AUBREY BEARDSLEY
The appearance of Aubrey Beardsley in 1893 was the most extraordinary
event in English art since the appearance of William Blake a little
more than a hundred years earlier. With that, however, or almost so,
the resemblance ends. Blake was born “out of his due time,” not alone
because he baffled the understanding of his age, but because his age
scarcely knew of his existence. Beardsley, on the other hand, was
born into an age of easy publicity; and that circumstance, combined
with the fact that he was so peculiarly of his period, instantly made
him a centre of discussion, a subject for regard and reprehension.
Temporally he was so appropriate that an earlier appearance would have
been as premature as a later would have been tardy. It was inevitable
that he should have come with _The Yellow Book_ and gone with
_The Savoy_. The times demanded his presence. He was as necessary
a corner-stone of the Temple of the Perverse as Oscar Wilde, but,
unlike that great literary figure of the decadence in England, his
singularity makes him a prisoner for ever in those Eighteen Nineties
of which he was so inevitable an expression. He alone of all the
interesting figures of those years is almost as sterile in art as he
is local in point of time. Oscar Wilde added delicate raillery and
novel lightness to drama, and a new accent to conversation; Francis
Thompson reintroduced Christian mysticism into English poetry; Ernest
Dowson linked an eternal and bitter anguish of the soul with modern
emotion; and Arthur Symons, Max Beerbohm, John Davidson, G. S. Street
and Richard Le Gallienne reasserted the significance of urbane things;
all revealed something that was universal--if only the universality of
taverns and courtesans. But Aubrey Beardsley is the unique expression
of the most unique mood of the Nineties, a mood which was so limited
that his art would have been untrue had it been either imitable or
universal. As a matter of fact, it is neither; all who have called
Beardsley master have destroyed themselves, and his work was archaic
even before he died.
As a man, or rather as a boy--for although Beardsley reached manhood
in years he hardly lost a certain boyish attitude towards life--he
was admired for his gaiety of heart, unabashed joy in his work, and
good-fellowship. He was born at Brighton on 21st August 1872, and
died of tuberculosis in 1898. From his seventh year his health was
delicate, and pulmonary troubles began to be feared as early as 1881.
He had passed through the first stages of education before this, first
at a kindergarten at Brighton, and then at a preparatory school at
Hurstpierpoint. But with the appearance of lung trouble he was removed
to Epsom. The first artistic influence of his early life was music,
and so proficient did he become as an executant that, in 1883, he
joined his family in London, and appeared on the concert platform with
his sister (Miss Mabel Beardsley, who became an actress) as an infant
prodigy. His real tastes, however, were literary, and, although as a
child almost he could talk with something like authority upon music,
he preferred to read books and dream in words and phrases. In 1884 he
and his sister were living in Brighton again, and he began to attend
the Brighton Grammar School as a day boy. Although his tastes ran in
the direction of books, he had innate skill with the pencil, and was
influenced by the drawings of Kate Greenaway. When quite young he made
a little money by decorating menu and invitation cards, but his drawing
first attracted particular attention at the Grammar School, where the
masters were interested and amused by his caricatures of themselves,
and his earliest work thus came to appear in _Past and Present_,
the magazine of that school. In 1888 he entered an architect’s office
in London, but apparently remained there for no great length of time,
for in 1889 he was employed as a clerk in the Guardian Life & Fire
Assurance Company. Whilst in that office he devoted his spare time to
reading and drawing, and his passion for books led him, as it has led
many another city clerk of literary tastes, to the well-known bookshop
of Messrs Jones & Evans, in Queen Street, Cheapside, and here he made
the acquaintance of Mr Frederick H. Evans, whose enthusiasm for his
drawings was the herald of Beardsley’s fame. Thus with the dawn of the
Nineties came whispers of the appearance of a new and remarkable
artist.
[Illustration: AUBREY BEARDSLEY
_By Max Beerbohm_]
Through the intervention of Mr Evans, Aubrey Beardsley came into
contact with the publishing world, and Mr J. M. Dent commissioned
him to illustrate the now famous two-volume edition of the _Morte
d’Arthur_, the publication of which in monthly parts, beginning June
1893, was Beardsley’s debut as a book illustrator. About this time he
met Joseph Pennell, who introduced him to the public in an enthusiastic
article, illustrated by several characteristic drawings, in the first
number of _The Studio_ (April 1893), the cover of which was also
designed by Beardsley. Interest in the new artist was immediate and
clamorous; and his work began to appear in many books. Messrs Dent &
Company, Messrs Elkin Mathews & John Lane, Messrs Longmans & Company
and Mr David Nutt, all published books decorated by him. In 1894 he was
appointed art editor of _The Yellow Book_, and then the “Beardsley
Craze” began in earnest. Beardsley posters appeared on the hoardings,
and the man-in-the-street became further acquainted with the work of
this marvellous boy through the columns of the popular newspapers and
magazines. The “Beardsley Woman” was an absorbing topic; and the young
artist was belauded and belittled to exasperation.
Never before did an artist achieve such immediate fame. He himself
appreciated it all with unabashed delight, and worked harder and
harder to meet the increasing demands upon his genius. Conscious, as
John Keats had been, that “mortality weighed heavy upon him,” he yet
clung to life with the fatal hopefulness of the consumptive. He is
said also to have worked feverishly, as though conscious of pending
doom, but, although fully aware of his fatal disease, it was not until
the last year of his life that he realised the nearness of death. As
late as September 1897, when he had actually got as far as France on
what proved to be his funeral journey to the south, he was buoyed up
by the hope of a complete recovery. “Dr P. has just put me through a
very careful examination,” he wrote to the Rev. John Gray. “He thinks I
have made quite a marvellous improvement since he saw me at the Windsor
Hotel, and that if I continue to take care I shall get quite well and
have a new life before me.”
A little more than seven months before, Aubrey Beardsley had been
received into the Church of Rome, and his published letters, covering
the period of preparation before his conversion, and closing a little
less than three weeks before his death, are full of a sweetness which
is heroic in so passionate a lover of life. In the introduction to
_The Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_, those “noted letters” in
which, as Arthur Symons has said, “we see a man die,” Father Gray says:
“Aubrey Beardsley might, had he lived, have risen, whether through his
art or otherwise, spiritually to a height from which he could command
the horizon he was created to scan. As it was, the long anguish, the
increasing bodily helplessness, the extreme necessity in which someone
else raises one’s hand, turns one’s head, showed the slowly dying
man things he had not seen before. He came face to face with the old
riddle of life and death; the accustomed supports and resources of his
being were removed; his soul, thus denuded, discovered needs unstable
desires had hitherto obscured; he submitted, like Watteau his master,
to the Catholic Church.” He was buried after a Mass at the cathedral at
Mentone, in the hillside Catholic cemetery of that town; his grave on
the edge of the hill is hewn out of the rock; “a true sepulchre, with
an arched opening and a stone closing it.”
It is recorded that Aubrey Beardsley was greatly impressed by the
wordless play, _L’Enfant Prodigue_, which delighted the playgoers
of the Nineties, and one can well imagine how the youthful artist
found in the spacious silences of that novel production an echo of
himself. Doubtless he saw in it something of his own vision of life
translated into another form, but doubtless he felt also, but this
time subconsciously, a response to that Pierrot note in his own soul
which has been indicated by Arthur Symons. But Beardsley was something
more than that, something more purposeful, although his early death
left his purpose unrealised. His youth made him the infant prodigy
of the decadence; and the Pierrot in him was an attitude, and even
then it was a bigger attitude than that of its namesake. Innocence
always frustrated the desires of Pierrot and left him desolate, but
Aubrey Beardsley introduced into art the desolation of experience, the
_ennui_ of sin. It required the intensity of youth to express such
an attitude, although the attitude savours not of the conventional idea
of youth, but of the conventional idea of experienced age. Perhaps it
is only the young who are ever really morbid, for youth more than age
regrets that “spring should vanish with the rose.” But youth that has
heard the beatings of the wings of death, as Beardsley must have done,
grows so hungry for the joys and beauties of spring that it becomes
aged by the very intensity of desire. Keats, like Aubrey Beardsley,
suffered such hunger, because, like Beardsley, whom he resembles so
much temperamentally, he loved as he said “the mighty abstract idea of
Beauty in all things.” And with both poet and artist there was acute
consciousness of the evanescence of Beauty:
“Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu, and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.”
But that reality is not only the attitude of hypersensitive youth
towards life; it is the attitude of self-conscious civilisation. And
how like modern civilisation is Max Beerbohm’s summary of Aubrey
Beardsley’s temperament? “He knew that life was short, and so he
loved every hour of it with a kind of jealous intensity. He had that
absolute power of ‘living in the moment’ which is given only to the
doomed man--that kind of self-conscious happiness, the delight in
still clinging to the thing whose worth you have only realised through
the knowledge that it will soon be taken from you. For him, as for
the schoolboy whose holidays are near their close, every hour--every
minute, even--had its value. His drawing, his compositions in prose
and in verse, his reading--these things were not enough to satisfy his
strenuous demands on life. He was himself an accomplished musician, he
was a great frequenter of concerts, and seldom, when he was in London,
did he miss a ‘Wagner night’ at Covent Garden. He loved dining out,
and, in fact, gaiety of any kind. His restlessness was, I suppose, one
of the symptoms of his malady. He was always most content where there
was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and
the most brilliant light.” That is a picture of the age as well as of
its epitome, Aubrey Beardsley.
In spite, however, of this hunger for life, this restless desire for
more and more vitality, he contrived to retain a natural sweetness in
his dealings with his fellow-men which has left many happy memories,
some of which have been recorded. When Robert Ross first met Beardsley
in 1892 he was so overcome by his “strange and fascinating originality”
that he neglected the portfolio of drawings which the young artist
had with him. “He was an intellectual Marcellus suddenly matured,”
says this chronicler. “His rather long brown hair, instead of being
_ébouriffé_, as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was
brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely
high and narrow brow. His face even then was terribly drawn and
emaciated. Except in his manner, I do not think his general appearance
altered very much in spite of his ill-health and suffering, borne with
such unparalleled resignation and fortitude; he always had a most
delightful smile, both for friends and strangers.”
Arthur Symons suggests that any eccentricities or difficulties of
character possessed by Beardsley were easily forgotten in his personal
charm: “He seemed to have read everything, and had his preferences
as adroitly in order, as wittily in evidence, as almost any man of
letters; indeed, he seemed to know more, and was a sounder critic,
of books than of pictures; with perhaps a deeper feeling for music
than for either. His conversation had a peculiar kind of brilliance,
different in order but scarcely inferior in quality to that of any
other contemporary master of that art; a salt, whimsical dogmatism,
equally full of convinced egoism and of imperturbable keen-sightedness.
Generally choosing to be paradoxical and vehement on behalf of any
enthusiasm of the mind, he was the dupe of none of his own statements,
or indeed of his own enthusiasms, and, really, very coldly impartial.
I scarcely accept even his own judgment of himself, in spite of his
petulant, amusing self-assertion, so full of the childishness of
genius. He thought, and was right in thinking, very highly of himself;
he admired himself enormously; but his intellect would never allow
itself to be deceived even about his own accomplishments.” “I remember
that when I first saw him,” says Max Beerbohm, “I thought I had never
seen so utterly frail a creature--he looked more like a ghost than
a living man. He was then, I believe, already in an advanced stage
of pulmonary consumption. When I came to know him better, I realised
that it was only by sheer force of nerves that he contrived to sustain
himself. He was always, whenever one saw him, in the highest spirits,
full of fun and of fresh theories about life and art. But one could not
help feeling that as soon as he were alone he would sink down, fatigued
and listless, with all the spirit gone out of him. One felt that his
gaiety resulted from a kind of pride, and was only assumed, as one
should say in company.” Another friend of the artist, H. C. Marillier,
writes: “Poor Beardsley! His death has removed a quaint and amiable
personality from among us; a butterfly who played at being serious, and
yet a busy worker who played at being a butterfly. Outwardly, he lived
in the sunshine, airing bright wings. Inwardly no one can tell how he
suffered or strove. It is well to avoid self-righteousness in judging
him. As the wise pastrycook says in _Cyrano_,
“‘_fourmi n’insulte pas ces divines cigales_.’”
But there is little doubt that Aubrey Beardsley did take his work very
seriously, boyish as he was, dandy as he was, butterfly as he was. He
loved praise and approbation as all men do; but when he won the frank
appreciation of an acknowledged master, such as Whistler, as eventually
he did, Beardsley showed his own sincerity and earnestness by tears.
The story is told very simply and very beautifully by Elizabeth and
Joseph Pennell in _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_:
“Whistler met Beardsley and got to like not only him, as
everybody did, but his work. One night when Whistler was with
us, Beardsley turned up, as always when he went to see anyone,
with his portfolio of his latest work under his arm. This time
it held the illustrations for _The Rape of the Lock_,
which he had just made. Whistler, who always saw everything
that was being done, had seen _The Yellow Book_, started
in 1894, and he disliked it as much as he then disliked
Beardsley, who was the art editor; but he had also seen the
illustrations to _Salomé_, disliking them too, probably
because of Oscar Wilde; he knew many of the other drawings, one
of which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was more
or less a reminiscence of Mrs Whistler, and he no doubt knew
that Beardsley had made a caricature of him which a follower
carefully left in a cab. When Beardsley opened the portfolio,
and began to show us _The Rape of the Lock_, Whistler
looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then
with delight. And then he said slowly: ‘Aubrey, I have made a
very great mistake--you are a very great artist.’ And the boy
burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say
anything, was ‘I mean it--I mean it--I mean it.’”
[Illustration: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
_By Aubrey Beardsley_]
Leaving aside the prodigious elements in the life and work of Aubrey
Beardsley, his youth and early death, the sudden ripening of
uninstructed genius, and the brilliant productiveness of those last
six disease-ridden years, his best drawings stand out from the general
level of British art with such sheer audacity as to compel attention.
It may be true that more than half of this distinction is comprised
of the insolence of originality or of mere difference, but even then
his novelties and differences are so remarkable as to be things in
themselves. Most artists are generally normal in their work, departing
only into the margin of the page of art by means of a mannerism
or so upon which neither they nor their admirers insist overmuch.
Aubrey Beardsley was all mannerism; his genius all whim. That is the
explanation of its suddenness; its surprise. But it does not explain
the extraordinary vision of humanity associated with his work.
An interviewer once asked him whether he used models. “All humanity
inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter,” Beardsley
replied, “and,” he added, “strange as it may seem, I really draw folk
as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain
lines and angles.” Contradictions of actuality as each of these
statements may be, they yet throw light on Beardsley’s attitude. Those
who know his work, eclectic as it is, know that “all humanity” did not
inspire it; that “every passer-by” was not an “unconscious sitter”;
that his confession of drawing folk as he saw them was merely the art
cant of the hour, which he tacitly admits by the suggestion that such
a confession is strange, in the light of his own drawings and what he
and the interviewer knew to be actually true. It was not, of course,
his fault that these folk under his pencil fell into “certain lines
and angles,” it was the natural outcome of his genius. But that genius
was never pictorial in the realistic sense. Beardsley was not an
Impressionist, like Manet or Renoir, drawing the thing as he _saw_
it; he was not a visionary, like William Blake, drawing the thing as
he _dreamt_ it; he was an intellectual, like George Frederick
Watts, drawing the thing as he _thought_ it. Aubrey Beardsley is
the most literary of all modern artists; his drawings are rarely the
outcome of pure observation--they are largely the outcome of thought;
they are thoughts become pictures. And even then they are rarely if
ever the blossoming of thought derived from experience; they are the
hot-house growths of thought derived from books, pictures and music.
Beardsley always worked indoors, without models and by artificial,
generally candle, light. On those rare occasions when he did go to
life for inspiration he went to life in its more artificial form--to
theatres and _salons_, to the Domino Room at the Café Royal, to
the Pavilion at Brighton and the Casino at Dieppe.
The rococo in art and life appealed to him and influenced him in
his finest creative moments. Other influences are certainly obvious
in much of his work; something of the Japanese, but not so much as
some critics have imagined, much of Watteau, and a great deal of
Burne-Jones, who early expressed approval of the new artist--perchance,
as Tennyson said of Prince Albert and King Arthur in _The Idylls of
the King_, “Perchance in finding there, unconsciously, some image
of himself,” although the “Beardsley woman,” that sardonic creature,
who looks as if she were always hungering for the sensation after
next, might well have been, as she probably was, at her inception,
a caricature of the wraith-like women of Burne-Jones. The wan and
saintly amorousness of the figures in the _Romaunt of the Rose_
become cadaverous with sin, and fat with luxury in the figures of
Aubrey Beardsley. But wherever the influence of Japanese or English
æstheticism asserts itself in Beardsley’s drawings, it does so to their
detriment, as in the case of the illustrations and decorations of the
_Morte d’Arthur_ and the “Procession of Joan of Arc,” although
the influence behind the decorations in the former work is obviously
more that of William Morris than of Burne-Jones. The only pictorial
influence which had a creative effect upon the work of Beardsley was
that of Watteau, under whose spell, born of deep sympathy with the old
master’s sophisticated period, Beardsley produced some of his most
satisfying pictures.
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATION FROM THE _MORTE
D’ARTHUR_
_By Aubrey Beardsley_]
Save for two months in an art school, Beardsley had no art training.
He was self-taught, and the so-called influences require another name
to describe them precisely. They were studies in technique; he used
them much as the average art student uses his models--to teach himself
the use of his materials, and they were dropped with the development
of mastery. Throughout his short and astonishing art life, Beardsley
was thus shedding those artistic influences which appeared to dominate
him. But all the time he added himself to his masters: he was never
dominated. The rapt and languorous spirituality of Burne-Jones was
translated into grotesque and leering fleshliness--if languorous at
all, languorous with sin. The frozen realities of Japan became torrid
reflections of occidental passion expressed in crisp shadows and
sweeps of line in black and white, suggesting colours undreamt of even
in the rainbow East. But apart from all this, and during the earlier
transition period, Aubrey Beardsley had actually discovered himself. At
a time when he had barely ceased turning out poor echoes of Burne-Jones
for his friends, he was drawing such daringly original things as “The
Wagnerians,” “The Fat Woman,” “The Kiss of Judas,” and “Of a Neophyte,
and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend Asomuel.” From
such work he passed on to the decorations for _Salomé_, which
consummate magnificently his first period, and to those of _The Rape
of the Lock_, which gave formal art a new meaning and Beardsley
immortality.
The only real and lasting influence in the art of Aubrey Beardsley
was literature. All who have written about him concur as to his
amazing booklore. He himself admitted to having been influenced by
the writers of the eighteenth century. “Works like Congreve’s plays
appeal far more vividly to my imagination than do those belonging
to the age of Pericles,” he said, in the interview already quoted.
He was well versed in the literature of the decadence, and was fond
of adventuring in strange and forbidden bookish realms of any and
every age. The romance, _Under the Hill_, especially in its
unexpurgated form, suggests deep knowledge of that literature generally
classed under _facetiæ_ and _erotica_ by the booksellers,
and there are passages which read like romanticised excerpts from the
_Psychopathia Sexualis_ of Krafft-Ebing. _The Last Letters
of Aubrey Beardsley_ reveal on almost every page an extraordinary
interest in books, equalled only by the keenness of his insight into
literature. They reveal also how he was gradually being drawn from the
literature of time to that of eternity. “Heine,” he writes, “certainly
cuts a poor figure beside Pascal. If Heine is the great warning, Pascal
is the great example to all artists and thinkers. He understood that to
become a Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just
as Magdalen must sacrifice her beauty.” And in the last letter in the
volume, less than three weeks before his death, he wrote: “I have been
reading a good deal of S. Alphonsus Liguori; no one dispels depression
more than he. Reading his loving exclamations, so lovingly reiterated,
it is impossible to remain dull and sullen.”
In his literary predilections, more even than in his art, you can
see the mind of Aubrey Beardsley. All the restlessness, all the
changefulness of modernity were there. His art was constantly changing,
as Oscar Wilde’s was, not necessarily progressing, for, properly
understood, Beardsley said his say in “The Fat Woman,” just as the
essence of Wilde is in _The Harlot’s House_. All afterwards was
repetition, restatement, intensification and elaboration. As with all
the work of the decadence, Aubrey Beardsley’s represented a consistent
search after new and more satisfying experiences: the soul-ship seeking
harbourage. But unlike so many decadents he possessed humour. You hear
the laugh, often enough satyric, behind his most sinister design; and
there is something in Max Beerbohm’s belief that many of his earlier
drawings, which seemed morbid and horrible, were the outcome of a
very natural boyish desire to shock conventional folk. But that does
not explain away his undeniable interest in all phases of sexual
experience. In normal youth, this tendency generally satisfies itself
by absorbing the current and colloquial variants of, say, the stories
of the _Decameron_. But Beardsley loved the abnormal and he invented
a sort of phallic symbolism to express his interest in passionate
perversities. His prose work, _Under the Hill_, is an uncompleted
study in the art of aberration. He is seldom frankly ribald, after the
manner of youth, although, strangely enough, the most masterly of all
his drawings, the illustrations to the _Lysistrata_, if it were not
for their impish cynicism, are sufficiently Rabelaisian to satiate the
crudest appetite for indecencies. It has been urged that Beardsley
was engaged with such matters as a satirist, that his designs had the
ultimate moral objective of all satire. Such apologies would make of
him an English Felicien Rops. But there is little genuine evidence to
support the contention, and what there is fades away in the light of
an unpublished letter, written after his conversation during his very
last days, imploring his friends in a few tragic, repentant words to
destroy all indecent drawings. “I implore you,” he wrote, “to destroy
_all_ copies of _Lysistrata_ and bawdy drawings. Show this to ---- and
conjure him to do same. By all that is holy _all_ obscene drawings.”
And the words, “In my death agony,” were added after the signature.
Aubrey Beardsley, although he died a saint, represents a diabolonian
incident in British art. He was essentially a decorator; but with
the perversity of one phase of his generation he made decoration a
thing in itself. None of the books he illustrated are illustrated
or decorated in the best sense. His designs overpower the text--not
because they are greater but because they are inappropriate, sometimes
even impertinent. The diabolical thumb-nail notes in the “Bon Mot”
series have nothing whatever to do with the texts. Where the designs
for the _Morte d’Arthur_ approximate to the work of William Morris
and Burne-Jones they serve their purpose, but where they reveal the
true Beardsley they miss the point; the _Salomé_ drawings seem to
sneer at Oscar Wilde rather than interpret the play. _The Rape of
the Lock_ is eclipsed, not explained, by Beardsley. But, outrageous
as his decorative comments on the _Lysistrata_ may be, they are
at least logical commentations on the text of the play; as are also
the illustrations to his own _Under the Hill_. “No book ever gets
well illustrated once it becomes a classic,” wrote Beardsley, but
that does not explain his own failure as an illustrator. He failed
as an illustrator because his art was decoration in the abstract: it
lacked the rhythm of relationship--just as he himself lacked obvious
relationship with the decades that preceded and followed him. He is
entombed in his period as his own design is absorbed in its own firm
lines.
But Beardsley as a fact is the significant thing, not Beardsley as
an artist. It does not matter how or where he stands in art, for he
represents not art so much as an idea, not an accomplishment so much as
a mood. The restless, inquisitive, impudent mood of the Nineties called
him forth, and he obeyed and served and repented.
[Illustration: TAIL-PIECE FROM SALOME
_By Aubrey Beardsley_]