Et Jamais Je Ne Pleure, Et Jamais Je Ne Ris: Unsentimentality as Form in Aubrey Beardsley’s The Coiffing 

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] 

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.

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.