Et Jamais Je Ne Pleure, Et Jamais Je Ne Ris: Unsentimentality as Form in Aubrey Beardsley’s The Coiffing
Et Jamais Je Ne Pleure, Et Jamais Je Ne Ris: Unsentimentality as Form in Aubrey Beardsley’s The Coiffing
T.N. Hutchinson
T.N. Hutchinson
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There is an aesthetic category which, I will suggest, is a defining feature of Aubrey Beardsley’s work, and which I will term unsentimentality. It is a feature consistently overlooked in the critical literature on Beardsley, which has tended instead to privilege the themes of transgression, the grotesque, and innuendo, among others. By unsentimentality I refer to a yearning in his work for the transcendence of matter in a kind of exaggerated Platonism. According to this, all that is rooted in the earthly and the material is distasteful because it is only an imperfect iteration of the ideal, as enshrined in Plato’s world of ideal forms. All that approaches one to this higher state is delectable; all that further entrenches the individual in the boredom of earthly matter is to be escaped. In his explanation of Platonic aesthetics, Walter Pater speaks of Plato’s inclination ‘towards that "intelligible world," opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all’ in ‘a passage from all merely relative experience to the "absolute["]’ or ‘the eternal Being’.[1] This yearning for Platonic transcendence is not unique to Beardsley’s work, insofar as other literary movements have dealt with the attainment of higher or transcendental beauty as a similar telos. The Aesthetes and Symbolists glimpsed it in fleeting, impressionistic moments of particular charge, and Vladimir Nabokov, in a movement all his own, caught at and set down in art his tantalising impressions of the ‘otherworld’.[2] But Beardsley is the first in his particular fashion to yearn for the above with a reverence that has bound up in it such disdain for the below, and necessitates such a clinical, reticent handling of matter. This cruel unsentimentality toward the meaningless is the flipside of his love of the perfect. As is fundamental to the dandiacal tradition – at least by the time of Baudelaire – the artist must turn his face away from the aesthetic bankruptcy of everyday life so as to nourish his soul on the glimpses of beauty that he finds in himself. His natural domain is the sick-bed, because there his sensitivity may be preserved, and there he may acquire perverse prestige in the claim that his body could not brook the material world, leaving his mind to escape upward. In this sense, his revulsion is the sign of a heightened and refined aesthetic sensibility. This article lays out the concept of Beardsleyan unsentimentality before moving onto its formal expression, focusing on his visual piece The Coiffing, and his poem The Ballad of a Barber.[3]
Figure 1. Aubrey Beardsley, The Coiffing, 'The Savoy', No. 3, July 1896, line block print.
There is a commonality of temperament between Beardsley’s unsentimentality and the words which Baudelaire imagines Gautier to say in L’Art Romantique:
You believe me a dispassionate man, and you do not see, prosaic and wicked people, that I impose upon myself an outward calm which you seek constantly to trouble with your ugliness and your cruelty! What appears to you as indifference in me is the resignation of despair. It is to escape the unbearable sight of your madness and your cruelty that my eyes remain steadfastly fixed upon the image of the immaculate Muse.[4]
For Beardsley, all that is earthly content as opposed to higher form – and thus chaotic as opposed to beautiful – must be handled as though with a scalpel, with a kind of disdainful and exacting chirurgy. By Beardsley’s lights, to be an artist is to be a surgeon, sculpting or contorting matter into ordered forms which capture something of the higher. It is from this worldview that the misanthropy and violence of the Beardsleyan dandy stems. By punishing matter, he looks upward.
Because life and art must be indistinguishable for the Beardsleyan dandy, it is not just paper, wood, or prose which must be made into articles for worshipping the sublime. It is also the life and body of the artist himself. A friend of Beardsley’s sister Mabel observed that the most striking thing about him was his being ‘spotlessly clean & well-groomed - one was impressed by his cleanliness’.[5] A friend, Douglas Ainslie, spoke of his ‘clean-cut gestures' and ‘ascetic-looking face’, and Arthur Symons (amongst many others) described Beardsley as the ‘thinnest young man’ he had ever seen.[6] Oscar Wilde famously quipped to a friend: ‘don't sit on the same chair as Aubrey, it’s not compromising’.[7] Taken together, these anecdotes speak to the aesthetic unsentimentality which Beardsley cultivated in his life as well as his art. In his rigorously maintained, austere haircut is the Apollonian impression of self-control; the organic body is straitjacketed to satisfy the aesthetic principle of linearity. That it was unfashionable for its time is so much the better for the poète maudit.
This unsentimentality finds considerable formal expression in Beardsley’s very particular use of line. Line as a feature of his art was much discussed, with both reverence and pearl-clutching.[8] Though it often has a curvilinear, rococo extravagance to it, as in the dotted line of the Princess’ peignoir in The Coiffing, on other occasions it demonstrates an icy austerity, as in The Climax.[9] To be sure, his minimalist line is more characteristic of his Japoniste work around 1893 – 1894 (cf. How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink), while his vegetal, rococo line characterised by horror vacui and excess is more typical of the phase in which he produced his celebrated illustrations for Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, such as The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles.[10] Elsewhere, this aesthetic unsentimentality is to be seen in the clinical, lacerating triad of lines in the centre of Beardsley’s Of a Neophyte, and the stylised, restricted trees in The Platonic Lament and The Kiss of Judas.[11] This unsentimental style is prone to verticality, dramatic bisections of the image, and a clinical simplicity. Beardsleyan line at its most economical and severe is the formal expression of his unsentimentality: the disorder of matter compressed into pure form. It is where his austere line meets with his dotted, curvilinear line that this relationship between matter and form is most apparent. The discerning, exacting artistic eye – consciousness expressed here as line – ranges over matter and sees behind it the clean, cold, mathematical perfection of the sublime. This compression of disordered matter into sanitised line is the means by which Beardsley’s scalpel-like chirurgy is conducted. It is, likewise, this same quality of aesthetic unsentimentality which Beardsley’s conspicuous affect is designed to connote. The anecdotes above refer to him as clean, cold, thin: all cultivated examples of the unsentimental Beardsleyan line which yearns for transcendence, and scorns the disordered meaninglessness of matter.
Fig. 2. Aubrey Beardsley, Of a Neophyte and How the Black Art Was Revealed unto Him by the Fiend Asomuel, 1893, lithograph.
Fig. 3. Aubrey Beardsley, The Kiss of Judas, 1893, ink on paper.
Equally, Wilde is referring above to Beardsley’s ‘freakish asexuality’, another curated feature of his life and art.[12] This, too, is part of his performed coldness. To be a dandy à la Beardsley is partly to shudder in horror at the notion of carnal engagement with matter. To penetrate or to be penetrated would be to leave the ivory tower, and betray the ascetic formal principles with which he washes his hands and turns his face from the world. When Tannhäuser – the Beardsleyan dandy par excellence – does enter into a sexual atmosphere in The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, it is with a glacial emotional indifference: ‘there was a shadow of sentiment in his voice as he spoke’.[13] Elsewhere, Tannhäuser is ‘more than satisfied with [the attendants’] skill, and the delicate attention they paid his loving parts aroused feelings within him almost amounting to gratitude’.[14] The Beardsleyan dandy, as a product of a Decadent civilisation, must have become a total work of art, sublimated all bestial impulse, and, as a consequence, must be perpetually composed. In a manner which is more intuitive to Aristotelian thought, lust points downwards towards earthliness, emotional engagement, and carnality; it is lust for and through matter. Sex is, in various senses, a domain for which one must be undressed, and such a thing is unthinkable for the immaculately composed Beardsleyan dandy. One surviving anecdote has Beardsley run from the room during a coughing fit so as to hide the bloodstains on his handkerchief.[15] This could be entirely incidental, but it could also be somewhat telling. To be seen in a state of unmadeness would be to publicly lose something of one’s status as the almost Nietzschean poet-hero. As in the case of Tannhäuser (‘after he had had a little support from the smelling-salts, he recovered his self-possession’), for the mask to slip risks ego death.[16] It is the fantasy of perfect unsentimentality which the still lake represents in The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser:
The Chevalier fell into a strange mood, as he looked at the lake. It seemed to him that the thing would speak, reveal some curious secret, say some beautiful word, if he should dare wrinkle its pale face with a pebble, "I should be frightened to do that, though," he said to himself. […] A thousand drowsy fancies passed through his brain. Sometimes the lake took fantastic shapes, or grew to twenty times its size, or shrunk into a miniature of itself, without ever once losing its unruffled calm, its deathly reserve.[17]
The word ‘unruffled’ is, in this sense, something of a touchstone for Beardsley. The unmoving surface of the lake is a metaphor for the similar kind of exterior calm which Baudelaire imposes upon himself, and the ‘deathly reserve’ which Tannhäuser cultivates as a Beardsleyan dandy. To ‘wrinkle its pale face with a pebble’, that is, to ruffle it, would be to disturb this studiedly unsentimental affect. Likewise, the term can also be taken as an innuendo if unruffled is read in Tannhäuser’s case as meaning ‘without ruffle’: undressed, in other words. This is precisely the same undoing of the dandy’s careful façade – the troubling of the water’s surface – which leads to penetration of and by the world, and collapses the emotional and affective remove which the dandy has worked so hard to maintain. It reveals that he is a human being, returns him to the earthly, and pulls him away from the possibility of transcendence. To restate: the Beardsleyan dandy can never truly be undressed.
Lastly, art to Beardsley is amoral, as it was to Gautier, Wilde, and the Goncourt brothers.[18] To contemplate beauty of any sort can approach one to the sublime; the particular form of beauty via which one accesses this state is, in a sense, only incidental.[19] If the end justifies the means, the means need not be morally palatable. The Beardsleyan dandy finds equal pleasure in contemplating the loveliness of a butterfly, and the décolletage of a perfectly preserved corpse. Equally permissible is eroticisation of man or woman, adult or child. Likewise, if all life can be art, so too is every action perfectible, whether benign or condemnable. There is a perfect way of executing a balletic plié but, given the amorality of art, there might also be a perfect way of wearing a bruise, to use an example from The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser.[20] It is because Beardsley knows this, and because he knows that others don’t, and the inequality of this relationship must lead to pride and scorn, that he takes such savoured, sweetly nasty pleasure in presenting the reader with offensive beauty. Hence descriptions like that of the designs painted on the skin of Venus’ courtiers: ‘about a wrist, a wreath of pale, unconscious babes; upon an elbow a bouquet of spring flowers’.[21] The lovely is everywhere punctuated by quiet perversity, because this follows inevitably from the morally arbitrary condition of beauty. It is often in these instances that Beardsley’s relish for violence emerges in little flourishes in descriptions such as those of ‘fans of big, living moths stuck upon mounts of silver sticks’.[22] Such play baits the reader into feeling revulsion, because to do so would be to admit that one is still tethered to the moral contingency of beauty, and thus that one lacks the mettle for Beardsley’s transcendental ideal.
Beardsley’s The Coiffing (Fig. 1) is a case study in the formal unsentimentality of which he makes such a fetish.[23] The piece was originally intended for his unfinished erotic novel The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, and is accompanied by the poem The Ballad of a Barber which first appeared in the July 1896 issue of The Savoy, and details the narrative which The Coiffing illustrates.[24] The poem opens with the barber Carrousel, a dandy-artist who ‘cut, and coiffed, and shaved so well/That all the world was at his feet’, and whose ‘razor was a magic wand/ That understood the softest cheek’. Carrousel is asked to complete the coiffing of the King’s daughter – ‘a pretty child,/Thirteen years old, or thereabout […] as joyous and as wild/ As spring flowers when the sun is out’. Overfaced by such beauty, however, he suffers a nervous breakdown and, smashing a perfume bottle to form a jagged edge, murders the Princess: ‘Carrousel’s cut was sharp and deep’. The Ballad concludes with the death of the eponymous barber. ‘They hanged him in Meridian Street./ You pray in vain for Carrousel’.[25] Beardsley’s illustration The Coiffing is a view of the barber’s studio and the two figures of the narrative: the Princess seated in the centre of the image, and Carrousel standing behind her. The viewer is left to deduce that the scene depicted must be very shortly before the murder.
One of the most formally striking aspects of the piece is the implicit long diagonal which bisects the image from the top left corner to the bottom right, along which various contents of the image are arranged, beginning with the topmost edge of the framed wall mirror on the top left, and ending with the bottommost hem of the Princess’ petticoated skirt on the lower right. The opposite long diagonal, from the bottom left to the top right, is also delineated, though this only halfway, running up from the bottom left but stopping at the point at the centre of the image where the two diagonals intersect. This second ‘half-diagonal’ is formed by the left outline of the Princess’ peignoir and the cabriole leg of the table in the bottom left corner. This formal chassis – an inverted ‘Y’ shape – is to be found elsewhere in Beardsley’s oeuvre, at its most obvious when most minimal, as in Beardsley’s cover design for Leonard Smithers’ edition of Ernest Dowson’s Verses (Fig. 4).[26] Even in this simplest of features, Beardsley’s Platonic unsentimentality emerges. The content of the picture, much of which is curvilinear or organic in shape, adheres to a rigorous underlying formal imperative. Content, one might say, is subjugated to form. This is a feature which Zatlin considers to have resulted from Beardsley’s study of the Japanese masters of the Edo period such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Moronobu:
Beardsley learned abstraction; simplification, or the compression of ideas into a line; an aesthetic serenity; and distance; and he adhered to these principles even when he changed style in his last drawings, turning to that of the eighteenth century. [27]
This observation can effectively be read as a gloss of unsentimentality. Abstraction is the definitive feature of Plato’s world of ideal forms, whereby the Platonic eye ranges across the variegation of matter and, seeing the order behind the apparent, looks upward to form abstract categories. Simplification and compression suggest the artist’s straitjacketing of matter, while serenity and distance denote the necessary, emotionally arrested remove at which the dandiacal artist regards the material world.
Fig. 4. Aubrey Beardsley, Cover Design for The Poems of Ernest Dowson, With a memoir by Arthur Symons, four illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, and a portrait by William Rothenstein, 1922.
It is worth stopping a moment here to consider the way in which these conceptual principles play out visually in The Coiffing. The composition of the covered, Queen Anne-style table on the far left of the image, for instance, can be taken as an example of Beardsley’s compression of matter into line. The bouquet of flowers in the footed vase on the table is one of the most florid, organic textures in the picture, counterpoised only by the vegetal panel on the piece of furniture showing through between the table and the princess’ clothing. The roses – a Decadent leitmotif with a considerable historical pedigree – seem ostensibly to represent rich, fecund life, and sensuality.[28] They are also, however, precisely the kind of matter – decaying and disorganised – that Beardsley’s unsentimental line does so much to strangle. On closer inspection, the vase constricts as it descends, such as would suffocate the stems of the flowers, and could not hold enough water to keep them alive. The vase becomes something of an impossible object, then, stripped of its ability to perform its function, and so condemned to a strangely skeuomorphic status. The three lines of minor floral detailing on the sides of the vase occupy a similarly uncanny position. As an inanimate ornamental feature, they blend into the flowers seamlessly, giving the trompe l’oeil impression that tendrils of the roses are attempting to escape and creep down the sides of the imprisoning vase. And yet, they too are drawn to a sharp point as the vase narrows – a literal moment at which matter is restricted and compressed into pure line. The uncanniness extends further, however. The vase widens again at the base to form three feet which resemble the shape of buckled court shoes of the variety worn by the French aristocracy at court during the 18th century. These object-appendages form two further visual rhymes: the first with Carrousel’s right and only visible foot, and the second with the cabriole leg of the table. Both of these other ‘feet’ seem unnaturally linear. Carrousel’s shoe seems almost too pointed and thin to contain a real human foot, while the table leg is so sharp as to appear almost two-dimensional, as though it would lacerate the floor. If any of these three ‘feet’ were to be real, they would each be of sickly thin dimensions. They therefore constitute matter which has been condensed and simplified to the point of becoming impossibilia; material hyper-compressed into pure line.
The emotional remove and distance which Zatlin describes, and which is so integral to unsentimentality, also appears in Arthur Symons’ description, according to which ‘Beardsley did not believe in his own enchantments, was never haunted by his own terrors, and, in his queer sympathy and familiarity with evil, had none of the ardors of a lost soul’.[29] For Symons, Beardsley ‘was the dupe of none of his own statements, or indeed of his own enthusiasms, and, really, very coldly impartial’. Indeed, his description reads like a definition of dandiacal unsentimentality.
This clear, unemotional intellect, emotional only in the perhaps highest sense, where emotion almost ceases to be recognizable, in the abstract, for ideas, for lines, left him with all his interests in life, with all his sociability, of a sort essentially very lonely.[30]
Here we have the abstraction from reality which holds the artist apart from and above the material world for Baudelaire, sanctifying his loneliness. It is this same remove which Yeats’ speaker achieves in the following lines:
I had gathered about me all gods because I believed
in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave
myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble,
a mirror of polished steel.[31]
This unsentimentality, by which I mean the compression of matter into form and the dandy’s distance from the material world, also precipitates a certain atmosphere of violence. If one imagines watching Beardsley create this piece or his cover design for The Poems of Ernest Dowson, one sees the hand trace a long, scything motion to create the two long diagonals which intersect precisely over the Princess’ head: a crosshair of sorts.[32] The sweeping line as both the product and symbol of laceration is a feature which recurs across Beardsley’s oeuvre. The Platonic Lament and Of a Neophyte, for instance, demonstrate the same compositional motif, according to which three vertical lines create the trompe l’oeil effect of scything through a figure’s neck (see Fig. 2).[33] In The Platonic Lament, the blade-like rods of the trellis appear almost to run through the figure of Salome, while, in Of a Neophyte, the three vertical candlesticks – a perennial symbol of phallic violence in Beardsley’s work – give the impression of decapitating the woman in the centre of the image. To be sure, the cold, clinical violence of line is nowhere more appropriate than in an image of a skilled artist-turned-murderer. Lines such as ‘The razor was a magic wand/That understood the softest cheek’ capture all of these connotations. The ‘razor’ and ‘magic wand’ suggest the fine division between violence and invention implicit to the artist’s manipulation of matter into form, while ‘the softest cheek’ reminds the reader of the delicacy with which such bladework must be carried out. For both the linear composition of the piece and Carrousel as a dandy-artist, there is no unsentimentality without violence.
The distinctly vertical impulse which conditions Beardsley’s use of line has generally been understood as the product of his Japonisme.[34] This is certainly true; the negative space – horror vacui substituted for a kind of horror materiae - and vertiginous composition of pieces such as Frau Klafsky as Isolde (Fig. 5) demonstrate a clear inheritance from various Edo and Meiji Ukiyo-e works.[35] Indeed, proof of this Japoniste verticality is also to be found in the various works of Beardsley’s successors which make his verticality an integral formal component. Pieces by Kay Rasmus Nielsen such as And Then she lay on a Little Green Patch in the Midst of the Gloomy Thick Wood, for example, show what visually astounding extremes can be crafted from this technique (Fig. 6).[36] Following on from my discussion of unsentimentality as an aesthetic category, however, I would like to suggest that this vertical impulse is also profoundly concerned with transcendence. The many vertical lines in the upper right quadrant of The Coiffing distract somewhat from the detailed richness which populates everything to the lower left of the long diagonal. They also give the uncanny impression of intersecting at contrived junctures with the billowing folds of the Princess’ dress and peignoir. The bend of her wrist, for example, is directly in line with the leftmost vertical line of the curtain. The edge of her left-hand sleeve stops exactly at the vertical line of the curtain which is fourth from the left, and the final, rightmost line of the curtain exactly meets the curve of a bulge in her peignoir. Vertical line as form, then, has an uncannily determinative effect on matter, seeming to impose on it an aesthetic order. There is no luxurious, material beauty too playful, free or fine to escape the presiding higher order of Beardsley’s austere and unsentimental line.
Fig. 5 Aubrey Beardsley, Frau Klafsky as Isolde, reproduced in Martin Birnbaum, “The Strange Genius of Aubrey Beardsley”, 1911.
Fig. 6 Kay Rasmus Nielsen, And Then she lay on a Little Green Patch in the Midst of the Gloomy Thick Wood in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914, ink and watercolour on paper.
It is a recurrent feature of Beardsley’s work that the frame seems always to fall a few inches further inward than one would like. One has the impression of viewing a delimited snapshot of a world which, as it continues on beyond the frame, can never be apperceived in its entirety. Beardsley does much to remind the viewer of this compositionally, depicting objects such as the wall mirror and the Queen Anne-style table half-in and half-out of view in The Coiffing. The vertical lines in the top right quadrant, likewise, reach upward into implied but unseen space, as do the tree trunks in Nielsen’s piece (see Fig. 6), and the rope in Beardsley’s Two Athenian Women in Distress (Fig. 7).[37] In this sense, the verticality of The Coiffing not only sees all matter aspire to perfect form but, in tending upward out of shot, constantly yearns in the direction of transcendence. Indeed, almost the entire half of the picture to the upper right of the long diagonal consists of clinical vertical line implying higher space, the tonal partner to the frilly luxuriance of matter in the lower left half. This type of Beardsleyan line inevitably motions upward, in a manner not unlike that of Raphael’s Plato who, as he walks alongside Aristotle, points up toward the heavens.[38]
For all that the flagellation and sculpting of matter into perfect form is transcendental in The Coiffing, it is also profoundly erotic. This eroticism results from the fraught relation between the two polarities on which Beardsley’s work is based. On the one hand: the sumptuous, extravagant, and indulgent. On the other: the asceticism and austerity of the Apollonian mode. Take, for example, the bow on the front of the Princess’ dress and that at the back and slightly to the side of Carrousel’s attire. In both cases the bow is an outward symbol of fancifulness, and the Decadent frippery of rococo adornment. It is also restrictive, however. It draws in the folds of the Princess’ peignoir, thus preserving her dignity, and cinches Carrousel’s waist. In restraining the body, it represents the bondage of matter. The same motif appears in the bow at Carrousel’s neck, and the neckline drawstring which tightens around the Princess’ neck. Both decorate as much as they foreshadow; the Princess’ blood flow is shortly to be stopped, and Carrousel is soon to be hung by the neck. It is this same erotic restriction which emerges at the intersection of Beardsley’s compressed, austere line with the rich frivolity of the folds in the Princess’ dress: the oscillation between compression and restraint on the one hand, and the luxuriance of matter on the other.
Indeed, if Carrousel is to be understood as a dandy, his toilette serves to illustrate the integral function of eroticism for Beardsley in both dandyism and unsentimentality. For the Beardsleyan dandy, the performance of sartorial elegance is necessary for entrance into refined society. In Norbert Elias’ terms, cultured dress is one of the means by which an individual demonstrates that he has sublimated his bestial urges, differentiated himself from the barbarians beyond the walls of civilisation, and so belongs in the polite company of the salon.[39] It is, in effect, a renaissance courtly ethos which reaches back to Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, expressed as a rococo aesthetic, but supercharged by social Darwinism and the Decadence of the later nineteenth century.[40] With every additional layer of clothing, the flesh and blood urges of the body are further buried below a palimpsest of refinement. Any ripple of muscle which might suggest the supposed indignity of manual labour – and the capacity for force – is safely trussed up and hidden away behind the protection of a chemise, cravat, waistcoat and justaucorps. For the dandy, clothes constitute armour in various senses. They keep the cruelty and brutishness of the world out, but, equally, keep the crudity of the body safely locked in. As Freud would have it, however, sublimation is a process which is, in Heidegger’s sense, always already erotic. Following the same mechanism as the antithetical meaning of primal words, each layer that abstracts from the body reminds of the carnality underneath.[41] There is no notion of civilisation without barbarism, and there is no glove that does not remind of the hand’s capacity to dirty itself.
One of the principal means of Beardsley’s method, however, is the exposure of that which should be hidden. He punctures the façade of refinement, but ensures that the broken façade remains visible. Take, as an instance of this, the following line from The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser: ‘[Tannhäuser] adored [Venus] all over and all the things she had on, and buried his face in the folds and flounces of her linen, and ravished away a score of frills in his excess.’[42] The brutishness of ‘excess’ and ‘ravished’ emerges to disrupt the performance of refinement which the ‘frills’ and ‘flounces’ suggest. Equally, the violence suggested by the etymology of ‘ravish’ functions as a miniature iteration of the civilising process. Meaning originally to seize, rob, or rape, the term becomes softened, referring to passionate but not necessarily non-consensual intercourse. The term has become distant from its bestial etymon, and so has become palatable, but bears still the mark of its origins.
In The Coiffing, Carrousel appears as a case study in the above. The hyper-refinement of his toilette has become exaggerated and grotesque in the form of his coiffure and bow, but the repressed violence refuses to be entirely sublimated. The scissors poking out of his pocket (blades angled towards the Princess) remind of his skill with the razor and capacity for force. Sinisterly, the placement and action of his right hand is not visible. If the miniature of the Virgin and child on the mantelpiece serves as an accurate template for the position of the Princess and Carrousel, though, his hand would be in the same position as that of the Virgin: pressed against the underside of the Princess. The façade of civilisation seeks to sublimate the transgressive-erotic, but Beardsley thwarts and makes visible this process. Various lines from The Ballad give a similar impression of exposing this repressed bestiality.
Such was his art he could with ease
Curl wit into the dullest face […]
The curling irons in his hand
Almost grew quick enough to speak,
The razor was a magic wand
That understood the softest cheek.[43]
Here the violence of the sword or phallus is sublimated into articles for completing one’s toilette, the ultimate image of a late-stage Decadent civilisation. But the violence of those weapon-substitutes remains visible in the body horror suggested by the idea that the barber transmogrifies the face with his curling irons. In line with the sadistic impulse integral to Beardsleyan unsentimentality, the fact that the face is ‘dull’ – that is to say, without artistic value – is a part of why it must be sculpted by the artistic hand with a certain underlying, violent disdain. As in the case of The Coiffing, the process by which the natural body is acculturated is one of erotic sublimation as matter is compressed into clinical, clean unsentimentality.
Indeed, the Beardsleyan dandy takes this sublimation of the body’s animalism to an extreme, and so elevates it to the level of kink. Tannhäuser’s garments become fetishistic means of self-restriction: the ruff, cravat, and sash constrict and truss up the body almost beyond recognition, and so satisfy the masochistic urge – accordant with unsentimentality – to beat the formless into ordered, beautiful shape. The tighter he is bound, the more aesthetically refined he can imagine himself to be. This, too, coheres with the Beardsleyan fantasy of perfect unsentimentality. If the dandy as a physical work of art is entirely abstracted from the urges of his origins, he must have achieved a glacial emotional distance which renders him isolated from his own baseness, and impervious to the ugliness of the mundane. It is this impression which Baudelaire creates in Spleen et Idéal.
Je suis belle, O mortels! comme un reve de pierre, . . .
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.
(I am beautiful, O mortals! Like a dream of stone, . . .
And I never weep, and I never laugh.)[44]
Unsentimentality, then, is of integral significance to Beardsley’s dandiacal art (and life-as-art). It encompasses the Platonic yearning for transcendence which is reflected everywhere in his work: as form, content, and as the conflict between. As a Baudelairean scorn for matter it is the essence of dandyism, and is the source of the aloof malevolence which conditions so much of Beardsley’s work. It is both philosophy and method, in that it is transcendence conveyed through line (both on the canvas and in the life of the dandy as public artist and flâneur). As an aesthetic category it has the capacity to contain many of his work’s most salient features: perversity, eroticism, Decadence, violence, luxuriance and asceticism. As a critical lens it points up the common philosophy which unites these features, and the shared formal means by which they are expressed. In The Coiffing, unsentimentality determines the narrative, the composition, and the content of the image, and explains the manner in which Beardsley as dandy interacts with its themes. Quite apart from its analytical weight, it is also a means of appreciating more keenly the beauty of his work, and separating it from the critical legacy according to which his work is transgressive merely for its own sake. Considered instead with unsentimentality in mind, his art appears as aesthetically cohesive, intellectually ambitious, and, in many ways, sui generis.
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References
References
1. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (MacMillan and Co., 1910), p.170, p.167, p.168. Pater’s summation of the world of ideal forms in his Plato and Platonism gives the rendering most historically accurate to Beardsley’s period, though it was published after Beardsley’s death.
2. For the pioneering treatment of this in the critical literature, see Vladimir Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton University Press, 1991).
3. Aubrey Beardsley, The Coiffing, 'The Savoy', No. 3, July 1896, line block print, 18.5 x 12.7cm, WikiArt, accessed September 2, 2026,
https://www.wikiart.org/en/aubrey-beardsley/coiffing, Aubrey Beardsley, “The Ballad of a Barber” in Under The Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse by Aubrey Beardsley With Illustrations (The Bodley Head, 1904).
4. Charles Baudelaire, “L’Art Romantique” in Œuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire (Louis Conard, 1922), p.180, my translation.
5. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., 1999) p.97.
6. Ibid., p.336, p.151.
7. Ibid., p.160.
8. For reverence, see the discussion of Beardsley’s line in Brigid Brophy, Black & White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp.11-12; and Haldane MacFall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Clown, The Harlequin, The Pierrot of His Age (Simon and Schuster, 1927), p.28, p.44. For pearl-clutching, see Margaret Armour, “Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents.” Magazine of Art, 20 (November 1896-October 1897): 9-12, The Victorian Web, accessed 17 February 2026,
Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents.
She feels impelled to commend his ‘economy of means’ and ‘serene surety of the drawing’, but laments the ‘slimy nastiness of those faces [from his illustrations for Salome]’.
9. Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, from the illustrations for Salomé, c. 1893–1894, line block print on Japanese vellum, 342mm x 272mm, JPEG file, Wikimedia Commons, public domain, accessed February 26, 2026,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aubrey_Beardsley_-_The_Climax.jpg.
10. Aubrey Beardsley, How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink, 1893–94, Indian ink and pencil, Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, viewed at the website Artchive, accessed August 12, 2026,
How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink (1893 – 1894) by Aubrey Beardsley – Artchive,
Aubrey Beardsley, The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles, 1897, line-block, 115 mm x 77 mm, Royal Academy, accessed August 12, 2026,
The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles | Works of Art | RA Collection | Royal Academy of Arts.
11. Aubrey Beardsley, Of a Neophyte, 1893, lithograph, Fine Art America, accessed November 15, 2025,
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/of-a-neophyte-1-aubrey-beardsley.html,
Aubrey Beardsley, The Platonic Lament, 1894, lithography, private collection, accessed November 15, 2025,
https://www.artchive.com/artwork/the-platonic-lament-aubrey-beardsley-1894/,
Aubrey Beardsley, The Kiss of Judas, 1893, ink on paper, accessed November 15, 2025, https://www.artchive.com/artwork/the-kiss-of-judas-aubrey-beardsley-1893/.
12. Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p.160.
13. Aubrey Beardsley, and John Glassco, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (Book-of-the-Month Club, by arrangement with New York: Blue Moon Books Inc., 1995), p.23. Beardsley’s only novel – left unfinished at the time of his death in 1898 – is a pornographic retelling of the Venus and Tannhäuser legend after the fashion of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise, Burne-Jones’ Laus Veneris, or Swinburne’s poem of the same name. It recounts the bacchanalia at the Venusberg, and Tannhäuser’s many orgiastic interactions with Venus and her courtiers. See William Morris, ‘The Hill of Venus’, The William Morris Archive, ed. by Florence S. Boos, accessed November 18, 2025, https://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/; and Edward Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, 1869, Oil with gold paint on canvas. 122cm x 183cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Laus Veneris." In Major Poems and Selected Prose, edited by Jerome J. McGann and Charles L. Sligh, 111–141. (Yale University Press, 2004).
14. Ibid., p.62, my emphasis.
15. Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p.162.
16. Beardsley, and Glassco, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, p.73.
17. Ibid., p.73.
18. This amorality, though, refers to the practical, embodied side of morality, that which concerns how we might justly act toward one another as co-actors in a society. It is, however, intensely concerned with morality in the form of the credo that governs pursuit of the sublime. It is not amoral in the sense that it is feckless or nihilistic, a distinction which it is important to grasp.
19. Perhaps this accounts in part for the lackadaisical attitude that Beardsley’s characters sometimes take toward beautiful things. The venerated articles of beauty are not the end in themselves, in the same way that religious idols are not the Godhead. To confuse the end with the means is to be blinded to the sublime by the obviousness of the material world, and so, having marked oneself out as a philistine, to be shut out of the precious elect or, as Wilde puts it, ‘the exquisites who are going to rule’ (see Oscar Wilde, 'A Woman of No Importance' in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Merlin Holland (Harper Collins, 2003), pp.464—514 at p.493). Thus Beardsley’s flagellating scorn for matter sometimes results also in a studiedly flippant handling of fine things, an almost nasty glee in trampling the flower or vivisecting the animal.
20. Beardsley, and Glassco, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser.
21. Ibid., p.38.
22. Ibid., p.37.
23. Beardsley, The Coiffing.
24. Aubrey Beardsley, “The Ballad of a Barber” in Under The Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse by Aubrey Beardsley With Illustrations (The Bodley Head, 1904).
25. Ibid., lns. 3 – 4, 23 – 24, 37 – 40, 62, 67 – 68.
26. Aubrey Beardsley, Cover Design for The Poems of Ernest Dowson, With a memoir by Arthur Symons, four illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, and a portrait by William Rothenstein, 9th ed., John Lane, The Bodley Head Ltd., 1922, Digitized by the Internet Archive, accessed at Wikimedia Commons, accessed January 21, 2026,
27. Zatlin notes that ‘Beardsley could also have seen British illustrated books on Japan, such as F. V. Dickins’s Fugaku Hiyaku-kei, or A Hundred Views of Fuji (Fusuyama) by Hokusai (1880), G. H. Audsley’s Ornamental Arts of Japan (1882-5), William Anderson’s Pictorial Arts of Japan (1886), and Marcus Huish’s Japan and its Art (1893)’. See Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.13.
28. See, for instance, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Elagabalus, 1888, oil on canvas, 213.9 x 132.1cm, private collection.
29. Arthur Symons, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Boni and Liveright, 1918), p.19.
30. Ibid., p.24.
31. William Butler Yeats, “Rosa Alchemica” in Mythologies (Macmillan 1989), p.268.
32. Beardsley, Cover Design for The Poems of Ernest Dowson.
33. Beardsley, The Platonic Lament; Beardsley, Of a Neophyte.
34. See Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Haldane MacFall also acknowledges the influence of Japanese artists on Beardsley’s work, but does so with an inaccuracy that is patronising to both parties: ‘[i]t 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’. See Haldane MacFall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Clown, The Harlequin, The Pierrot of His Age (Simon and Schuster, 1927), p.44.
35. Aubrey Beardsley, Frau Klafsky as Isolde, reproduced in Martin Birnbaum, “The Strange Genius of Aubrey Beardsley”, The Craftsman, XXI, No. 3 (December 1911) at p.248, accessed at Wikimedia Commons, accessed September 2, 2026,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/The_Craftsman_%28IA_craftsman2119unse%29.pdf?utm.
For Edo- and Meiji-period works from which this design draws influence, see, for instance, Kitagawa Utamaro I, The Northern Country (Kitaguni), from the series Three Amusements of Modern Beauties (Tôsei bijin sanyû), ca. 1800, woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and colour on paper, 52.8 × 23.9 cm, William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession no. 21.6542, accessed January 24, 2026,
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/234207.
36. Kay Rasmus Nielsen, And Then she lay on a Little Green Patch in the Midst of the Gloomy Thick Wood in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914, ink and watercolour on paper, Public Domain Image Archive, accessed January 24 2026,
‘"And then she lay on a little green patch in the midst of the gloomy thick wood."’ by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1922) | Public Domain Image Archive.
37. Aubrey Beardsley, Two Athenian Women in Distress, one of eight plates by Beardsley for The Lysistrata of Aristophanes (Leonard Smithers, 1896), ca. 1929 (printed and published), collotype print on paper, 181 x 262mm, Wikiart, accessed January 21, 2026,
https://www.wikiart.org/en/aubrey-beardsley/two-athenian-women-in-distress?utm.
38. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483–1520), The School of Athens, ca. 1508 – 11, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican City.
39. Norbert Elias, State Formation and Civilization; Translated by Edmund Jephcott with Some Notes and Revisions by the Author (Blackwell, 1982).
40. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, translated and with an introduction by George Bull (Penguin, 2003).
41. See Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Vol. 11, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works (1910) (Hogarth Press, 1953), 155–61.
42. Beardsley, and Glassco, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, p.42.
43. Beardsley, “The Ballad of a Barber”, lns. 13—14, 21–24.
44. Charles Baudelaire, “La Beauté” in Les Fleurs du Mal, Œuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire (Louis Conard, 1922), p.33, lns. 1 – 8, my translation.
Article Information
Til Hutchinson, “Et Jamais Je Ne Pleure, Et Jamais Je Ne Ris: Unsentimentality as Form in Aubrey Beardsley’s The Coiffing,” Aspectus, no. 8 (Fall 2026): X-X. DOI
Article Information
Til Hutchinson, “Et Jamais Je Ne Pleure, Et Jamais Je Ne Ris: Unsentimentality as Form in Aubrey Beardsley’s The Coiffing,” Aspectus, no. 8 (Fall 2026): X-X. DOI
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