At the corner of Buckingham Road and Upper Gloucester Road in the Seven Dials district of Brighton stands the old Grammar School, one of the few visible links connecting Aubrey Beardsley, the artist, with the town of his birth. The house is now the Sussex Women's Hospital and its exterior is unprepossessing - a tall dour building faced with gravel and cement. To this house Mrs. Beardsley brought her son when he was eleven years old to be admitted as a boarder.

To the school magazine Past and Present, Beardsley contributed his first drawings, and one may trace in several of them the touch of genius which was to make him world-famous a few years later. His life was short, as men count time, but he lived long enough to make for himself a name and a tradition that are lasting, if not luminous. He was born in 1872. He died in 1898.

He was famous when he was twenty-two, and died at twenty-six. As a black-and-white artist he stands alone. His work is unique. With Chinese ink and a gold pen he decorated white sheets of paper as they had never been decorated before, and they remain in art collections all over the world, among the most precious and exquisite works in the art of the nineteenth century.

Beardsley was threatened with tuberculosis when he was nine, and played the piano at a concert - as a great musical phenomenon - when he was eleven. At twelve he was almost as clever with his pencil, as an artist, as he was when he died. Thus one gets a picture of this restless boy, conscious of the possession of certain powers which may or may not prove of service to him, but wholly unable to decide what is the work in which he is most likely to succeed. If he could have had his way, he would undoubtedly have become an actor.

His fame at Brighton Grammar School rested on his acting and recitations - not on his drawings. His love for acting and actors clung to him to the very end and he once began to write a play in collaboration with Brandon Thomas, the author of Charley's Aunt.

 

Brighton Grammar School has always been famous for its Christmas plays. Mr. Fred Edmonds and C. T. West turned out many operettas for the school, and Beardsley acted in these from 1884 to 1888. Many of the old boys of Brighton Grammar School remember Beardsley well. One of his contemporaries thus describes his appearance on the first day when he came as a boarder:

I remember him sitting in a corner of the "day room" looking the picture of misery and showing very evident signs of home-sickness. His figure, straight and slender, gave an impression, at first sight, of a sprightly well-groomed boy, and the curious red-brown colour of his hair claimed my attention instantaneously. His hair was brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and narrow brow. I have a drawing of him made by one of his school-fellows at this time and it distinctly shows this eccentricity of coiffure.

' I don't know why, but he always reminded me of a squirrel - yes - there was a manner about him that certainly gave me that impression. His head was always in a book when he had a moment to spare, and I often caught him with his long hands drawn up on one side of his face like the paws of a squirrel. This was a favourite attitude when he was reading. It made one long to place a nut in those paws! "Weasel" was his later sobriquet, but why this name was attached to him I could never discover. His eyes were large and dark - the oldest eyes I have ever seen; older than the world.

He had a delightful and engaging smile for everybody, but once he took up a book you could see the intelligence retreat and retreat from those eyes, until the mind behind them was definitely away, in space and eternity. I often noticed him lose his identity in this way in the class room. It was a disconcerting habit; but the masters understood him after a while and would wait for his return. Literature, art, and the drama were what I should call, save for the mixture of metaphor, his intertwining keynotes.

When he was twelve years old he was feverishly hungry for books. He came once or twice to my father's house at Worthing with me and carried away the most diverse collection of books that any boy could possibly choose. He called Dickens "our cockney Shakespeare" but he never read one of his works; they bored him, he said. One book which he took from our library delighted him for weeks, and that was The Lives of all the Notorious Pirates. I remember the book inspired us to a series of pirate games, and for a week or two our speech was carefully fashioned after the jargon of those sad rogues of the skull-and-crossbones.

We addressed other boys as "ill-looked dogs", and I remember Beardsley hissing in my ear such imprecations as "Harkee, ye rogue, you will be hang'd because ye have a damn'd hanging look". About this time he wrote several pirate tales and ballads which appeared in the school magazine and a paper called Brighton Society. Among the books he read at the age of twelve may be mentioned Thomas Chatterton's Poems, Boccaccio's Decameron and most of the tales and verse of Edgar Allan Poe.

A sea ballad written in 1886 by Beardsley is precious, if slight. It is full of a naive simplicity which was a quality which he never again introduced into his artistic and literary efforts.

THE VALIANT The Valiant was a noble bark As ever ploughed the sea, A noble crew she also had As ever there might be. When once at night upon the deep The Valiant did sail, Her captain saw a pirate ship By the moonlight dim and pale. Then up he called his goodly crew, And unto them thus spake: 'A musket and a cutlass sharp Each must directly take. For yonder see a pirate ship, Behold her flag so dark; See now the gloomy vessel Makes straight for this our bark.'

 

Scarce had the Captain spoke those words Than a shot o'er his head did fly From the deck of the pirate ship which now To the Valiant was hard by. Approaching near, twelve desperate men On the Valiant deck did leap, But some there were less brave and strong Who to their ship did keep. And then a moment afterwards Did a bloody fray ensue, And as the time sped onward Fiercer the fray it grew. 'Come on!' the Valiant's captain cried, 'Come on, my comrades brave, And if we die we shall not sink Inglorious 'neath the wave.'

When the morning came, and the men arose, The pirates, where were they? The ship had sunk and all its crew; Dead 'neath the sea they lay.

A. B. Beardsley.

Beardsley was a shy, retiring boy, who did not care much for games, and made very few friends. The old chain pier, once the glory of fashionable Brighton, but in Beardsley's time a decaying and deserted relic of the past, became his favourite resort. It was while pacing the weather-beaten structure from end to end that he committed to memory his lines in the school plays.

Mr. E. J. Marshall, the headmaster of Brighton Grammar School during Beardsley's school days, was a remarkably successful man with wild irresponsible boys. If other schools found certain boys too mischievous they were generally passed along to Marshall to tame. He had a strange gift for compelling devotion from his pupils, and many of the wild boys passed on to him brought credit to the school and remained his friends until he died.

He was possessed of an irascible temper, and was naturally disputatious. On the other hand he was most just to any boy who came before him in trouble. Young Beardsley was once in trouble for stuffing the corner of Marshall's gown into an inkpot while his back was turned. When the old pedagogue went striding up the class room, his gown took the inkpot with him, and it freely sprinkled everything around. The old school-master was very deaf, and when the inkpot fell with a crash he did not hear it. Not till a wild wave of laughter passed over the class did he discover Beardsley's little joke.

During Whistler's impecunious days in Tite Street, Chelsea, he once or twice visited an American boy at Brighton Grammar School. Marshall introduced him to a Bond Street tailor who lived at Brighton, and in the end he commissioned Whistler to paint a picture for him. Whistler arrived at Brighton with the picture and called at the tailor's house. But the family were spending the day on the Downs. When they returned, Whistler was asleep on the sofa, and all the pictures on the wall were carefully turned facing the wall with the exception of his own picture which he had placed in a prominent position over the mantelshelf.

C. B. Cochran and Aubrey Beardsley were schoolboys together at Brighton Grammar School. They both appeared in the original operettas written by Fred Edmonds and C. T. West each Christmas. In 1886 Beardsley first showed his dramatic ability in the School Prologue. The chief honours in the Prologue for 1887, played at the Dome, went to C. B. Cochran as Henry VII and Beardsley as The Spirit of Progress.

Beardsley had a fine speaking voice and at a concert in 1887 he read out the skating scene from The Pickwick Papers. Later on we find him taking an important part in a musical play called The Pay of the Pied Piper. The programme for this operetta was illustrated with black-and-white sketches by Beardsley, and these are his first published work as an artist. At a school concert in 1888 he recited Mary's Ghost, by Hood; and C. B. Cochran recited one of George R. Sims's poems.

 

 

 

 

 

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