Part 1
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.