Chapter V: 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.

_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.’”

_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.

_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.

_By Aubrey Beardsley_]