Aubrey Beardsley

Extract

Je ne sais pas grand’ chose de plus. Mais que sais-je de mes autres amis? Chercher l’amitié, la donner, c’est d’abord crier ‘Asile! Asile!’ Le reste de nous est sûrement moins bien que ce cri, il est toujours assez tôt pour la montrer.

That Sunday afternoon early in the spring of 1894, when Henry Harland called on Henry James to introduce Aubrey Beardsley and the as yet uncradled Yellow Book, ‘this young man, slender, pale, delicate, unmistakeably intelligent, somehow invested the whole proposition with a detached, a slightly ironic and melancholy grace.’ Henry James ‘had met him before, on a single occasion, and had seen an example or two of his so curious and so disconcerting talent— an appreciation of which’ had, of course, ‘stopped quite short.’ A year later I had not been interested in the Yellow Book, not even in those ‘literary efforts of Beardsley’s own that matched’ his pictures ‘in perversity.’ I had seen him once at the Annan Bryces’. His sister Mabel (met first at the Bruntons and then in Waterloo Place) had persuaded me to hear him lecture. The slender youth did not attract me nor his lecture. The Jacques Blanche portrait accentuates the little I remember: some hardness, much affectation. La voix du sang was quite silent, and yet we were fated to be more brothers than friends. I left without any wish to encounter the Beardsleys again.

Not many weeks later, when I returned to South Audley Street from an early call in Park Lane (it must have been about 10.30 a.m.), I found a strange visitor in the drawing room, near Gustave Moreau’s Sappho.