THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

Wilde, Beardsley, and the Making of Salome

Linda Zatlin

[This article was originally published in 2000 in the ‘Roundtable on Oscar Wilde’ in the journal Victorian Culture, and we are grateful to Professor Zatlin for permitting us to republish it here.]

Professor Zatlin adds this note, October 2007:

During the intervening years several issues I raise here have not been broached. It would be valuable to have a firm date for the first time Wilde and Beardsley met, the way they came to be on a first name basis, and more details of their collaboration.  Equally important is to uncover information about the two drawings discussed herein, more specific dates and motivation for their execution as well as when Wilde actually saw J'ai baisé ta bouche; the way Beardsley learned the two lines from Salomé which he quotes on these drawings.  In addition, we would profit from knowing more about Beardsley's supposed desire to translate the play; details of the row with Lane; Wilde's actual opinion of the drawings; and Beardsley's reason for leaving his drawings untitled. One way to begin would be to find out if there is in the United States, as Estelle Jussim asserts in her book on F. Holland Day, a number of unpublished letters between playwright and artist.   As I have said elsewhere, the number of Beardsley's published letters during 1895 is precipitously lower than in other years.  Was he too busy to correspond, or were his letters destroyed—contemporaneously or in 1935 by Lewis May with the blessing of Allen Lane, successor to his uncle at The Bodley Head?  Or are uncooperative owners hoarding unpublished material?   To answer these and other queries, Holmesian researchers are required.

Oscar Wilde was the most visual writer, and Aubrey Beardsley the most literary artist of the 1890s. And their creative lives had much in common. Writing in London, Wilde capitalized on his Irish background in a country unappreciative of foreigners. Drawing in London, Beardsley overcame his provincial Brighton origins and his brief time at art school. Both affected the dandy’s perfection of attire and cynicism about the public. While neither artist was interested in the direct reflection of the material world, in their work each explored the dark side of human nature. Both were wits, although Wilde was faster, his epigrams more pithy, and he was the more gracious of the two. They both wrote poetry, absorbed French ideas into their work, and became notorious in England. They embraced Catholicism, were ultimately rejected by the English public, and died too young in lodgings in France. Not surprisingly, their work simultaneously fascinated and repulsed their contemporaries.

Despite these shared contours of their lives and of aspects of their personal styles, the most interesting writer and the most avant-garde illustrator of the 1890s were acquaintances, but not friends. They could not have been, partly because Wilde was eighteen years older. Although their careers would flame and die during the decade, the iconoclasm of each man emerged at different times. More established in his career, Wilde ushered in the period with the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, which resulted in a boisterous debate in the press about art and morality. By the summer of 1891, when he may have met Beardsley, Wilde had already given up the editorship of Woman’s World magazine, was on his way to becoming a successful playwright, had published other fiction as well as Dorian Gray, and had written two plays. At this time the illustrator carried with him a portfolio of his drawings, but he would not make illustration his career until autumn 1892. Ada Leverson, a friend to both men, recalled their ‘marked contrast’:

Oscar loved purple and gold, Aubrey put everything down in black and white. And while every connoisseur declared that line of the artist superb, there were others who deplored that he did not know where to draw it. (22)

Nonetheless, during 1893, a brief collaboration between the two men produced one of the most significant English illustrated books, whose publication was one of the most resounding English artistic events of the 1890s. Wilde’s play Salome, illustrated by Beardsley, was published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews on 24 February 1894. The play excited mixed critical commentary, but the drawings, which contrasted starkly with most contemporary work, were a magnet for opprobrium.

Although a few letters bearing on their relationship by them and others have come to light in the last three decades, the circumstances and the date of their actual meeting and their working together remain largely unknown. To these letters we can add other shreds of information to date two drawings, a caricature and an early version of Salome, more accurately and to analyze the play’s pre-publication difficulties, using six of Wilde’s previously unpublished notes and telegrams—which let us understand their working relationship better. That information is released 100 years after Wilde’s death leads to trust that more material will surface in this new century and definitively resolve issues such as those I raise here. Wilde is silent on the whole matter of meeting Beardsley, but Beardsley reports that he met ‘the Oscar Wildes’ at the home of the painter Edward Burne-Jones on 12 July 1891 and afterwards ‘came home with the Oscar Wildes—charming people’ (22). Then for twenty-two months, he too falls silent, until he announces ‘I’m off to Paris with Oscar Wilde’—a trip which in the event he took alone (47). Beardsley’s most recent biographer accepts the testimony of Beardsley’s mother and doubts that Wilde visited Burne-Jones with his family that summer Sunday, some three months before he took up temporary residence in Paris to write his Salomé (Sturgis 74-5).[1] Largely completing the play between late October and mid-December 1891, Wilde returned to London before Christmas, which he spent with his family (Ellmann 342-3).[2] Wilde wanted Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, and she was already in rehearsal in London when the Lord Chamberlain banned the production in June 1892, invoking an old law prohibiting biblical figures from stage interpretation.[3] But the portrayal of biblical figures was not prohibited in books, and soon after the turn of the year, on 22 February 1893, Wilde published Salomé in French in London and Paris.

And what of Beardsley during this year and a half? If Wilde had in fact been present at Burne-Jones’s home on 12 July 1891, he would have seen Beardsley’s drawings and heard the painter praise them. If Wilde was not at the painter’s that day, Wilde’s longtime friend Robert Ross, to whom the designer and writer Aymer Vallance introduced Beardsley on 14 February 1892, would have introduced playwright and artist in the succeeding months (Vallance 364; Ross 15). By then, Beardsley, who moved from Brighton to London in late 1888, would have been familiar with the story of Salome, which gained great popularity among writers in the nineteenth century, as well as with numerous depictions of her in art.[4] Already a Francophile, he had been a prodigious reader since his early tubercular hemorrhages forced him to be sedentary for extended periods of time. The painter Jacques-Emile Blanche declared that Beardsley knew Balzac’s characters as if they were members of his family, and the artist Joseph Pennell recalled Beardsley’s accurate correction of Andrew Lang when that authority quoted Villon (Blanche 1107; Pennell 40). In particular, Beardsley would have known that, beginning in 1870, Gustave Moreau portrayed Salome as a femme fatale in a celebrated group of nineteen paintings, six watercolors, more than 160 drawings, and two sculptures (Salomé, exhibition catalogue 118-21). Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier had described her in fiction, Stephan Mallarmé in poetry (Zagona passim). During 1892 Beardsley may have learned that Wilde had left and later sent one, perhaps two, of the three copies of his manuscript to Paris so that Pierre Louÿs, Stuart Merrill, and Adolphe Retté could check his grammar and style (Kohl 178). Beardsley would also have known about the censorship of the stage production and read about Wilde’s reaction—a declaration that he would renounce his English citizenship and move to France. He certainly seems to have heard Wilde read from the play, for his caricature Oscar Wilde at Work and his drawing of Salome with the head of John the Baptist, J’ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan, bear lines of Wilde’s dialogue in Beardsley’s hand. If these drawings ultimately fail to offer clues about when the two met, they offer other information: the long-ignored caricature presents most of Wilde’s sources, and the arresting style of J’ai baisé ta bouche provided the reason Wilde became ‘anxious’ to have Beardsley as his illustrator (King 38).

The caricature gently satirizes Wilde as he writes his play during autumn 1891, or as he reads the suggestions of his Paris readers between late January and early February 1892 (Fig. 1). Reade dates the drawing as 1891, a distinct possibility upon examination of the style: thick-nibbed pen strokes awkwardly slick down Wilde’s hair, a technique evident in another 1891 effort, Soleil Couchant. In addition, the Bible cover, the bookcase, as well as the (misquoted) line from the play are decorated with what Reade terms ‘calculated’ loose scrawls, which would be refined away or turned into background lines in 1893 drawings for the Pall Mall Budget (Reade 123). Moreover, unlike later caricatures such as the frontispiece for John Davidson’s Plays, the face does not effectively caricature Wilde’s. The books revealing most of Wilde’s sources, however, present a problem for an 1891 date: Beardsley was not in Paris during autumn 1891. Unless he and Wilde already knew each other and only if Wilde were working on Salomé before he left for Paris would Beardsley have a reason to caricature the playwright then.

Long hidden information suggests that they might indeed have met before Wilde left for Paris. Previously unpublished letters from Wilde to Princess Alice of Monaco on 27 and 31 October 1891 reveal one reason he made the trip: he wanted Salomé to be produced in Paris before its London debut which, he writes on 27 October, he had already arranged (Merlin Holland, Personal Communication, February 2000). Although W. S. Blunt’s diary notation for that same day records that Wilde is ‘writing a play in French’ (quoted in Wilde 1962, 305), Wilde uses the past tense when he writes to Princess Alice. His play is ‘finished’, he says, and he wants to tell her about it when she returns to Paris. Perhaps another reason for his trip was inducing Princess Alice to underwrite a Parisian production of Salomé. Could he have brought with him from London extensive notes, sections of dialogue, or even rough scenes of the play—enough for him to declare it finished? If Wilde and Beardsley were introduced at Burne-Jones’s, if the two subsequently met, and if Wilde was writing his play in early autumn in London, it is entirely plausible that Beardsley made the caricature then.

Or, he could have drawn it in early 1892. If Ross introduced playwright and illustrator shortly after he met Beardsley in February, Wilde may have been collating corrections sent from Paris and possibly checking his sources shortly before he became preoccupied with his new play (Kohl 179). It is too early in Beardsley’s career to say that he recognized in the playwright a kindred soul who boldly stole from others, as Wilde readily admitted he did (Ellmann 354-5). But Beardsley so liberally cites Wilde’s sources—the Bible, French fiction and poetry—because he too had read them or because he heard Wilde, or those who attended Wilde’s readings of Salomé, mention them. This, then, is not a caricature executed to expose Wilde as he pilfers ideas.

Beardsley does, however, caricature Wilde’s French. The manuscripts of Salomé prove that Wilde’s French writing ability was fluent, if possessing infelicities of grammar and style. In contrast to his written French, Charles Ricketts reports that that Wilde spoke hesitantly, as if unsure of his accent: ‘his pronunciation was hesitant but not unpleasant’ (51).[5] Based probably on hearing Wilde speak, rather than on having access to a manuscript, Beardsley commemorates his perception of Wilde’s ineptitude: on the writer’s desk he prominently places texts on French grammar and diction as well as a text on spoken French, The First Course, a book written in the 1850s and updated by Frederick Ahn, the Berlitz of the period. Beardsley also commemorates, however unwittingly, either his own careless use of quotation marks or his own weak knowledge of French pronouns: he deliberately changed or misquoted the line from the play spoken by the page of Herodias to the Syrian captain as he ogles Salome, giving it as ‘Il ne faut pas le regarder’ (‘You must not look at him’) instead of ‘la regarder’ (‘at her’) (Salome 1893, scene i). The line is set in parenthesis within quotation marks and placed under the title, suggesting that it might have been intended as a subtitle, but it is jammed in, raising the question of whether this line was added after the caricature was completed. Sadly, the disappearance of the original more than seventy years ago prevents further speculation.

The caricature remained unpublished until 1914 and thereafter had limited circulation, but the drawing of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist circulated within the group of people to whom Beardsley was introduced during the beginning of 1893—the year recent critics such as Snodgrass (1999, 383) ascribe to its creation (Fig. 2). Lewis Hind, editor of The Studio, a magazine then in the planning stage, asserts that he saw it in January 1893 at the home of Alice and Wilfred Meynell (16-18). Vallance had arranged for Beardsley to be invited to one of their ‘at homes’ so that he could meet Hind. Drawn in the artist’s new ‘black blot’ style—stark masses of blacks and whites tensely opposed on the page—it gave Hind and everyone present a view of Beardsley’s talent. The title inscribed on this drawing, J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche, is the penultimate line from Wilde’s play, and expresses Salome’s triumph when she holds the severed head (which floats in space like the head in Moreau’s L’Apparition). Beardsley was obviously familiar with the play, but how had he gained his knowledge? Had he indeed met Wilde on 12 July 1891 and gotten to know him then? Had he attended a rehearsal of the play during spring 1892 or a private gathering at which Wilde read from his work? Had Wilde loaned him a manuscript? While hearing Wilde read from his play is most likely—as William Rothenstein, Charles Ricketts, and Graham Robertson report having done—no one places Beardsley at such a reading. It is possible that friends, trying in their memoirs to protect Beardsley’s reputation, omitted traces of his association with Wilde. Nonetheless, giving only the publication date of J’ai baisé ta bouche (i.e. April 1893), Vallance records that, ‘this was the first design suggested to the artist by Oscar Wilde's French play of Salome [sic]’ (Vallance in Ross 76).

In 1925, over thirty years after the event, Hind recalled commissioning from Beardsley an illustration for Salomé, presumably to accompany an early 1893 review of the play in The Studio. But the exact date of the commission is unknown. Hind left The Studio before its first issue appeared on the stands in April 1893 and, after securing Gleeson White as his successor, became the editor of another new magazine, the Pall Mall Budget. The Studio’s inaugural issue featured Joseph Pennell’s laudatory and liberally illustrated article about Beardsley, which included J’ai baisé ta bouche. Furthermore, Hind reports that he had first tried to commission Wilde to review his own play, a very unusual request. When Wilde refused, Hind turned to Beardsley. As an editor, Hind might have obtained a publisher’s pre-publication copy of the play for Beardsley to read, but the drawing was completed before Hind met the artist. When he first met Beardsley in January 1893, Hind declares, in his portfolio were ‘three or four [drawings] from Salome, including “Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist” ’, a statement which excludes the possibility that Hind commissioned this drawing (vii-viii).

Most probable is that Beardsley made the drawing during autumn 1892, after he had been to Paris and was experimenting with his black blot style. It was assuredly completed prior to 1 December, when he wrote to Ross that the New English Art Club had invited him to place in their spring [April] exhibition some of the Japonesques ‘in [his] portfolio already’ (36), information verified by the N.E.A.C. Spring 1893 Exhibition Catalogue which specifies this drawing and La Femme Incomprise as numbers 28 and 34. Taken together, the information demands a re-dating of this picture from 1893 firmly to autumn 1892. While it was drawn too early to be a deliberate bid to secure the position of illustrator for an English version of Salomé, a translation not then contemplated, Beardsley may have calculated that it would place him prominently should Wilde seek an illustrator.

If Beardsley’s motivation for creating the drawing remains speculative, how and when Wilde saw the drawing is tantalizing. He would not have escaped seeing this drawing of Salome when it was published with Joseph Pennell’s laudatory article about Beardsley in the first issue of The Studio, in April 1893. But Wilde’s inscription to Beardsley in a copy of the French edition of the play (now in Sterling Library, University of London) is dated a month earlier, and his words suggest that he saw the drawing long before Pennell’s article appeared. Wilde seemingly alludes to Salome’s dance and its result, her receipt of John the Baptist’s head—which is Beardsley’s subject: ‘March 1893. For Aubrey: for the only artist who, beside myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance. Oscar.’[6] Moreover, his use of Beardsley’s first name indicates a previous acquaintance with the artist, an acquaintance close enough to be on a first name basis (Sherard 1902, 58). If indeed Wilde alludes to Beardsley’s drawing, he may be suggesting the way Salome uses her sexuality to obtain John’s head, the ‘blood and ferocity’ with which The Times characterized the play. At the same time, through his inscription Wilde may be acknowledging the outsider status of playwright and illustrator, the invisible dance of talent which was propelling them forward despite their origins. Wilde most probably saw the drawing shortly after Beardsley executed it.

Having seen Beardsley’s drawing of Salome with John the Baptist’s head, Wilde apparently directed John Lane to contract Beardsley to illustrate his play. On 8 June 1893, Lane wrote to Wilde that he had ‘this day seen Beardsley and arranged for 10 plates and a cover for 50 guineas!’ (HRHRC, Hanley). Beardsley first mentions a drawing for the English version in a June letter to Robert Ross, directing him to go to the publisher ‘Elkin Mathews today[;] they have a drawing (Salomé) to show you’ (49-50). In the event, between late spring and late autumn 1893, Beardsley executed a total of nineteen drawings, including two front covers, a rear cover, and three drawings to replace those Lane believed had obviously sexual details.

While Beardsley was making drawings, Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas was translating the play into English. Douglas, to whom Wilde may have given the task to keep him busy, failed (Merlin Holland, Personal Communication, August 1999). According to Douglas’s notes for an autobiography, Beardsley then tried and also failed (Sturgis 161-2). Wilde rewrote Douglas’s translation or translated Salomé himself. An examination of some of Douglas’s letters to Lane about his translation reveals Douglas’s failure to comprehend his task; instead, he viewed his role as artistic re-creator. These letters help us to view their dispute at closer range, although some details remain mysterious. During summer 1893 Douglas completed a translation and on 30 August confidently informed Lane that he had sent it to Wilde

at Dinard otherwise I should have thought it better to send it straight to you. I suppose he wants to look it through. I am rather proud of it both as a translation and as a work of art in itself!….I suppose Oscar will send it to you almost immediately. (HRHRC, Lane Archive, Box 3)

Contrary to Douglas’s expectations, Wilde did not accept the translation. The result was that on 30 September Douglas withdrew as translator, pettishly complaining to Lane that he and Wilde

have found it impossible to agree about the translation of certain passages, phrases and words in Salome, and consequently, as I cannot consent to have my work altered and edited, and thus become a mere machine for doing rough work of translation, I have decided to relinquish the affair altogether. You and Oscar can therefore arrange between you as to who the translator is to be. (Rosenbach Library)

(Thirteen years later, Douglas would complain that Wilde ‘himself revised the translation to the extent of taking out from it most of the elements of original work on my part’ [Douglas to Lane, 6 July 1906, HRHRC, Lane Archive, Box 3]). During October Wilde translated the play himself, but other difficulties arose.

Lane may have become squeamish about publishing the play, or at least three of Beardsley’s drawings. He may have threatened to withdraw from his (separate) contracts with playwright and illustrator rather than publish a volume written by an author who flaunted his male lover in public and illustrated by an artist who flaunted salacious sexual details in his work. If he intended to withdraw, Lane may have offered to return the drawings or to transfer them to another publisher. On the other hand, it may have been Wilde who threatened to take his play to another publisher. The details are unclear, but on 4 November Beardsley responded to a letter from Lane with transparent concern about the publication of his drawings. He had, he writes,

been considering the matter of Salome and I think the only feasible plan is to let the drawings remain in your hands. I quite recognise that they are legally your property as long as you consent to make them public, and that their transference to another publisher would only lead to trouble. I hope you may settle satisfactorily with Wilde. (56)

Beardsley intelligently refuses Lane’s offer to return the drawings, but his comment about the publisher’s settling with Wilde is puzzling (although unrelated to Beardsley’s supposed translation). It may refer to the dispute between Douglas and Wilde over the translation that delayed publication until 24 February 1894 (evidenced by Beardsley’s second cover drawing with a bare root rosebush, which bears at the bottom of the attached spine the year 1893). It may refer to Wilde’s perception of Beardsley’s drawings, which we will examine presently. Or it may refer to another dispute that concerned Beardsley only indirectly.

On 6 November Wilde requested professional advice ‘on Salomé business’ from Charles Kains-Jackson, a solicitor who was a friend of Douglas’s. A note on the verso of this (unpublished) telegram states that ‘Kains-Jackson will keep the appointment’ (W. A. Clark Library). On 10 November Wilde telegrammed twice and wrote two notes (all unpublished) to Kains-Jackson, attempting to meet again with the solicitor. One note states Wilde’s business: ‘particularly to see you about Lane’s conduct in reference to Salomé’ (NYPL, Berg Collection). The same queries raised about Beardsley’s letter to Lane must be raised about Wilde’s consulting a solicitor. Did Wilde anticipate trouble and want a lawyer on tap? Did Lane refuse to publish Beardsley’s drawings in the volume? Lane had, after all, demanded the replacement of three with obvious sexual details. (Salome on Settle, John and Salome, and The Toilet of Salome were removed, and the frontispiece was expurgated, but Lane missed the phallic details in Enter Herodias, The Stomach Dance, and The Platonic Lament.). Did Wilde want Beardsley’s drawings published without expurgation? In either case Beardsley’s contract would have made consulting or hiring a solicitor unnecessary. Did Wilde, who may have been concerned about his behavior in public with Douglas, decide that he did not want Beardsley’s suggestive illustrations published with his play? On this issue Wilde may have needed advice about the way to remove himself from a potentially compromising situation. Beardsley’s drawings could possibly result in public opinion so harsh that it would forever prevent staging the play; Wilde could legally dissociate his text and the drawings. Or did Lane refuse to publish the play even without the drawings? In this case, Wilde would want advice about forcing Lane to honor his contract.

There is one other possibility—that Lane wanted Douglas’s name off the title-page. This issue is raised in Douglas’s 16 November letter to Lane, in which he first accuses Lane of trying to make mischief between him and Wilde, and then rationalizes the removal of his name from the title-page:

…nothing would have induced me to sanction the publication of Salome without my name on the title-page (and the matter was left entirely in my hands by Mr. Wilde), if I had not been persuaded that the dedication which is to be made to me is of infinitely greater artistic and literary value than the appearance of my name on the title-page. It was only a few days ago that I fully realized that the difference between the dedication of Salome to me by the author and the appearance of my name on the title-page is the difference between a tribute of admiration from an artist and a receipt from a tradesman. (Rosenbach Library)

The removal of Douglas’s name from the title-page coincides with Wilde’s consultations between 6 and 10 November with Kains-Jackson. Persuading Douglas that he should voluntarily remove his name may have been possible only with the help of a solicitor who was also Douglas’s friend. And most probably Wilde, rather than Lane, consulted the solicitor in order to soothe Douglas. Moreover, the removal of Douglas’s name coincides with Beardsley’s refusal to become embroiled in a dispute which concerned him only indirectly. In late November Beardsley commented to Robert Ross that he supposes

you’ve heard all about the Salome row. I can tell you I had a warm time of it between Lane and Oscar and Co….I really don’t quite know how the matter stands now. Anyhow Bosie’s name is not to turn up on the title.

He concludes his statements about Wilde and Douglas with the judgement, ‘Both of them are really very dreadful people’ (58). His judgement could have arisen from Douglas’s behavior over his translation, over the placement of his name in the published text, from Wilde and Douglas’s public behavior, from Wilde’s refusal of Beardsley’s supposed translation, or perhaps from Wilde’s view (unknown to us as we shall see) of Beardsley’s drawings.

Whatever the details were, a point on which playwright and artist concurred was Lane’s behavior over the publication of the play. In a letter to Rothenstein around 20 November, Beardsley inquires if the painter straightened out a problem with Lane, ‘Or are you ready to join the newly formed anti-Lane society?’ (56). Several days later Wilde asserted to More Adey that ‘The wicked Lane has been routed with slaughter’ (347). Whatever Lane’s actions were, the unhappiness of playwright and illustrator grew when Lane chose the material for the cover, coarse-grained blue canvas. In December 1893, apparently with Beardsley’s blessing, Wilde complained to Lane about his choice of material:

The cover of Salome is quite dreadful. Don't spoil a lovely book. Have simply a folded vellum wrapper with the design in scarlet—much cheaper, and much better. The texture of the present cover is coarse and common: it is quite impossible and spoils the real beauty of the interior. . . .I loathe it. So does Beardsley. (348)

The protest went unheeded.

In spite of Wilde’s statement to Lane that Salome was a ‘lovely book’, Wilde’s opinion of Beardsley’s illustrations is ambiguous. He saw them before publication, which is suggested by the (undated) letter from Douglas to Lane, requesting that the publisher ‘bring the drawings to the Albemarle Hotel now’, a day most likely during November 1893, when both Wilde and Douglas were in London (W. A. Clark Library). And both Holmes and Ricketts record that Wilde brought Beardsley’s drawings to The Vale, the home Ricketts shared with Charles Shannon (167; 38).[7] But when the play was published, to the feral howls of the London press, Wilde complained privately to Charles Ricketts that the drawings did not fit his mystical play: ‘My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau—wrapped in his jewels and sorrows. My Salomé is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Sainte Thérèse who worships the moon; dear Aubrey’s designs are like the scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks’; Ricketts declared that Wilde ‘detest[ed] the drawings’ (51-2). But with the exception of Salomé, Ricketts was Wilde’s illustrator. Was Wilde’s denigration of Beardsley’s art a diplomatic attempt to repair Ricketts’s wounded feelings? Others who would have been privy to Wilde’s personal views, including Rothenstein, Leverson, Ross, and Max Beerbohm, do not repeat Wilde’s complaint. That Wilde was trying to soothe Ricketts may be gleaned from the playwright’s February 1894 introduction of Beardsley to the actress Mrs. Pat Campbell. To her, he described the artist as ‘very brilliant and wonderful’ and praised his drawings as ‘quite wonderful’ (353). Was she merely someone outside Wilde’s immediate circle, a person from whom his real feelings must be shielded? The reader is left to judge.

The drawings for the play, moreover, can be read as complimenting or even flattering Wilde. In 1906 Robert Ross told John Lane that ‘the two [drawings] in which Oscar appears [are] The Face in the Moon [sometimes called The Woman in the Moon] and Enter Herodias’ (HRHRC, Lane Archive, Box 8).[8] Wilde’s face may also appear in The Eyes of Herod and The Platonic Lament. An examination of the details, however, reveals that these are not caricatures of Wilde. They have none of the cruelty all too evident in Beerbohm and Toulouse-Lautrec’s caricatures of him; as a matter of fact, the moon’s eyes in these drawings evince pain. Additionally, in Enter Herodias, the only drawing of the four to include a recognizable portrait of Wilde, he is the showman/shaman, who stands in front of the stage and welcomes the audience. His owl mask, caduceus, and the antique phallic prickets are emblems of wisdom belonging to a magician—Beardsley’s graphic tribute to the play’s wordsmith.

Wilde’s gender in the titles to these drawings has also come under scrutiny. Traditionally, critics have seen him as the face in The Woman in the Moon, and by stressing the links between him and Diana, the goddess of the moon, have maintained that Beardsley was publicly revealing Wilde’s homosexuality (Fletcher 83, 84). But Diana is also goddess of the hunt and she is allied with Artemis, goddess of fecundity—characteristics which Beardsley, with his knowledge polished by bouts of reading after attacks of tuberculosis, surely knew. Moreover, the moon was a powerful image to Wilde. Long before he wrote Salome, the moon threads through his poetry in various ways: its light is a mirror; it influences animal behavior; it exerts gravitational pull on the earth and the tides. In the play, the moon focuses the characters’ personalities. In a reinforcement of his role, Iokanaan prophecies that the ‘moon shall become like blood’ (all quotes from Salome 1894, passim). The Page of Herodias loves the Syrian captain, who will soon commit suicide because his love for Salome is unrequited; for the Page, the moon is not unnaturally a ‘woman rising from the tomb.’ The Syrian Captain sees the moon as an incarnation of Salome, ‘a little princess.’ Herod, an older man tied to traditionally superstitious views, perceives the moon as ‘a mad woman. . . .seeking everywhere for lovers.’ Only Herodias seems to view the moon unsentimentally, ‘as the moon.’ Nonetheless, like Herod she links the moon and madness, and she wishes to see the day when her daughter Salome ‘will be like the moon.’ The virginal Salome describes the moon as an undefiled goddess, ‘cold and chaste.’ The moon’s chastity and its beams also link Salome and Iokanaan. Salome declares that Iokanaan is ‘chaste as the moon is’ and ‘like a moonbeam… a shaft of silver.’ Her perceptions lead to the final pairing of the two: immediately before Herod orders Salome’s death, a ‘shaft of moonbeam falls on her.’ Rather than revealing Wilde’s gender, Beardsley’s alliance of Wilde with the moon recognizes its attraction for Wilde both as a symbol and his technique to reveal the characters’ preoccupations.

The details of Wilde and Beardsley’s relationship such as we have—of a first meeting, of their collaboration, of Salome’s delayed publication and its reception—have been generally forgotten. New editions of the text routinely include Beardsley’s drawings, continuing to link him and Wilde. In succeeding generations the play itself has been kept alive by the devoted few entranced by the play’s lush erotic tone, its hints of homosexuality between the Syrian and the Page of Herodias, as well as the attraction and repulsion between Salome and John, which culminates in Salome’s death. These elements, created by Wilde and depicted by Beardsley, not only link the most creative men of the 1890s, but bring them from the twentieth century into the new millenium where their work continues to attract readers and viewers.

Wilde and Beardsley were key figures, even the key figures, of the fin de siècle era. The extraordinary illustrated book that they collaborated on continues to attract and astound readers and inevitably generates equal interest in their relationship. Complex and tense in nature, this relationship, of which this essay necessarily gives only a partial account, is shrouded in mystery and complicated by certain often cited memoirs of the time, attesting to their (supposed) polarization. These memoirs have limited our perceptions of their relationship, so much so that many biographers and journalists fail to discuss its intricacies. Yet playwright and artist seem not to have disliked each other, as may be gathered from less well known accounts of, for example, their meetings in Dieppe and Berneval after Wilde was released from jail and both men had only a short time to live. A century later, armed with such fresh information, scholars can reinvigorate and enlarge the discussion, taking it beyond the narrow focus of their collaboration on Salome and beyond the cliché of their mutual dislike, to see Wilde and Beardsley, both individually and in their working relationship, in their full human complexity.

Linda Gertner Zatlin

Morehouse College

---

Notes

I am grateful to Morehouse College for providing funds for research and writing, to Robert Orme for suggestions which made me rethink sections of this essay, to Simon Wilson for his always invaluable criticism, and to Merlin Holland for debating with me the known as well as the possible chronology of events and for allowing me to use unpublished Wilde material.

[1] Ellen not unnaturally held Wilde responsible in April 1895, when Aubrey was sacked from The Yellow Book. After Aubrey died Ellen distanced the two; to that end she declares that their acquaintance ‘lasted only six weeks’ [77].

[2] In Paris, according to Covington, the intellectual life of which Wilde partook included attending the salon hosted by Rachilde [Marguerite Eymery], the feminist and writer who with her husband founded the Mercure de France (6). During the last week of April 1897, when Beardsley had moved to Paris on doctor’s orders, he described to his sister Mabel a luncheon he attended at which Rachilde and ‘some long haired monsters of the Quartier . . . .all presented me with their books’ (304, 305, 308). The circles in which Wilde and Beardsley traveled overlapped, but generally did not include both men at the same time.

[3] Contemporaries recount different stories about Wilde’s choice of actress (Tydeman and Price 19-20). Salome would be produced only in February 1896, in Paris. Wilde was still in jail, but Beardsley attended the opening night with Ernest Dowson. Thereafter, the play would be sporadically but affectingly performed, emphasizing the mysticism Wilde incorporated. Richard Strauss quickly turned the script into a much-performed opera. Beardsley’s drawings continue to be reproduced in costumes and sets for films and stage productions, including those in black and white for Yukio Mishima’s Tokyo audiences during the 1960s and for Steven Berkoff’s 1989 Dublin audiences (Tydeman and Price list selected productions, 184-7).

[4] A survey of paintings of the subject through the mid-sixteenth century reveals that the most usual figures are Herodias or the beheading of John the Baptist. For the next three centuries, these would be joined by depictions of Salome receiving or carrying John’s head (Salomé, exhibition catalogue).

[5] Snodgrass reads this caricature as Beardsley’s response to Wilde’s boasting about his French (1995, 116). But knowing French would have been nothing to brag about: every cultured individual of the time was fluent in at least one additional language, and native speakers of French, including Louÿs, Retté, and another man of letters, Henri de Régnier, complimented Wilde’s fluency (Sherard 1906, 285-6).

[6] Presumably, the ‘invisible dance’ is intercourse, cited in Farmer and Henley under entries for ‘Greens’ and ‘Ride.’ Robert Orme believes that Wilde’s supposed description of Beardsley’s drawings as ‘the scribbles of a precocious schoolboy’ (quoted below, page 13) uses the term ‘precocious’ as a code word for masturbation. Space permits no further discussion here of Wilde’s intent when he used these terms, but they require investigation.

[7] A friend of Ricketts, Holmes calls Beardsley’s Salome ‘a jaded Cyprian apache from a music-hall promenade,’ and believes the choice of Beardsley was unlucky for Wilde because his art was ‘already so generally associated in the Victorian mind with ideas of a veiled priapism’ (167).

[8] Beardsley did not routinely title his drawings. One consequence is that some publishers entitled or retitled drawings when reproducing them both before and after Beardsley’s death. One example is the drawing Ross calls The Face in the Moon. In 1894 it was The Woman in the Moon, but during Beardsley’s lifetime it was also published as The Man in the Moon. In his 1909 ‘List of Drawings’, Vallance names it The Woman (or Man) in the Moon. For further discussion, see my article on Beardsley, Lane, and the Yellow Book (59-70).

Works Cited

Beardsley, Ellen. ‘Aubrey Beardsley.’ A Beardsley Miscellany. Ed. R. A. Walker, London: The Bodley Head, 1949. 75-83.

Beardsley, Aubrey. Letters. Eds. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1970.

Blanche, Jacques-Emile. ‘Aubrey Beardsley.’ Antée 2.11 (April 1907): 1103-22. Clive, H. P. Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925), A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Covington, Elizabeth E. ‘ “Mademoiselle Baudelaire.” ’ The Center & Clark Newsletter 13 (Spring 1999): 5-6.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.

Farmer, J. S. and W. E. Henley, eds. Slang and its Analogues Past and Present. 7 vols. [1890-1904]. New York: Kraus, 1965.

Fletcher, Ian. Aubrey Beardsley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Hind, Lewis. Uncollected Work of Aubrey Beardsley. London: 1925.

Holmes, Charles J. Self and Partners (Mostly Self). London: Constable, 1936.

King, A. W. An Aubrey Beardsley Lecture. London: R. A. Walker, 1924.

Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Trans. David Henry Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Leverson, Ada. Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde. London: Duckworth, 1930.

Pennell, Joseph. Aubrey Beardsley and other Men of the Nineties. Philadelphia: Privately Printed, 1924.

Reade, Brian. ‘Beardsley Re-Mounted.’ Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley. Ed. Robert Langenfeld. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. 103-30.

Ricketts, Charles. Oscar Wilde: Recollections. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1932.

Ross, Robert. Aubrey Beardsley. London: The Bodley Head, 1909.

Salomé dans les collections françaises. Exhibition Catalogue. Saint-Denis: Musée municipal d’art et d’histoire, 1988.

Sherard, Robert H. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906.

_____. Oscar Wilde; The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, London: Privately Printed, 1902.

Snodgrass, Chris. Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

_____. ‘Beardsley Scholarship at His Centennial: Tethering or Untethering a Victorian Icon?’ English Literature in Transition 42.4 (1999): 363-399.

Sturgis, Matthew. Aubrey Beardsley. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

Tydeman, William and Steven Price. Wilde: Salome. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Vallance, Aymer. ‘The Invention of Aubrey Beardsley.’ Magazine of Art (May 1898): 362-68.

_____. ‘List of Drawings.’ In Ross, 1909, pp. 57-112.

Wilde, Oscar. Letters. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

_____. Salomé, London: John Lane, 1893.

_____. Salome. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1894.

Zagona, Helen Grace. The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake, Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1960.

Zatlin, Linda Gertner. ‘Aubrey Beardsley, John Lane, the Yellow Book, and Archival Material.’ The Death of Pierrot, A Beardsley Miscellany. London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998. 59-70.

Return to the top Return to hub page Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page


Return to The Library Table of Contents