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kindred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his debt to Greece through Anning Bell.

We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s _Evelina_ and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on drawings for Hawthorne’s _Tales_ and Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_.

Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are written “after the event,” when the contents of the portfolio have been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab performance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the _Rape of the Lock_ and _The Savoy_ for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive” at once--we are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift achievement is the more a marvel--almost a miracle.