IV
FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty
THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES”
Ona Sunday, the 12th of July 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones.
Beardsley being still a clerk in the city—his week-ends given to drudgery at the Insurance Office—he had to seize occasion by the forelock—therefore Sunday.
The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave; and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise of renewed health.
We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show Burne-Jones—we have seen what he had gathered together in theScrap Bookas his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time—a sorry thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British Museum—an act which, had Beardsleyknown the betrayal that was to be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet. We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably promisingMolière, which it is difficult to believe as having been made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s style for a while.
Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to pour forth from his hands for a couple of years.
Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy—the solemnities reigned, and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned with serious fresco—’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness.
As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promisewhereon to found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance.
Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered London as she had conquered France—if rather a pallid ghost of Japan. The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it was so.
It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of pure line by the Japs—he saw prints in shops and they interested him, but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.
Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F. Scotson-Clark Esq.,” his musician friend, “written after visiting Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes most of its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged with his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form and furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatsoever to Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was confined to smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and gold leaf. It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square upright shafts of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief impression of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages the Japs make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent Whistler may have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple Menpes’s word for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it “should be as simple as possible and be of straight lines.” Whistler and Wilde’s war against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of the crowded Victorian drawing-room brought in a barren bare type of room to usurp it which touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in preciousness, in dreariness, and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s blue and gold-leaf scheme, carried out all over this pretentious room, may have done to better its state, at least it must have rid it of the brown melancholy of the stamped Spanish leather which Whistler found so “stunning to paint upon.” It is probable that this contraption of pseudo-Japanese art, to which the rare genius of Whistler was degraded, did impress the youthful Beardsley in this his imitative stage of development, owing to its wide publicity. The hideous slender straight wooden uprights of the furnishments of which the whole thing largely consisted, were indeed to be adopted by Beardsley asthe basis of his drawings of furniture a year or two afterwards, as we shall see. But in some atonement, the superb peacock shutters by Whistler also left their influence on the sensitive brain of the younger man—those peacocks that were to bring forth a marked advance in Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of years later when he was to give hisSalometo the world.
It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father—as quickly to vanish again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Woking and he and his “pater” alone in the house.
Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had become secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he edited a little magazine calledThe Bee; and it was in the November of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece hisHamletin which he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship.
It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on Aubrey Beardsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one of note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halting and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling for line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some six months after the summer that had brought hope and life to Beardsley out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer Vallance, one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went to call on the lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half the urgings of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known the boy when at Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one afternoonat Charlwood Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away wildly enthusiastic over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at his demand. It is to Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and then turned the lad’s ambition towards becoming an artist by profession—an idea that up to this time Beardsley had not thought possible or practicable.
Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled us in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile “puerilia”—thePied Piperstuff—which one cannot believe that Beardsley would show. There was the Burne-JonesesqueHamletfrom theBeejust published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jonesesques. He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had not done anything better than theHamlet. Then there was theScrap Book! However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won so powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal friend as Aymer Vallance.
On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the winter was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross and Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert Ross wrote of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any case his record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was overwhelmed with the personality of the youth—Ross was always more interested in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for his was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the antique dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a powerful friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to thedoors of fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a kindly man enough; and he had not only come to have considerable authority on matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the great, but with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. Ross, with his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was fascinated by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy youth whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of beingebourifféas the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the impression of being brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better as “tortoise-shell”—it was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as his voice and manner. The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was always cadaverous. The young fellow seems gradually to have thawed at this forgathering at Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial company, and was soon found to have an intimate knowledge of the British Museum and National Gallery. He talked more of literature and of music than of art. Ross was so affected by the originality of the young fellow’s conversation that he even attributed to Beardsley the oft-quoted jape of the old French wit that “it only takes one man to make an artist but forty to make an Academician.”
It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting—what precisely did Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under his arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were in the portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn theProcession of Joan of Arcin pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans,a work which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with any merit from his own hands, and from which he could not be induced to part for all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a pen-and-ink replica from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the May of 1892. The youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his own work than had his admirers.
It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic promise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplaceProcession of Joan of Arccould stand out at the forefront of his career, and was, as we shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order to get him public recognition—in which it distinctly and deservedly failed. He himself was later to go hot and cold about the very mention of it and to be ashamed of it.
We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,” his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking for him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship of that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom he loved to glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is canting and stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged down. Nothing of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste drew about him, he was not compelled into, the company of the erotic and the precious in craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small share in opening wide the doors to him.
But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a curiousparadox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the mediæval atmosphere of the Æsthetic Movement into which his destiny now drifted him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, his art and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement at best. It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially the French writers—it was their challenge to the past—it was their very inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, that brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise have remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. He was to run riot in eroticism—he was to treat sex with a marked frankness that showed it to be his god—but it is only right to say that the artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he has as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novelist of the “best seller” who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this mood nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works that any girl may read.” The whole business is simply a matter of degree. And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the race. It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the measure in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not that he is alone subject to blame or praise in the matter.
Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive conceit—it was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being of the middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class—he was one of the most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engaging smile he had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the loneliness of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitterWhistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and opened the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated his work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on it, as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When he was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charming and witty companion.
Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley after a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, and is said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily repelled. However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the ambition growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance and his friends, to dare all and make for art.
Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And remember that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed mimic of Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall soon see a very different reception of the youth by a very different temperament. Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, gave the young fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that Beardsley “had learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training of an art school.” From this interview young Beardsley came back in high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being kicked down the steps of the National Gallery by the old masters.
This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holiday; and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvisde Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly encouraged him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un jeune artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”
Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on his art—the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the studios talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and Burne-Jones at this very time—Whistler had published hisGentle Art of Making Enemiesin 1890, and London had not recovered from its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, but his eager eyes were quick to see.
However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition.
And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most impressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The generoussoul of Vallance little understood Morris—or Beardsley; but his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted boy’s cause.
Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid ourselves of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achievement. Next—and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an interesting fact—Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a specimen of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in mediævalism, and Frederick Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse—probably not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things.Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would only have understood the society of the great—his idea of it was an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vulgar, who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him—only doing it with an air and dressing well for the part.
Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy—they even lack manhood—they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelligence.
However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott books—he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then anxious to produce—Sidonia the Sorceress. Vallance leaped at the chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once persuaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris received the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to swallow a ridiculous pill.
We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all butmediocrity—a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know—and to achieve. Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “fat blacks” of his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of fulfilling it—far less any of his sponsors. And yet!——
Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meeting of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a rival publication to the Kelmscott Press—he was to smash it to pieces and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point—and Frederick Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision and essence than mediævalism it would be hard to find; but when the problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could foreseeit. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beardsley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beautiful nor attractive, but probably trying to findsomethingto praise, at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”—and so saying he dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disappointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded by being repulsed and “not liked,” rather than that he was wounded about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than to care for his drawings—he had no personal feeling whatsoever against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again—and he could never be induced to go.
Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad refused to go, and Vallance went alone—but that is another story. For even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in the doing—one John Dent, a publisher.This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end in a moment of intense emotion for the young city clerk. He was about to leave the city behind him for ever—desert the night-school at Westminster—burn his boats behind him—and launch on his destiny as an artist.