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.