II
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL
THE “PUERILIA”
Ofa 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.
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 ornot, 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 heworked 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.
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 ofHolywell Streetwas made in mid-1888 before he left the school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red hair—worná 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 thatL’Enfant Prodigueand 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 werenumbered. 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 ofHolywell 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 theHolywell Streetwas rough-sketched in London and sent by Beardsley to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in theHolywell 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 theHolywell Streetthereisthe sign—and a portent.
It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic wayfaring.
holywellHOLYWELL STREET
HOLYWELL STREET