Part 8
I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance--and it was a regret to me that it so chanced--it fell to my lot to have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had asked for it, ’tis true--had clamoured for it--and yet resented others saying what he was arrogant in doing.... One of those stupid, narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled with that of Wilde--I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled _The Decay of English Art_, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical examples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, was particularly “national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted mimicry of mediæval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and unclean”--which was not at all typical of the modern achievement as a whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere precious poetasters.
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD]
Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about him, cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian reply; and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a laboriously hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured ambition of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to the Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of _St. Paul’s_; and the editor, Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus:
114 Cambridge Street S. W. June 28th
SIR, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.”
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
Yours &c Aubrey Beardsley
This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched.
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be published--that I quite understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in seeking self-advertisement--but I was the last man in the world to allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather raw at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword and first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired to pose as a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by cutting out the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with “Your critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his naughty but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply at the same time, as follows:
A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley.
SIR,
When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath--a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist in it.
Yours truly Hal Dane.
July 3rd 1895
The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way to advertisement--the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as deadly a weapon for wounds.
Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt--before giving out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “masterpiece”--on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth; but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine to lash _at him_ but at Harry Quilter--at the same time perhaps he would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought it a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the applause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his signature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice, from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him a passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather extravagantly when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appreciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.”
In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own significant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of bitter regret was at hand.
* * * * *
Beardsley during his early _Yellow Book_ phase, about the July of 1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for _The Comedy Ballet of Marionettes_ which appeared in the July _Yellow Book_; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight changes, _The Comedy Ballet No. 1_, in William Nicholson’s manner. He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a _Lady with a Mouse_ on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said--“I only use flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at being that produced on a Japanese print.” “I prefer to draw everything in little.”
[Illustration: THE SCARLET PASTORALE]
It is as likely as not that his attempt to paint _The Comedy Ballet I_ in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement for Geraudel’s Pastilles--as well as I can remember--which first appeared in _Le Courier Français_ on February 17th, 1895. It was a wonderful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men in that realm--Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was essentially “in the small.”
For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured intention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, John Lane whilst in America during the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the flower of decadence, was “a pitiless satirist who will crush it out of existence.... He is the modern Hogarth; look at his _Lady Gold’s Escort_ and his _Wagnerites_.... The decadent fad can’t long stand such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.” Scant wonder that the _Daily Chronicle_ asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offended Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but who still more resented this desire to show him as being really “quite respectable.” As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of the satirist in him; had he wanted to satirise anything he would have satirised the respectabilities of the middle-class which he detested, not the musicians and the rich whom he adored and would have excused of any sin. Look through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling together a dozen designs that could be made to pass for satire of the vices of his age! It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to try and whitewash Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist--he was none. A dying satirist does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.”
* * * * *
At a loose end, on his expulsion from _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling _Venus and Tannhäuser_--it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as _Under the Hill_--a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his drawings for _The Yellow Book_, and developed a new craftsmanship which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art.
The smallness of the page of _The Yellow Book_ had galled him by compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted him; it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line and flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest was kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncannily rapid as though he knew he had but a short way to go.
[Illustration: ATALANTA]
_Baron Verdigris_ was the transition from the _Morte d’Arthur_ phase to the _Yellow Book_ or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as _The Fat Woman_ was the transition from his Greek vase stage; _Black Coffee_ the end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of _The Yellow Book_ page and its consequent disheartening reduction, Beardsley was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a greater love of detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all his own.
He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street, 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.