Part 2
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.