Aubrey Beardsley's Drawing of the "Shadows" in W. B. Yeats's The Shadowy Waters

AUBREY BEARDSLEY'S DRAWING OF THE ((SHADOWS" IN W. B. YEATS'S THE SHADOWY If7ATERS As ALLAN WADE HAS NOTED, "Late in 1896 [Yeats] sent either a version or a synopsis of [The Shadowy Waters] to Leonard Smithers, who intended to publish it with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley hoped to make six pictures for it, but Yeats has stated that he only finished one and died before he could do the rest."l No one has pointed out what the illustration was like and what passage of the play it illustrated. Since the illustration does not appear in any of Beardsley'S published work and since neither Yeats nor anyone else seemed to know what happened to the original, information about what it looked like would be not only interesting in itself but potentially valuable for identification should the drawing still exist in some private collection. Such information is forthcoming if one examines the Letters from A ubrey Beardsley to Leonard Smithers2 concurrently with the unpublished manuscripts of The Shadowy Waters.s Not knowing that an edition of The Shadowy Waters published by Smithers had been planned, R. A. Walker, the editor of these letters of Beardsley's, could not identify the work which Beardsley was illustrating since the passage to be illustrated appears in no published version of the play. According to Walker, Beardsley wrote to Smithers about October 27th, 1896: "All right about Yeats, you know I admire his work." (Note after Letter LXXI) And again, probably on October 29, 1896: ''I'll take on Yeats playas soon as you like, am in working form." (Letter LXXII) Walker notes: "Apparently no play by W. B. Yeats was published at this time and Mr. Yeats will give no information." Yeats had "considered the publisher a scandalous person, and had refused to meet him."4 This may partly explain why Yeats "would give no information." 1 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London, 1954), p. 237n. This synopsis, with the notation in Yeats's hand, is now in the Huntington Library. The Shadowy Waters was first published in The North American Review, May, 19°0. 2 Ed. R. A. Walker (London, 1937). 8 In the National Library, Dublin. 4 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York. 1953). p. 198. 268 MODERN DRAMA December Apparently Beardsley was getting impatient for copy by the time he wrote a letter which Walker dates November 18, 1896. "When will Yeats be ready?" he demands. "In the meantime I will do whatever you like." (Letter LXXXIII) The letters show that the synopsis had been passed on to Beardsley by November 27th, 1896, when he wrote: "Yeats play will well stand 6 prs. I am now doing a double page picture for it of the young man on horseback following the young woman on horseback." (Letter LXXXVIII) This then is the description we have been looking for of the one drawing Beardsley finished. And again, with a gaiety incongruous enough with the sombre tone of this play: "The Yeats pictures will be amusing. The young man on horseback is vastly beau, & the young woman vastly belle. I am drinking beaune." (Letter LXXXIX; Postmark 29 Nov. 1896) Walker is quite right that "No play published in Yeats's Collected Plays has any young man or young woman on horseback." (Note to Letter LXXXVIII) And he is not far off the track to relate the illustration to The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), although the passage which he picks, a description of Niamh, is not the relevant one: "A pearl-pale, high·born lady, who rode/ On a horse with bridle of findrinny." (Bk. I, n. 20-21)5 The relevant passages from The Wanderings of Oisin, like the relevant passages from the manuscripts of The Shadowy Waters, present figures who are part of Yeats's arbitrary symbolism rather than characters involved in the plot. In each of the three sections of The Wanderings of Oisin, as Oisin and Niamh ride off to the three islands (of the living, of victories, and of forgetfulness), they see visionary figures who (and this is part of the symbolism) overtake them and leave them behind: . . . now a hornless...