that the idle day sees idly riding

John Gray, lithograph by Reginald Savage, c. 1896

Here's a portrait I saw at Tate Britain (known to my generation as the Tate Gallery), when Kyli took me to the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition last Tuesday: it was in the room about Beardsley's circle. John Gray (1866 - 1934) was a friend of Beardsley and Wilde. He was from a working-class family in Bethnal Green, left school at thirteen to apprentice as a metal-worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, and self-educated through evening classes.

His first collection was Silverpoint (1893), containing sixteen original poems and thirteen translations from Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Baudelaire.

Here's one of his own poems from the collection:


WINGS IN THE DARK
To Robert Harborough Sherard


Forth into the warm darkness faring wide —
More silent momently the silent quay —
Towards where the ranks of boats rock to the tide,
Muffling their plaintive gurgling jealously.


With gentle nodding of her gracious snout,
One greets her master till he step aboard:
She flaps her wings impatient to get out;
She runs to plunder, straining every cord.


Full-winged and stealthy like a bird of prey,
All tense the muscles of her seemly flanks;
She, the coy creature that the idle day
Sees idly riding in the idle ranks.


Backward and forth, over the chosen ground,
Like a young horse, she drags the heavy trawl
Content; or speeds her rapturous course unbound,
And passing fishers through the darkness call,


Deep greeting, in the jargon of the sea.
Haul upon haul, flounders and soles and dabs,
And phosphorescent animalculae,
Sand, sea drift, weeds, thousands of worthless crabs.


Darkling upon the mud the fishes grope,
Cautious to stir, staring with jewel eyes;
Dogs of the sea, the savage congers mope,
Winding their sulky march meander-wise.


Suddenly all is light and life and flight,
Upon the sandy bottom, agate strewn.
The fishers mumble, waiting till the night
Urge on the clouds, and cover up the moon.


A poem that fortuitously recalls another that I admired recently, by the presumably unrelated Australian poet Robert Gray.

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-home-paddocks.html

This isn't the most typical John Gray poem. But its evocation of the boat that appears idle to mundanely idle eyes, concealing a  history of stupendously energetic night-time labour in extraordinary worlds, seems profoundly telling about the aspirations of himself and his friends.

Aubrey Beardsley (1872 - 1898), from a higher-status but impoverished family, diagnosed with TB at the age of 7 (his father and grandfather were TB victims too), was perhaps the most remarkable instance of the enormous labours performed by the pallid aesthetic flaneurs, his vast output the work of just six years. 

Aubrey Beardsley, Withered Spring

An early picture by Beardsley, perhaps reflecting on his own TB and its inevitable outcome.

Aubrey Beardsley, self-portrait as art editor of The Yellow Book (1894)

Aubrey Beardsley was a wide-ranging connoisseur of music and literature. He had supposed he would be a poet until his gifts took him in a different direction, and he did bequeath us this delightful poem, written in Dieppe in summer 1895.

THE THREE MUSICIANS

Along the path that skirts the wood,

        The three musicians wend their way,

Pleased with their thoughts, each other’s mood,

        Franz Himmel’s latest roundelay,

The morning’s work, a new-found theme, their breakfast and the summer day.

One’s a soprano, lightly frocked

        In cool, white muslin that just shows

Her brown silk stockings gaily clocked,

        Plump arms and elbows tipped with rose,

And frills of petticoats and things, and outlines as the warm wind blows.

Beside her a slim, gracious boy

        Hastens to mend her tresses’ fall,

And dies her favour to enjoy,

        And dies for réclame and recall

At Paris and St. Petersburg, Vienna and St. James’s Hall.

The third’s a Polish Pianist

        With big engagements everywhere,

A light heart and an iron wrist,

        And shocks and shoals of yellow hair,

And fingers that can trill on sixths and fill beginners with despair.

The three musicians stroll along

        And pluck the ears of ripened corn,

Break into odds and ends of song,

        And mock the woods with Siegfried’s horn,

And fill the air with Gluck, and fill the tweeded tourist’s soul with scorn.

The Polish genius lags behind,

        And, with some poppies in his hand,

Picks out the strings and wood and wind

        Of an imaginary band,

Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.

The charming cantatrice reclines

        And rests a moment where she sees

Her chateau’s roof that hotly shines

        Amid the dusky summer trees,

And fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smooths the frock about her knees.

The gracious boy is at her feet,

        And weighs his courage with his chance;

His fears soon melt in noon-day heat.

        The tourist gives a furious glance,

Red as his guide-book grows, moves on, and offers up a prayer for France.

*

[Franz Himmel is either a fictional composer or a very obscure one!]

Aubrey Beardsley, portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche, at Dieppe in summer 1895

Kyli matching this orange and black room, based on Beardsley's decor of 114 Cambridge St, Pimlico (just near the Tate), the house he bought with his sister Mabel. The choice of orange may have been influenced by the famous panegyric in Huysmans' À rebours.

Kyli and Francesco being artists, they took even longer to get round the exhibition than I did: Beardsley's work is a bounteous source of ideas and techniques.

Of course we all had to wear our muzzles (as Laura calls them). This display of public obedience, like the lumbering right-mindedness of the exhibition commentary, the appropriate warnings around Lysistrata, etc (segregated in a room you could opt not to pass through), all formed a rather ironic contrast with the transgressive intent of the work we had come to see.

By the time we'd finished, the exhaustion of scrutinizing tiny art was compounded by oxygen starvation. We snatched heady breaths of the fresh air of Pimlico and headed euphorically for the nearest pub.