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, medi?val14 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 novel3; 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. in15 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 world16 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 permitted17 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 borrowing18 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.19 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 colour20 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 ‘but21 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.
5 the renaissance of the nineties, by w. g. blaikie murdoch, p. 29. 1911.
this charming personality stood him in good stead when the beardsley craze burst upon london. he had literally set the thames on fire. it was in 1894, when he became art editor of the yellow book (which i discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. his poster for dr. john todhunter’s the comedy of sighs, at the avenue theatre, a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull hoardings of london. another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink dress22 standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising fisher unwin’s pseudonym library, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid commercial advertising. punch parodied ‘the blessed damozel’ with a new version of lauds for ‘the beardsley girl.’ a famous tea-shop exploited the type of female beauty.
oscar wilde’s play salomé was illustrated by the newly arrived young artist. the columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or more often belittled it. the new art magazine, the studio, not only raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. and all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of london was only twenty-two. but he was not to stop there. after four more years of crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the black and white art of the world. he was to be at once accepted in paris. he was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or less detrimentally dozens of good artists.
yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming personality in the least.23 he still remained aubrey beardsley, the boy doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted to enjoy life.
max beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend, in which he says: ‘for him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are near their close, every hour—every minute, even—had its value. his drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading—these things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. he was an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and seldom when he was in london did he miss a “wagner night” at covent garden. he loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind.... he was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’ in the domino room of the café royal in london; outside the brighton pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, beardsley was at home and happy. ‘i am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in paris.’ and it was beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him—a world of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social24 parasites and gullible idiots. he always had an engaging smile that was delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, robert ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible.
after he vacated the yellow book art editorship, and the savoy had been issued, leonard smithers became the real beardsley publisher. there were no dead-locks with him as to nude amors, for smithers had a courage of his own—a courage great enough to issue the ballad of reading gaol when wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. it was smithers who issued the savoy, the two books of fifty drawings, the rape of the lock, the pierrot of the minute, the designs for mademoiselle de maupin, and among others the eight ‘lysistrata’ and the four ‘juvenal’ drawings. for any one to study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than a book of fifty drawings (1897), and a second book of fifty drawings (1899). the former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. indeed, in the first book all25 the drawings were fortunately selected by both beardsley himself and smithers. the artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. it includes his favourite, ‘the ascension of st. rose of lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature le morte d’arthur series. for when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful method of design. indeed, the salomé decorations (1894) had bridged this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of the rape of the lock (1896). whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is on record, when beardsley first showed these last designs to him he ‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. and then he said slowly, “aubrey, i have made a very great mistake, you are a very great artist.” and the boy burst out crying. all whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “i mean it—i mean it.”’
in reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in the le morte d’arthur series. for example, the true beardsley type of woman appears in the design entitled ‘how queen guenever made her a nun.’ these beardsley women, wilde hinted, were first26 invented by the artist and then copied by nature. they have, indeed, been the cause of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of a french bagnio and a chinese visitor. as pierre caume demanded of félicien rops we are moved to ask of beardsley:
quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes palies? quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies?
they belong to the same world as the women of toulouse lautrec, rops, odélon redon, bayros, and rassenfosse—the type known as la loupeuse insatiable et cupide. they move and have their being in french erotica and novels like la faustine.
beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with the rape of the lock and the lysistrata of aristophanes, and of the two the palm should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. no one has yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some day, when the kinship between beardsley and those old greek masters who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this truism may also come to light. it is unlikely, however, to become revealed until27 aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar tongue, for not even the most generous editor in his monumental edition has essayed that impertinence to mrs. grundy. the illustrations or rather critical decorations of beardsley are also not likely to become generally circulated to all because of their frankness. for phallism is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. but unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the lysistrata, as every scholar knows. beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating aristophanes and not donnay’s french version of the same. and never was he more cynical or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect; never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully ridiculed. in all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of the third, though i have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity. he had learned too much from the men who designed the old hellenic pottery to be obscene. he was frank as chaucer is frank, not vicious as aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the english artists rowlandson28 and james gillray were in some of their fantasies. virgil dying wanted to destroy his ?neids, and beardsley in articulo mortis wrote ‘to destroy all copies of lysistrata and bawdy drawings.’ yet he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded mysteriously into places like charing cross road. even fuchs in his erotische kunst has to say: ‘beardsley is specially to be noticed for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. no harsh or discordant notes, no violent tones. on the contrary, a wheedling finesse. in some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time incarnate.’ beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an alfred kubin or to the tone of certain of bayros’s designs. he was neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like rassenfosse or any one else who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. in his juvenal drawings (1897), his five lucian sketches (1894), and the lysistrata (1896) he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via,29 i believe, those wonderful greek vase designers6 which he, so assiduous a haunter of the british museum, must have not only seen, but revelled in. but of these the best and freest are the lysistrata conceptions; and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to receive.
6 ross says in his aubrey beardsley, p. 45, one of the events which contributed ‘to give beardsley a fresh impetus and stimulate his method of expression’ about the salomé time was ‘a series of visits to the collection of greek vases in the british museum (prompted by an essay of mr. d. s. maccoll).’
we are, however, more interested here with the literary side of his work, which divides itself into poetry and prose. as a poet beardsley has been accused of over-cleverness. whatever that criticism means i do not know. probably it implies some similar reflection to the statement that a dandy is over-dressed. i cannot, however, discover any such affectation in, for example, that charming poem, the three musicians, which recounts how the soprano ‘lightly frocked,’ the slim boy who dies ‘for réclame and recall at paris,’ and the polish pianist, pleased with their thoughts, their breakfast, and the summer day, wend their way ‘along the path that skirts the wood’:
30
the polish genius lags behind, and, with some poppies in his hand, picks out the strings and wood and wind of an imaginary band. enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.
the charming cantatrice reclines and rests a moment where she sees her chateau’s roof that hotly shines amid the dusky summer trees, and fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smooths the frock about her knees.
the gracious boy is at her feet, and weighs his courage with his chance; his fears soon melt in noonday heat. the tourist gives a furious glance, red as his guide-book, moves on, and offers up a prayer for france.
in the ballad of a barber, again, there is nothing but a trill of song in limpid verse. how carrousel, the barber of meridian street, who could ‘curl wit into the dullest face,’ became fou of the thirteen-year-old king’s daughter, so that
his fingers lost their cunning quite, his ivory combs obeyed no more;
is a typical ninety jeu d’esprit, only much better done than the average one. with the fewest words beardsley can sketch a scene or character, as he used the fewest of lines in31 his drawings. this is even better exemplified in his prose. time and again a single sentence of under the hill gives us a complete picture:
sporion was a tall, depraved young man, with a slight stoop, a troubled walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long japanese eyes, and a great gilt toupet.
we seem to gaze with the abbé fanfreluche at the prints on his bedroom wall:
within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious creatures of dorat and his school, slender children in masque and domino, smiling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in particular, terrible little pierrots posing as lady lovers and pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and huge, bird-like women mingling in some rococo room.
one rubs one’s eyes. are these not the drawings franz von bayros of vienna realised later? but beardsley’s output of both prose and verse is actually so limited that one cannot compare his double art work to that of an artist like rossetti. when all is said and done, his great literary work is the unfinished ‘fairy’ tale of under the hill. in its complete form it belongs to the class of works like casanova’s32 mémoires, the reigen of schnitzler, the novels of restif de la bretonne, and some of the thousand and one nights. it is an enchanting book in the same way as mademoiselle de maupin or le roi pausole are enchanting books. in its rococo style it surpasses the best rhythms of wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of beautiful things, while aubrey beardsley suggests more than he says in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties. indeed, the purple patches of beardsley are as rich in fine phrases as any paragraphs of the period—as faisandée as any french writer has written. elizabethan euphuists, restoration conceit-makers, later latins with all the rich byzantium flor? of brains like apuleius, can make as finely-sounding phrases, but i doubt whether they can pack away in them as rich a pictorial glamour as many of the writers of the nineties, and beardsley amongst them, achieved. we have helen in ‘a flutter of frilled things’ at ‘taper-time’ before her mirror displaying her neck and shoulders ‘so wonderfully drawn,’ and her ‘little malicious breasts ... full of the irritation of loveliness that can never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.’ whole scenes of the book are unrolled before33 us like priceless tapestries. the ‘ombre gateway of the mysterious hill’ stands before us:
the place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in mentzelius. huge moths, so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. the pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base each one was carved with loving sculptures....
to read the toilet of helen, with its faint echoes perhaps of max beerbohm’s ‘toilet of sabina’ in the perversion of rouge, is to be lured on by the sound of the sentences:
before a toilet-table that shone like the altar of n?tre dame des victoires, helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black and heliotrope. the coiffeur cosmé was caring for her scented chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and clustered like tendrils round her neck. her three favourite girls, pappelarde, blanchemains, and loureyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate fla?ons and frail cassolettes, and34 held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by chateline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. her three favourite boys, claud, clair, and sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin. millamant held a slight tray of slippers, minette some tender gloves, la popelinière—mistress of the robes—was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow. la zambinella bore the jewels, florizel some flowers, amadour a box of various pins, and vadius a box of sweets. her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with the gallant paintings of jean baptiste dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough.
there you have a beardsley drawing transfused into words. the same is true of his description of the woods of auffray. the same is true of the wonderful supper served on the terrace to helen and her guests amid the gardens. to find such another supper in literature one has to turn to some french author, or, better still, to the ‘cena trimalchionis’ of petronius himself. from this it will be seen that beardsley’s literary work,735 like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things in art. it is for this reason, indeed, that i have selected beardsley as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead and gone. he was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when the fall of wilde killed the age and the boer war buried it, neither of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. his age may die, but he remains. even now he has outlived the fad period, while many of the books that were written at that date by others and decorated by him are only valuable to-day because of his frontispiece or wrapper. one has not forgotten those wrappers, for as one will not forget the work of william blake, one will not forget that of aubrey beardsley. his enthusiasts treasure the smallest fragment.
7 in the influence of baudelaire in france and england, by g. turquet-milnes, pp. 277–280 (1913), there is an interesting study of his baudelairism.