AUBREY BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY
_by F. H. Evans_]
AUBREY
BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
[Illustration]
HALDANE MACFALL
NEW YORK
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
MCMXXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
EARL E. FISK
THIS SMALL TRIBUTE
TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP
H. M.
“I have one aim--the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.”
“I may claim to have some command of line. I try to get as much as
possible out of a single curve or straight line.”
[AUBREY BEARDSLEY.]
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 17
I: BIRTH AND FAMILY 23
II: CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL 27
“THE PUERILIA”
III: YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK 35
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”
IV: FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP 42
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty
THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”
V: BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST 58
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893--Twenty to Twenty-one
MEDIÆVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES
“LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS”
VI: THE JAPANESQUES 95
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894--Twenty-one
“SALOME”
VII: THE GREEK VASE PHASE 113
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-one to Twenty-three
“THE YELLOW BOOK”
VIII: THE GREAT PERIOD 159
“THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896--Twenty-three to Twenty-four
I. “THE SAVOY”
IX: THE GREAT PERIOD 234
ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE
1897 to the End--Twenty-five
II. THE AQUATINTESQUES
X: THE END 260
1898
A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY 269
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY _by F. H. Evans_ _Frontispiece_
SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 25
HOLYWELL STREET 33
HAIL MARY 60
PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD 67
HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN 71
“OF A NEOPHYTE....” 85
HEADPIECE FROM “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” 92
THE PEACOCK SKIRT 94
THE STOMACH DANCE 103
TITLE-PAGE OF “SALOME” 108
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III 112
LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS 115
MESSALINA 121
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 125
NIGHT PIECE 129
PORTRAIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL 136
THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN 139
DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD 143
THE SCARLET PASTORALE 149
ATALANTA 153
TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” _NOS._ I _AND_ II 158
FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHÄUSER” 161
THE MIRROR OF LOVE 165
A CATALOGUE COVER 169
ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS) 173
THE ABBÉ 175
THE FRUIT BEARERS 179
CHRISTMAS CARD 181
THE THREE MUSICIANS 185
TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS” 186
COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” _NO._ I 189
THE BILLET DOUX 191
THE TOILET 195
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 197
THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES 201
THE BARON’S PRAYER 203
THE COIFFING 207
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ IV 209
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” _NO._ VII 213
FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 215
HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS 219
TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 220
A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE” 223
FRONTISPIECE TO “THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD” 225
ATALANTA--WITH THE HOUND 229
BEARDSLEY’S BOOK-PLATE 231
THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY 235
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES” 241
ALI BABA IN THE WOOD 245
COVER DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE” 249
INITIAL FOR “VOLPONE” 255
THE DEATH OF PIERROT 261
AVE ATQUE VALE 270
FOREWORD
About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in
Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet,
who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop
on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had
forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary
and artistic world of the ’Nineties. As the congregation came pouring
out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man broke away from
the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched
awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping,
dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of
God’s acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly
efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by
the loose-limbed lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away
coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long
white hands, his lean wrists showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid
cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing
mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who
called to him, showing his “tortoise-shell” coloured hair, smoothed
down and plastered over his forehead in a “quiff” almost to his
eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so
awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted;
but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.
_The Yellow Book_ had come upon the town three months gone by.
Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a
night. He was the talk of the town--was seen everywhere--was at the
topmost height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was
out he was to be expelled from _The Yellow Book_! As he had come up, so
he was to come down--like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out
of the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and
for some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed
young dandy--fling him from _The Yellow Book_--and dim for him the
splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. Within
a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was to drop
out of the public eye almost as though he had never been.
But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered
there--and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered
there--this young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year
or so the masterpieces of his great period--the drawings for a new
venture to be called _The Savoy_--and was soon to begin work on the
superb designs for _The Rape of the Lock_, which were to thrust him at
a stroke into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years
were run out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave.
As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the dead,
so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be--one long struggle to
crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that yawned
for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being dragged
back to it again and again by unseen hands--was to spend his strength
in the frantic struggle to escape--he was to get almost out of sight
of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to find
himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge of
the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat
plays with a mouse--with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of the
grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high
road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we,
who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that
were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this
agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical
things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very
breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise
that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the
skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room.
For, realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and
charm of _The Rape of the Lock_. Surely the hideous nightmares that
now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject
for bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his
facile pen!
Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood,
and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each
twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few tomorrows--he knew
that he had but a little while to which to look forward, and had best
live his life to-day. And he lived it like one possessed.
HALDANE MACFALL.
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN,
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE
1872-1898
I
BIRTH AND FAMILY
To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something in the
city,” of the name of Beardsley--one Vincent Paul Beardsley--and to
his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of the family
of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first day
of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the army surgeon
at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, a boy, whom they
christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing that in a short
hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie a-dying, having made the
picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous.
Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption
that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does not
appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive,
stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the
chronicles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades
away, departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his
work of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it
be that so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us
wondering by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called
to the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name
and raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it
should stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of
the age. For, when all’s said, it was a significance--if his only
significance--to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying
at twenty-five, had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording
tablets of the genius of his race in the indelible ink of high
fulfilment. However, in the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a
brief moment into the limelight and is gone, whether “something in the
city” or whatnot, does not now matter--his destiny was in fatherhood.
But at least it was granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to
him, that, from whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he
should live to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son,
who, as at the touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line
into very music--the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age....
As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright
personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with
unceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and
character--therefore the man’s--in so far as the moulding of mind and
character be beyond the knees of the gods--a mother whose affection
and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful
sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world
of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy
inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as
a girl.
[Illustration: SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY
(_Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy_)]
II
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL
THE “PUERILIA”
Of a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road,
Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class
home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred and
cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably became
a forcing-house to any intelligent child--and both children were
uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or three
years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as things
turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely a
healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward
spirit.
It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over
the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Caldecott
which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s
life--yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest
illustrators that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure
test of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their
children are given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the
somewhat empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given
Kate Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons
in drawing and in “seeing” character in line and form, and in the
wholesome joy of country sights and sounds.
A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing his
pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music.
Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced
lessons, but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or
drawing or decoration.
The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s
heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell
disease which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was
sent to a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years.
Here the child seems to have made his chief impression on his little
comrades and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an
extreme reserve--which sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled
waters. However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat
of consumption; and a change had to be made.
At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a
couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a
profound influence over his future.
In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled
in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age
so skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an
infant prodigy--the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s
knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy in
the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologising
for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the plea
that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feeling for
sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the years
to come, he was to give forth line that “sings” like the notes of a
violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation-cards
in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or not, the
little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite considerable
sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome things.
As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched and
unpromising stuff.
A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it
absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to
send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where
the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the very
loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history, eagerly
reading Freeman and Green.
In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; and in
the January of 1885 he became a boarder.
Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half years
at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King, greatly
liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by letting him
have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey Beardsley
was happy as the day was long. His “quaint personality” soon made its
mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday, he wrote a
little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The delicate boy,
as might be expected, found all athletic sports distasteful and a
strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to be found with a
book when the others were at play. His early love for Carlyle’s “French
Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Restoration dramatists,
was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read “Erewhon” and “enjoyed it
immensely,” though it had been lent to him with grave doubts as to
whether it were not too deep for him. His unflagging industry became a
byword. He caricatured the masters; acted in school plays--appearing
even before large audiences at the Pavilion--and was the guiding spirit
in the weekly performances at the school got up by Mr. King and for
which he designed programmes. His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a
kindly attitude towards the lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively
encouraged his artistic leanings, as Mr. King his theatrical.
Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these
“puerilia” have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as
revelations of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain
unvarnished truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have
been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Probably
his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as the
grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley
himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on
reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every
means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging
good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether
incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such
unutterable trash.
Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind at
school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of the
“Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giving
amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays. By
the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he had
a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it,
very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong
meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad
was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French
he worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile
reader--but such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the
dog-Latin of a public school classical education.
Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that Aubrey
Beardsley drew the designs for the “Pied Piper” before he left
the school in mid-1888--though the play was not performed until
Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December the 19th
1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen and wash
drawing of _Holywell Street_ was made in mid-1888 before he left the
school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red hair--worn _á
la Bretonne_,” which I take it means “bobbed,” as the modern girl now
calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work, but writes verse
and is very musical. His “stage-struck mood” we have seen encouraged by
his house-master, Mr. King.
C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to “matinees” at Brighton; and at
one of these is played “_L’Enfant Prodigue_” without words--it was to
make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley.
There is no question that _L’Enfant Prodigue_ and the rococo of Bright
Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beardsley; and
he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked mediævalism; he was
to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to Pierrot and the
bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion.
Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, though
how exactly he fitted the red hair “_a la Bretonne_” to his theory
of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the
wearer, would require more than a little guesswork.
The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it came
to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were
numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a marked
personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely proud of him.
But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, on the eve of his
sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding farewell and leaving
for London, straightway to become a clerk in an architect’s office.
At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his
“puerilia”--or what the writers generally call his “juvenilia,” but
these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant,
inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the
“Pied Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing
of _Holywell Street_. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him a
month or two false--it is difficult to see why Beardsley should have
made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London that he
had not yet learnt to frequent--but even granting that the _Holywell
Street_ was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his
schoolfellow a month or two later, in the _Holywell Street_ (1888)
there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley leaves his
school and his “puerilia” cease--he enters at once on a groping attempt
to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his ideas and impressions.
So far, of promise there has been not a tittle--one searches the
“puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign--but there is none.
In the _Holywell Street_ there _is_ the sign--and a portent.
It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic,
tragi-comic wayfaring.
[Illustration: HOLYWELL STREET]
III
YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891--Sixteen to Nineteen
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”
At sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall
dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to
live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood
Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in
the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an
Insurance office.
The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and shy
and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent
young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat
solitary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first
little Pimlico home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly
appreciative, sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of
his devoted mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother
and sister was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite
unimportant, an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the
end of his day’s drudgery in the city, and--with the loud bang of the
hall-door--shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and
sister were happy in their own life.
But it is that _Holywell Street_ drawing which unlocks the door. It
is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy
old ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row--that made an
untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary le
Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych--was
the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the toes of Prime
Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with equal absence
of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, its fantastic
jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions--and its devotion
to books--was nearing its theatric end. In many ways Holywell Street
was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow spent every moment he
could snatch from his city office in such fascinating haunts as these
second-hand bookshops.
We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A Brown
Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; and that
before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act
comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.”
A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the National
Gallery to browse amongst antique art.
His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate
health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his behalf
from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening he
really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night by
consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London was
filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with any
sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices to hear
good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even dreamed of
pursuing an artistic career.
The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred
Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged
Beardsley’s artistic leanings. Beardsley had only been a year
in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became
a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth
birthday--August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or
whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning
of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for
the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of
Aubrey Beardsley--and as blank of achievement as they were black.
From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s
career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian
Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a
violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and
operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength
remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the
Insurance Office in the city.
The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking
down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body
compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of
the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life
which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he
might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in
the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy
were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which
mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all
hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued
youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon--it was enough to have
broken the courage of the strongest man. Beardsley’s first three years
in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen
he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in
the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What
interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion,
during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these
two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in
which his eyes gazed in terror at death.
His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite
eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed
to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease
led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams
led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo--especially the
human fetus--with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art
on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy.
Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian
Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones
and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither
he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures--to
Beardsley the supreme treasure.
It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside
bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor,
but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost
daily frequenter.
The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside,
which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so
well--indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called
the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth--was but
a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to
London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one
of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here
Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at
the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the
friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They
also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick
Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the
finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his
achievement and his vogue.
Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship
in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time
and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a
footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in
exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more
for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate.
At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young
clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture
galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the
bookshop in Cheapside.
“We know by the _Scrap Book_, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890,
what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time,
and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of
this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the
pictorial idea--only an increasing sense of selection--that is all. His
“juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there
begins to appear a certain personal vision.
From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books--saw life only through
books--was aloof from his own age and his own world, which he did not
understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather vulgar to
understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his daily toil,
he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere with
Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle de Maupin,
Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux Camélias, as his intimates. He
sketched them as yet with but an amateur scribbling. But he dressed
for the part of a dandy in his narrow home circle, affecting all the
airs of superiority of the day--contempt for the middle-class--contempt
of Mrs. Grundy--elaborately cultivating a flippant wit--a caustic
tongue. He had the taint of what Tree used to whip with contempt as
“refainement”--he affected a voice and employed picturesque words in
conversation. He pined for the day when he might mix with the great
ones as he conceived the great ones to be; and he sought to acquire
their atmosphere as he conceived it. Beardsley was always theatrical.
He noticed from afar that people of quality, though they dressed well,
avoided ostentation or eccentricity--dressed “just so.” He set himself
that ideal. He tried to catch their manner. The result was that he gave
the impression of intense artificiality. And just as he was starting
for the race, this black hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made
him despair. In 1890 had appeared Whistler’s _Gentle Art of Making
Enemies_--Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself
to form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic
ambition.
As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration
had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached
mid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from him,
his courage returned with health--and his belief in himself. So far he
had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided to
make an effort to become an artist.
The sun shone for him.
He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured an
introduction to Burne-Jones.
IV
FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892--Nineteen to Twenty
THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”
On a Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth
birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.
Beardsley being still a clerk in the city--his week-ends given to
drudgery at the Insurance Office--he had to seize occasion by the
forelock--therefore Sunday.
The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in
his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened
his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave;
and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic
endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long
North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise
of renewed health.
We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show
Burne-Jones--we have seen what he had gathered together in the _Scrap
Book_ as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add
to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the
wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time--a sorry
thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross
who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British
Museum--an act which, had Beardsley known the betrayal that was to
be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet.
We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an
occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably
promising _Molière_, which it is difficult to believe as having been
made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no
hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s
style for a while.
Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his
quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him
to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high
spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to
pour forth from his hands for a couple of years.
Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy--the solemnities reigned,
and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned
with serious fresco--’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness.
As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house
opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great
world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit
to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic
conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his
whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once
he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so
far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the
old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas
cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed
was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that
he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise whereon to
found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century
loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the
keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but
his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic
sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at
his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much
a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the
young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard
to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance.
Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the
Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered
London as she had conquered France--if rather a pallid ghost of Japan.
The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with
Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing
more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how
beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it
was so.
It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued
Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of
pure line by the Japs--he saw prints in shops and they interested him,
but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and
use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of
bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English
types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective
and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed
to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque
effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.
Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F.
Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting
Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of
its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with
his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and
furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to
Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to
smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf.
It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts
of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression
of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs
make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may
have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word
for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as
simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war
against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian
drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which
touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness,
and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme,
carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better
its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the
stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint
upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art,
to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the
youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to
its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the
furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed
to be adopted by Beardsley as the basis of his drawings of furniture
a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the
superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the
sensitive brain of the younger man--those peacocks that were to bring
forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of
years later when he was to give his _Salome_ to the world.
It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a
fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father--as quickly to vanish
again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls
for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking
and he and his “pater” alone in the house.
Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become
secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a
little magazine called _The Bee_; and it was in the November of 1891
that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his _Hamlet_ in which he at
once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.
It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on
Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one of
note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting
and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling for
line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly
working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some six
months after the summer that had brought hope and life to Beardsley
out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer Vallance,
one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went to call on the
lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half the urgings
of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known the boy when at
Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoon at Charlwood
Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away wildly enthusiastic
over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at his demand. It is to
Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and then turned the lad’s
ambition towards becoming an artist by profession--an idea that up to
this time Beardsley had not thought possible or practicable.
Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s
enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he
overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled
us in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile
“puerilia”--the _Pied Piper_ stuff--which one cannot believe that
Beardsley would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque _Hamlet_ from
the _Bee_ just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques.
He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had not done
anything better than the _Hamlet_. Then there was the _Scrap Book_!
However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won so
powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal friend
as Aymer Vallance.
On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the winter
was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross and
Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert Ross wrote
of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any case his
record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed
with the personality of the youth--Ross was always more interested
in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for his
was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the antique
dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a powerful
friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the doors of
fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a kindly man
enough; and he had not only come to have considerable authority on
matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the great, but
with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. Ross, with
his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was fascinated
by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy youth
whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of being
_ebouriffé_ 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.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the impression of being
brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better as “tortoise-shell”--it
was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as his voice and manner.
The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was always cadaverous. The
young fellow seems gradually to have thawed at this forgathering at
Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company, and was soon
found to have an intimate knowledge of the British Museum and National
Gallery. He talked more of literature and of music than of art. Ross
was so affected by the originality of the young fellow’s conversation
that he even attributed to Beardsley the oft-quoted jape of the old
French wit that “it only takes one man to make an artist but forty to
make an Academician.”
It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of
Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting--what precisely did
Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under his
arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were in the
portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the _Procession of Joan
of Arc_ in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans, a work
which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with any merit
from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced to part for
all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a pen-and-ink replica
from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the May of 1892. The
youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his own work than had
his admirers.
It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his
twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic
promise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace
_Procession of Joan of Arc_ could stand out at the forefront of his
career, and was, as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order
to get him public recognition--in which it distinctly and deservedly
failed. He himself was later to go hot and cold about the very mention
of it and to be ashamed of it.
We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,”
his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley
could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his
rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking
for him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship of
that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom he loved to
glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is canting and
stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged down. Nothing
of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste drew about him, he
was not compelled into, the company of the erotic and the precious in
craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small share in opening wide the
doors to him.
But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a
curious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval
atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted
him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art
and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best.
It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the
French writers--it was their challenge to the past--it was their very
inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that
brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have
remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was
to run riot in eroticism--he was to treat sex with a marked frankness
that showed it to be his god--but it is only right to say that the
artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has
as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist
of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual
moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood
nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that
any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree.
And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race.
It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure
in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is
alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.
Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit--it
was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the
middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class--he was one of the
most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he
had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness
of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter
Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened
the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his
work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and
thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss
criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or
patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it,
as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he
was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and
witty companion.