Under the Hill, and Other Essays in Prose and Verse

AUBREY BEARDSLEY AT MENTONE, IN THE ROOM IN WHICH HE DIED.
To those who are acquainted with Aubrey Beardsley's essays into the domain of literature no apology for this re-publication is needed—indeed Beardsley's most intimate friends have averred that if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of art.
Admirers frequently have expressed a wish to see the literary remains of Beardsley. This volume, in which are gathered together various fragments and personalia, will, I trust, meet the case.
A few of my random recollections of Beardsley's association with The Yellow Book perhaps will not be amiss.
Until the publication of the first volume of The Yellow Book in 1894, Beardsley was practically unknown, his drawings for Le Morte D'Arthur and his marvellous designs illustrating Salomé constituting his artistic record. It was at this time, then, that one morning he, with Mr. Henry Harland and myself, during half an hour's chat over our cigarettes at the Hogarth Club, founded the much discussed Yellow Book. Beardsley became Art Editor, whilst Mr. Harland accepted the post of Literary Editor.
Many will remember the sensation caused by the appearance of the first volume. Perhaps the Westminster Gazette and the Times were the most severe in their strictures, at any rate on the Art in general and on Beardsley in particular.
The Westminster Gazette said: Mr. Aubrey Beardsley achieves excesses hitherto undreamt of. He seems to have conceived the disagreeable idea of taking certain arrangements of lines invented by the Japanese, and specially suited to blithe and pleasant peaks of decoration, and applying them to the most morbid of grotesque. His offence is the less to be condoned because he has undoubted skill as a line draughtsman and has shown himself capable of refined and delicate work. But as regards certain of his inventions in this number, the thing called 'The Sentimental Education,' and that other thing to which the name of Mrs. Patrick Campbell has somehow become attached, we do not know that anything would meet the case except a short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal. The Times said: 'The Yellow Book' is, we suppose, destined to be the organ of the New Literature and the New Art. If the New Art is represented by the cover of this wonderful volume, it is scarcely calculated to attract by its intrinsic beauty or merit; possibly, however, it may be intended to attract by its very repulsiveness and insolence, and in that case it is not unlikely to be successful. Its note appears to be a combination of English rowdyism with French lubricity.... Sir Frederick Leighton, who contributes two graceful studies, finds himself cheek by jowl with such advanced and riotous representatives of the New Art as Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and Mr. Walter Sickert. On the whole the New Art and the New Literature appear to us to compare in this singular volume far from favourably with the old.