Part 9

The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed to be an “unfrocked” attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, gossip whispered and pursed the lip--but gave no clue. He came to London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of questionable morality--a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due depreciation of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how--whilst the henchman held the absent-minded seller in converse--Smithers slipped out and resold it for several hundred pounds--and how, the book being bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin-curtained door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid youth bathed their hair in showers of gold.... Smithers soon therefore made his daring _coup_ with Burton’s unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_, which was to be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gossip ran that, choosing Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by him could not reach a London bank before the morning of Monday, Smithers ran down to the country to see Lady Burton; and after much persuasion, and making it clear to her that the huge industry and scholarship of the great work would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it was quite unsaleable to an ordinary publisher, but would have to be privately issued, he induced her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of thousand pounds. Skilfully delaying the writing of the cheque for a sum which his account at the bank could not possibly meet, Smithers waited until it was impossible for the local post to reach London before the banks closed on Saturday morning--returned to town with the scrip--and spent the rest of the evening and the whole of Saturday in a vain and ever-increasing frantic endeavour to sell the famous manuscript for some seven or eight thousand pounds or so. It was only by dogged endeavour on the Sunday that he at last ran down his forlorn hope and sold it for--it is gossiped--some five thousand pounds. On the Monday morning the bank-porter, on opening the doors of the bank, found sitting on the doorstep a dandified figure of a man in silk hat and frock coat, with a monocle in his anxious, whimsical eye.... So Smithers paid the money into his account to meet the cheque which he had drawn and dated for this Monday, before the manager was likely to have opened his morning correspondence. It had been touch and go.

[Illustration: THE MIRROR OF LOVE]

Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of fine editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it came about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, Smithers with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had cast from him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly wherewith to usurp _The Yellow Book_. He knew that young Beardsley, bitterly humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his remarkable flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more--or at any rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not above an “exaggeration” to his own advantage--Beardsley’s bank-books alone can verify or refute it--he intended and meant to see to it that, Beardsley from that hour should be a free man, free from cares of bread, free from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, free to utter what song was in him. Whether Smithers were the unscrupulous rogue that he was painted by many or not, he determined that from thenceforth Beardsley should be assured of a sound income whether he, Smithers, had to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, in order that Beardsley should have it. This dissipated-looking man, in whatsoever way he won his means, was at this time always well dressed and had every appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups and downs; but he made a show of wealth and success. And he kept his wilful bond in his wilful way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, Smithers raised the money by fair means or foul that Beardsley might fulfil himself, for good or for ill. He knew no scruple that stood in Beardsley’s way. It is true that when Beardsley died, Smithers exploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers was the most loyal and devoted friend he had.

[Illustration: A CATALOGUE COVER]

A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, _M. A. P._, a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and interesting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy and is full of beautiful and costly things.... At his country house at Walton-on-Naze....”

You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world his footstool--no expense spared. But the source of income a prodigious mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the humiliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: “a good friend as well as a publisher.”

Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a dangerous one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general public. There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his novel entitled in its bowdlerised form _Under the Hill_, and later to illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication.

* * * * *

Disgusted with _The Yellow Book_, Beardsley put his immediate past and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn and the early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that had again begun to dog his steps.

Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and removed to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, Beardsley in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased now from money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with _The Savoy_ due to appear in December, he went back to his early inspiration from the 18th century, and at once his art burst into full song.

Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered Beardsley immersed in his work for _The Savoy_; but finds him now more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was hard at work upon his obscene novel _Venus and Tannhäuser_, the so-called _Under the Hill_, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went and scribbling phrases as they came to him.

[Illustration: ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS)]

[Illustration: THE ABBE]

The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of the Prudential.”

It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city and scholastic circles.

_Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.

[Illustration: THE FRUIT BEARERS]

[Illustration: A CHRISTMAS CARD]

As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing--better uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” “reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”--what Tree used wittily to call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publication is impossible.

This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that vex the age--he is concerned solely with his health or some business of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling fellows, not a sign!

It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s “Table Talk” that others published.

In _Under the Hill_ Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul, so he had to make Tannhäuser into an Abbé--it sounded more real to him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley--a hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable of postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on satisfying every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome garment over the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings over acts so bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind as Beardsley’s, judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being nauseated by his own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament--it explains his art, his life, his vision--and it proves the cant of all who try to excuse Beardsley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, he lashes it. Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and commonplace all such as did not revel in it.

[Illustration: THE THREE MUSICIANS

_from “The Savoy” No. 1._]

[Illustration: TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS”]

The story of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, bowdlerised as _Under the 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.