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.
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.