III
YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK”
Atsixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charlwood Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk in the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an Insurance office.
The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and shy and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat solitary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first little Pimlico home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly appreciative, sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of his devoted mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother and sister was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite unimportant, an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the end of his day’s drudgery in the city, and—with the loud bang of the hall-door—shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and sister were happy in their own life.
But it is thatHolywell Streetdrawing which unlocks the door. It is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy old ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row—that made an untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Maryle Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Aldwych—was the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the toes of Prime Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with equal absence of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, its fantastic jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions—and its devotion to books—was nearing its theatric end. In many ways Holywell Street was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow spent every moment he could snatch from his city office in such fascinating haunts as these second-hand bookshops.
We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A Brown Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; and that before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three-act comedy and a monologue called “A Race for Wealth.”
A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the National Gallery to browse amongst antique art.
His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his delicate health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his behalf from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening he really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night by consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London was filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with any sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices to hear good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even dreamed of pursuing an artistic career.
The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged Beardsley’s artistic leanings.Beardsley had only been a year in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth birthday—August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of Aubrey Beardsley—and as blank of achievement as they were black.
From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the Insurance Office in the city.
The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon—it was enough to have broken the courage of the strongest man.Beardsley’s first three years in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion, during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in which his eyes gazed in terror at death.
His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo—especially the human fetus—with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy.
Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures—to Beardsley the supreme treasure.
It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor, but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost daily frequenter.
The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside, which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so well—indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly calledthe University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth—was but a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his achievement and his vogue.
Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate. At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the bookshop in Cheapside.
“We know by theScrap Book, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890, what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time, and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the pictorial idea—only an increasing sense of selection—that is all. His “juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there begins to appear a certain personal vision.
From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books—saw life only through books—was aloof from his own age and his own world, which he did not understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather vulgar to understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his daily toil, he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish atmosphere with Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Phèdre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux Camélias, as his intimates. He sketched them as yet with but an amateur scribbling. But he dressed for the part of a dandy in his narrow home circle, affecting all the airs of superiority of the day—contempt for the middle-class—contempt of Mrs. Grundy—elaborately cultivating a flippant wit—a caustic tongue. He had the taint of what Tree used to whip with contempt as “refainement”—he affected a voice and employed picturesque words in conversation. He pined for the day when he might mix with the great ones as he conceived the great ones to be; and he sought to acquire their atmosphere as he conceived it. Beardsley was always theatrical. He noticed from afar that people of quality, though they dressed well, avoided ostentation or eccentricity—dressed “just so.” He set himself that ideal. He tried to catch their manner. The result was that he gave the impression of intense artificiality. And just as he was starting for the race, this black hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made him despair. In 1890 had appeared Whistler’sGentle Art of Making Enemies—Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself to form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic ambition.
As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reachedmid-1891, his nineteenth birthday, the hideous threat lifted from him, his courage returned with health—and his belief in himself. So far he had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now decided to make an effort to become an artist.
The sun shone for him.
He determined to get a good opinion on his prospects. He secured an introduction to Burne-Jones.