I
To begin with Aubrey Beardsley has many advantages, for it brings us at once not only to the type of mentality most representative of the period, but also to the man whose creative power was probably the greatest factor of the period, to the boy who changed, as has been said, the black and white art of the world, and to the artist, from whose work we can most easily deduce the leading contemporary characteristics. The art of these men was in a way abnormal, while the men themselves who produced it were exotics; and Beardsley’s is not only the most abnormal art of them all, but also he himself is the greatest exotic. As Robert Ross well said as a mere comment on the decade, he is invaluable: ‘He sums up all the delightful manias, all that is best in modern appreciation—Greek vases, Italian primitives, the “Hypnerotomachia,” Chinese porcelain, Japanese kakemonos, Renaissance friezes, old French and English furniture, rare enamels, mediæval illumination, the débonnaire masters of the eighteenth century, the English pre-Raphaelites.’ In Beardsley, so to speak, was inset all the influences that went to make the period what it was. And another reason why it is so convenient to begin with him is that he and not Oscar Wilde was in reality the great creative genius of the age. Besides his black-and-white work all the world knows, in which, as Father Gray says, ‘His imaginative gifts never showed a sign of fatigue or exhaustion,’[2] Beardsley practised in other arts. While a youngster at Brighton he promised to become a musical prodigy, and in later days Symons describes him at a Wagner concert gripping the seat with nervous intensity. He wrote some charming poetry, and as picturesque a fairy tale for grown-ups as has ever been written in Under the Hill. In an interview he states, probably slyly, he was at work in 1895 on a modern novel[3]; while in 1897 he said, ‘Cazotte has inspired me to make some small contes. I have one in hand now called The Celestial Lover.’ He began once to write a play with the actor, Brandon Thomas. In his late illustrations for Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin he was clearly working towards water-colour work, while at one time he began under Walter Sickert his only oil painting (unfinished), ‘Women regarding a dead mouse.’ By no means least, he became a leader in English poster work. All of this was essentially creative work. And when death came he was very far from his artistic or intellectual maturity. So is it not just to say that this young man who practised nearly all the forms of art, and who was also an avid reader and student, remains the chief creative figure of the nineties?
[2] Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, with an Introduction by the Rev. John Gray, 1904.
[3] The Sketch, April 10, 1895.
Indeed, there is no more pleasing personality in the whole period than this ‘apostle of the grotesque,’ as his own decade loved to hail him. Born at Brighton in 1872 he was educated at the local Grammar School, whose magazine, Past and Present, contains his earliest work. The Kate Greenaway picture books, it is said, started him drawing. At school he was neither keen on his work or games, but used to be continually doing ‘little rough, humorous sketches.’ Reading was his great refuge, and when he fell in with some volumes of the Restoration dramatists he had already begun to find his feet in that world of the mad lusts of Wycherley and the perfumed artificiality of Congreve. Of school life itself he speaks bitterly and with no regret. At sixteen he must have been particularly glad to escape from it and enter, first of all, an architect’s office in London, and then, the next year, the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Office, where his fatal illness unfortunately first began to reveal its presence. Then came his seed-time up till 1891, when he did little but amateur theatricals. But at length Beardsley discovered himself. Many gentlemen have subsequently stated that they discovered him. It may be that they discovered him for themselves, but it was Beardsley and Beardsley alone who found himself. He certainly received, however, a large amount of appreciative sympathy when he started to draw a series of illustrations in his spare time for Congreve’s Way of the World, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. He was without art training in the usual sense, though he went of nights in 1892 to Professor Brown’s night school at Westminster, but still kept to the Insurance Office stool till August, when, after being recognised by Burne-Jones and Watts with kindness, he left his post to live by his art. What had probably actually permitted him to take this step was the commission given by J. M. Dent to illustrate Le Morte d’Arthur. Any way he was launched out by the first number of The Studio with Joseph Pennell’s article on ‘A New Illustrator,’ and, what was more important, with eleven of Beardsley’s own works. At that time all his art was intuitive without much knowledge of modern black and white. Indeed he was artistically swamped at the moment with the glory of the pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones. The Le Morte d’Arthur, really, was intended as a kind of rival to the Kelmscott Press publications, and Beardsley in his border designs had small difficulty in excelling Morris’s work.
Next year, 1893, finds these influences modified to a certain extent, although the Salomé drawings still belong to that cadaverous, lean and hungry world of Burne-Jones, from which Beardsley has not completely as yet rescued himself by means of Frenchmen like Constantin Guys; but his release has well arrived in 1894 with his design ‘The Fat Woman,’ a caricature of Mrs. Whistler. Watteau, Rops, and the Japanese, and the thousand books he is now reading throw open at last all the splendour of the art world to him. He lacks nothing, and he goes forward borrowing lavishly, like Shakespeare, from any source that suits him. Beardsley’s illustrations are generally critical decorations, although it must never be forgotten he did attempt on more than one occasion a series of illustration pure and simple in, for example, his early scenes for Manon Lescaut, La Dame aux Camélias, and Madame Bovary, which are not altogether successful. He is perhaps at his best as the illustrating critic, which he is somewhat scornfully in Salomé, very happily in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, and triumphantly in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. It can be said of his work, rather sweepingly no doubt, but still truthfully, he began by decorating books with his Le Morte d’Arthur; he then tried illustrating them; but wound up in criticising them by his decorations. ‘Have you noticed,’ he once wrote to Father Gray, ‘have you noticed that no book ever gets well illustrated once it becomes a classic? Contemporary illustrations are the only ones of any value or interest.’ But Beardsley was always more than a mere illustrator, for where a learned Editor writes notes and annotations on Aristophanes, he decorates him; where Arthur Symons would write an essay on Mademoiselle de Maupin, Beardsley does a number of critical designs. It was, in fact, an age of the critical function; but Beardsley’s criticism is of that supreme kind Oscar Wilde called ‘creative criticism.’
At one time it was customary for critics to plead that he was only a supreme imitator of the Japanese or somebody; but, in reality, as has been pointed out by Robert Ross in his admirable essays on his work, he was as intensely original as an illustrator as Sandro Botticelli was in his designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy, or William Blake for the drama of Job. None of them interpreted authors for dull people who could not understand what they read. Perhaps the very best way to appreciate his work of this kind is often to take it away from the text, and say this is the way Beardsley saw The Rape of the Lock. As for all the supposed influences he is pretended to have laboured under, it can be at once said, he was too restless a personality to accept merely one influence at a time. If he took from anywhere, he took from everywhere, and the result is a great and original draughtsman, the music of whose line has been the theme of many artists. With little stippled lines in the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us the colour of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong; but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what knowledge went to their composition! ‘He sketched everything in pencil, at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines, afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built up, and completed on the same sheet of paper.’[4] ‘But Beardsley’s subtlety does not lie only in his technique, but also in what he expresses thereby. Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest; and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment of the artist’s unique personality.’[5]
[4] Aubrey Beardsley, by Robert Ross, pp. 38–39. 1909.