Columbia Library columns (v.28(1978Nov-1979May))

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  v.28,no.3(1979:May): Page 24  



24                                   Karl Beckson

ings). The Yellow Book was not designed as a deliberate expres¬
sion of artistic Decadence in the 1890s. Indeed, Harland, Beardsley,
and Lane agreed to exclude Wilde from its pages as a symbolic
gesture: he had, for many, become the embodiment of moral reck¬
lessness. The periodical, as the critic Arthur Waugh wrote of its
forthcoming appearance, would be "thoroughly representative of
the most cultured work which is now being done in English litera¬
ture." If it stood for anything, Waugh stated, it was against "dull¬
ness and incapacity" and with "no hall-mark except that of excel¬
lence." Privately, Beardsley was willing to go somewhat further:
in a letter to a friend, he explained: "Our idea is that many brilliant
story painters and picture writers cannot get their best stuff ac¬
cepted in the conventional magazines, either because they are not
topical or perhaps a little risque."

Despite the abuse from many critics when the first issue ap¬
peared. The Yellow Book was a financial success. Harland, having
propelled himself to the center of the literary world in London,
had successfully adopted a new mask of identity—that of the
Aesthete in the practical world of journalism. By the turn of the
century, he embarked on a new phase of his career as a writer
of Anglo-Italian romances, of which The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
(1900) is his best-known work. He returned in triumph to Amer¬
ica in late 1902, but within three years, his health took a sudden
turn for the worse. At the age of forty-four, he died in southern
Italy, where, in a last desperate attempt to save him, he had been
brought by his mother and Aline.
  v.28,no.3(1979:May): Page 24