Part 4

It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the decoration of the _Morte d’Arthur_ with almost mad enthusiasm. He knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, the blinds drawn, and London asleep--poured them forth in that secret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print-shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, people would ask when Beardsley worked--he was everywhere--but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that art.

Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil, and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only sketch he made for the completed design--when the pen and ink had next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rubber. The well-known pencil sketch of _A Girl_ owned by Mr. Evans shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the rough rhythm of his scrawls.

A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candlelight; as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to recognition.

Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shutting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs--than from any record by eyewitnesses--that he finished his drawing in ink on the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study--that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a whole--that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design--and then inked in the pen-line and masses.

[Illustration: PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD]

Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “original,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “I am happiest when the lamps of the town have been lit.” He must be at all costs “the devil of a fellow.”

Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on which stood two tall tapering candlesticks--the candlesticks without which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much else than pose whereon to lean for reputation.

* * * * *

His rapid increase of power--and one now begins to understand Vallance’s enthusiasm--induced Vallance to make a last bid to win the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move another foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young fellow to let him have a printed proof from the _Morte d’Arthur_ of _The Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur_ to show to Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance arrived. Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxscomb, mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpassing it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there was a storm of anger from Morris.

Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any hope of these two men working together was futile. “A man ought to do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy as a burglar filching from Caxton and mediæval Europe. However, so hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from writing an angry remonstrance to Dent.

[Illustration: HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN

_from “Le Morte D’Arthur”_]

How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beardsley and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the bubble of the mediæval “fake” in books; but had he instead entered into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had in his being no whit in common with mediævalism. Art has nothing to do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mistook for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble-hearted friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have no cant about it: the “mediæval” decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_ were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through mediæval research. That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and associate with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have let him starve and the music die in him unsung.

William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years thereafter, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival him in his “mediæval fake”--find himself--and give to the world in _The Savoy_ a series of decorations that have made his name immortal and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages, where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an elaborate boredom.

* * * * *

Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Meredith’s _Shaving of Shagpat_--a desire to which he returned and on which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual success, increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement.

However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commissions. His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Having mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him hugely--here he could use his line without troubling about floor or ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve the monotony of the heavy _Morte d’Arthur_ convention by drawing fantasies in this Japanesque vein for _Bon Mots_, both conventions rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him.

* * * * *

Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every hand his life long.

The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of _The Art Journal_, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together--and in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between Charles Holme and Lewis Hind--and _The Studio_, as it was christened by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset--Holme saw Hind in the editorial chair as _his_ best asset.

So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Palace Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet-faced” pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his forehead much in the style of Phil May--a pallid silent young man, but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful--with the inevitable black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered “geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot enthusiasm of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once decided that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one. In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for _Le Morte_ _d’Arthur_, the _Siegfried Act II_, the _Birthday of Madame Cigale_--_Les Revenants de Musique_--“Some _Salome_ drawings”--with several chapter-headings and tailpieces for the _Morte d’Arthur_. Hind’s memory probably tricked him as to the _Salome_ drawings; for, in refreshing his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of _The Studio_ published three months later. Wilde’s _Salome_ did not see print until February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown.

However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, _The Studio_, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to _The Studio_ offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey.

Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest-read critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon Beardsley abroad--and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and was launching a new monthly to be called _The Pall Mall Magazine_. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry Cust, appointed editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, asked Hind to become editor of the weekly _Budget_ at a handsome salary; and Hind, thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Gleeson White to take command of _The Studio_ in his stead. But even as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editorship of the _Pall Mall Budget_, for which, unfortunately, the young fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have somewhat dumbfounded Hind.

So the first number of _The Studio_ was to appear in the April of 1893 glorifying a wonderful youth--his name Aubrey Beardsley!

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It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented much of the wit of the ’nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive--and they forgave Gleeson White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts men.

On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a cover design for _The Studio_ from the much gratified youth, who went home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire--here was _réclame_! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in the first number of _The Studio_ after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pennell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in his several styles--the Japanesque, and the mediæval _Morte d’Arthur_ blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator”? In Pennell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrelevantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many--he gave it just and fair and full value.

All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebtedness to the first number of _The Studio_ in bringing him before the public. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did contain very remarkable work--at the same time it was scarcely world-shattering--and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic honesty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art--and all of us who have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-reproduction won through--and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down and died.

The first number of _The Studio_ did not appear until the April of 1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around _The Studio_ that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. _The Studio_ itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by mediæval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “gone into oak.” It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world--and a very narrow inner circle at that--where _The Studio_ caused any talk, and Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé to mediævalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a somewhat dinted toy--we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so--he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who at the New Year had gone from _The Studio_ offices to edit the _Pall Mall Budget_, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the most wretched drawings imaginable--drawings without one redeeming shred of value--work almost inconceivable as being from the same hands that were decorating the _Morte d’Arthur_, which however the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for _Morte d’Arthur_ were made by the time that Beardsley began his miserable venture in the _Pall Mall Budget_. The first volume of _Bon Mots_ appeared in the April of 1893--the _Sydney Smith and Sheridan_ volume--although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it respect. It was pretty poor stuff.

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