The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

The appearance of Aubrey Beardsley in 1893 was the most extraordinary event in English art since the appearance of William Blake a little more than a hundred years earlier. With that, however, or almost so, the resemblance ends. Blake was born "out of his due time," not alone because he baffled the understanding of his age, but because his age scarcely knew of his existence. Beardsley, on the other hand, was born into an age of easy publicity; and that circumstance, combined with the fact that he was so peculiarly of his period, instantly made him a centre of discussion, a subject for regard and reprehension. Temporally he was so appropriate that an earlier appearance would have been as premature as a later would have been tardy. It was inevitable that he should have come with _The Yellow Book_ and gone with _The Savoy_. The times demanded his presence. He was as necessary a corner-stone of the Temple of the Perverse as Oscar Wilde, but, unlike that great literary figure of the decadence in England, his singularity makes him a prisoner for ever in those Eighteen Nineties of which he was so inevitable an expression. He alone of all the interesting figures of those years is almost as sterile in art as he is local in point of time. Oscar Wilde added delicate raillery and novel lightness to drama, and a new accent to conversation; Francis Thompson reintroduced Christian mysticism into English poetry; Ernest Dowson linked an eternal and bitter anguish of the soul with modern emotion; and Arthur Symons, Max Beerbohm, John Davidson, G. S. Street and Richard Le Gallienne reasserted the significance of urbane things; all revealed something that was universal -- if only the universality of taverns and courtesans. But Aubrey Beardsley is the unique expression of the most unique mood of the Nineties, a mood which was so limited that his art would have been untrue had it been either imitable or universal. As a matter of fact, it is neither; all who have called Beardsley master have destroyed themselves, and his work was archaic even before he died.

As a man, or rather as a boy -- for although Beardsley reached manhood in years he hardly lost a certain boyish attitude towards life -- he was admired for his gaiety of heart, unabashed joy in his work, and good-fellowship. He was born at Brighton on 21st August 1872, and died of tuberculosis in 1898. From his seventh year his health was delicate, and pulmonary troubles began to be feared as early as 1881. He had passed through the first stages of education before this, first at a kindergarten at Brighton, and then at a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint. But with the appearance of lung trouble he was removed to Epsom. The first artistic influence of his early life was music, and so proficient did he become as an executant that, in 1883, he joined his family in London, and appeared on the concert platform with his sister (Miss Mabel Beardsley, who became an actress) as an infant prodigy. His real tastes, however, were literary, and, although as a child almost he could talk with something like authority upon music, he preferred to read books and dream in words and phrases. In 1884 he and his sister were living in Brighton again, and he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School as a day boy. Although his tastes ran in the direction of books, he had innate skill with the pencil, and was influenced by the drawings of Kate Greenaway. When quite young he made a little money by decorating menu and invitation cards, but his drawing first attracted particular attention at the Grammar School, where the masters were interested and amused by his caricatures of themselves, and his earliest work thus came to appear in _Past and Present_, the magazine of that school. In 1888 he entered an architect's office in London, but apparently remained there for no great length of time, for in 1889 he was employed as a clerk in the Guardian Life & Fire Assurance Company. Whilst in that office he devoted his spare time to reading and drawing, and his passion for books led him, as it has led many another city clerk of literary tastes, to the well-known bookshop of Messrs Jones & Evans, in Queen Street, Cheapside, and here he made the acquaintance of Mr Frederick H. Evans, whose enthusiasm for his drawings was the herald of Beardsley's fame. Thus with the dawn of the Nineties came whispers of the appearance of a new and remarkable artist.