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.
HOLYWELL STREET