Confessions of Aleister Crowley

211 Now, at this time, Gerald Kelly was in his Whistler-Velasquez period. Kelly's mind is in no way creative or even critical in the true sense of the word. He was a scholar. He would convince himself by elaborate argument that So-and-so was the greatest of all artists; and he would then endeavour to discover the secrets of the master in the spirit of the analytical chemist, and proceed to paint with the most pitiful perseverance in the style of his latest hero. I possess sketches by Kelly which I defy the world to distinguish from Beardsley, Rossetti, Morris, G.F.Watts, etc. Robbie Ross once told me of a man who collected fans by Charles Conder. He had twenty-three when he {354} died; four of them Conders, five doubtful, but the remaining fourteen genuine Kellys. At this particular moment he was aiming at the "low tone" of Whistler and Velasquez and his method was to keep on darkening his palette. Ultimately he would use paint the colour of Thames mud for the highlight on the cheek of a blonde. He once picked out an old canvas to paint over and had gone some distance before he discovered that it was his favourite portrait of the Hon. Eileen Grey. His knowledge of art was encyclopaedic; and he laid down the law and more unction and emphasis than anyone else I have every heard. He took Stanlaws under his wing and started to teach him to paint. Stanlaws possessed the characteristic American faculty of doing anything and everything easily; of scoring superficial success. One day I called on him and found a large easel in his studio on which stood a vast canvas --- evidently by Kelly. I congratulated him on his acquisition. He replied, rather huffily, that he had painted it himself. And the cream of the jest is that this hasty imitation of Kelly's imitations of Velasquez was accepted in the Salon on the strength of Stanlaws' American reputation! I gradually sickened of the atmosphere of Paris. It was all too easy. I flitted restlessly to London and back, and found no rest for the sole of my foot. I had even got engaged to be married, but returning after a week in London I was partly too shy to resume relations with my fianc‚e, and partly awake to the fact that we had drifted under the lee shore of matrimony out of sheer lack of moral energy. This lady claims notice principally as the model for several poems, notably (in Rosa Mundi, and other Love Songs) "The Kiss", "Eileen" and the poems numbered 14, 15, 16, 18, 21 to 28. She was also the "Star" in The Star and the Garter, Which I wrote at this time; and the three women connected with the "Garter" were an English lady with a passion for either, an acrobat and model whom I called my boot-button girl because her face was "round and hard and small and pretty", and thirdly Nina Olivier. Nina is described in the poem itself and also in several lyrics, notably "The Rondel" --- "You laughing little light of wickedness". My adoration of Nina made her the most famous girl in the quarter for a dozen years and more. She figures, by the way, in my "Ordeal of Ida Pendragon". The Star and the Garter contains some of my best lyrics and is also important as marking a new step in my poetic path. I had mastered form better than I had ever done before; I had welded lyrics into a continuous opus with an integral purpose, without artificiality, such as to some extent mars Orpheus and even Alice. I spent two days writing the poem; but I do not consider it a waste of time. Some time later I added an appendix of a very obscure kind. The people of our circle, from Kathleen Bruce (since Lady Scott and Mrs. Hilton Young) {335} to Sybil Muggins and Hener-Skene (later, accompanist to Isadora Duncan) are satirized. Their names are introduced by means of puns or allusions and every line is loaded with cryptic criticism. Gerald and I, as educated men, were frightfully fed up with the presumption and poses of the average ass - -- male or female --- of the quarter. One incident became immortal. One incident became immortal. I wrote in The Sword of Song that I "read Lévi and the Cryptic Coptic", and lent the manuscript to my financ‚e, who was sitting for Gerald Kelly. During the pose she asked him what Coptic meant. "The language spoken by the