Aubrey Beardsley

BIRTH AND FAMILY

To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something in the city,” of the name of Beardsley—one Vincent Paul Beardsley—and to his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of the family of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty-first day of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the army surgeon at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, a boy, whom they christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little foreseeing that in a short hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie a-dying, having made the picturesque name of Beardsley world-famous.

Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consumption that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does not appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive, stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the chronicles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades away, departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his work of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it be that so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us wondering by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called to the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name and raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it should stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of the age. For, when all’s said, it was a significance—if his only significance—to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying at twenty-five, had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording tablets of the genius of his race in the indelible ink of high fulfilment. However, in the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a brief moment into the limelight and is gone, whether “something in the city” or whatnot, does not now matter—his destiny was in fatherhood. But at least it was granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to him, that, from whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he should live to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son, who, as at the touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line into very music—the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age....

As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with unceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and character—therefore the man’s—in so far as the moulding of mind and character be beyond the knees of the gods—a mother whose affection and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beautiful sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as a girl.