To compare Beardsley with any of his contemporaries would be unjust to them and to him. He belonged to no school, and can leave no legend, in the sense that Rossetti, Whistler, and Professor Legros have done; he proclaimed no theory; he left no counsel of perfection to those who came after him. In England and America a horde of depressing disciples aped his manner with a singular want of success; while admirable and painstaking artists modified their own convictions in the cause of unpopularity with fatal results. The sensuous charm of Beardsley's imagination and his mode of expression have only a superficial resemblance to the foreign masters of black and white. He continued no great tradition of the 'sixties; has nothing in common with the inventive and various genius of Mr Charles Ricketts; nothing of the pictorial propriety that distinguishes the work of his friend, Mr Pennell, or the homogeneous congruity of Boyd Houghton, Charles Keene, and Mr Frederic Sandys. He made use of different styles where other men employed different mediums. Unperplexed by painting or etching or lithography, he was satisfied with the simplest of all materials, attaining therewith unapproachable executive power. Those who cavil at his flawless technique ignore the specific quality of drawing characterising every great artist. The grammar of art exists only to be violated. Its rules can be learnt by anyone. Those who have no artistic perception invariably find fault with the perspective, just as those who cannot write a well-balanced sentence are always swift to detect faults in grammar or spelling. There are, of course, weaknesses in the extremities of Beardsley's figures—the hands and feet being interruptions rather than continuations of the limbs. Occasional carelessness in this respect is certainly noticeable, and the structure of his figures is throughout capricious. It was no fault in his early work; the hands and feet in the "Joan of Arc," if crude and exaggerated, being carefully modelled. While the right hand of "Salomé" in "The Dancer's Reward," grasping the head of the Baptist, is perfectly drawn, the left is feeble, when examined closely. For sheer drawing nothing can equal the nude figure in the colophon to "Salomé." The outstretched, quivering hands of Ali Baba are intentionally rendered larger than proportion allows, to render dramatic expression, not reality. For the purpose of effect he adapted proportions, realizing that perfect congruity and reality are irreconcilable. None of the figures in the dramatic "Battle of Beaux and Belles" could sit on the fallen chair in the foreground.
There is no need to disturb ourselves with hopes and fears for the estimation with which posterity will cherish his memory; art history cannot afford to overlook him; it could hardly resist the pretext of moralising, expatiating and explaining away so considerable a factor in the book illustration of the nineties. As a mere comment on the admirations of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Beardsley is invaluable; he sums up all the delightful manias, all that is best in modern appreciation—Greek vases, Italian primitives, the "Hypnerotomachia," Chinese porcelain, Japanese Kakemonos, Renaissance friezes, old French and English furniture, rare enamels, mediæval illumination, the débonnaire masters of the eighteenth century, the English pre-Raphaelites. There are differences of kind in æsthetic beauty, and for Beardsley it was the marriage of arabesque to figures and objects comely or fantastic, or in themselves ugly. For hitherto the true arabesque abhorred the graven image made of artists' hands. To future draughtsmen he will have something of the value of an old master, studied for that fastidious technique which critics believed to be a trick; and collectors of his work may live to be rallied for their taste; but the wheat and the chaff contrive to exist together through the centuries.
A passing reference should be made to the Beardsley of popular delusion. A student of Callot and Hogarth, he took suggestions from the age in which he lived and from the literature of English and French contemporaries, but with no implicit acceptance of the tenets of any groups or schools which flutter the dove-cots of Fleet Street. He stood apart, independent of the shibboleths of art and literature, with the grim and sometimes mocking attention of a spectator. He revealed rather than created a feminine type, offering no solution for the problems of Providence.
Applying the epithet "original" to an art so intensely reminiscent, so ingeniously retrospective, might seem paradoxical to those unacquainted with Beardsley's more elegant achievements. His is not the originality of Corot and Whistler, with a new interpretation of nature, another scheme of art and decoration, but rather the scholarly originality of the Carracci—a scholarship grounded on a thousand traditions and yet striking an entirely new note in art. In his imagination, his choice of motive, his love for inanimate nature, his sentiment for accessory,—rejected by many modern artists, still so necessary to the modern temper,—his curious type, which quite overshadowed that of the pre-Raphaelites, the singular technical qualities at his command, Beardsley has no predecessors, no rivals. Who has ever managed to suggest such colour in masses of black deftly composed? Reference to the text is unnecessary to learn that the hair of Herodias was purple. His style was mobile, dominating over, or subordinate to the subject, as his genius dictated. He twisted human forms, some will think, into fantastic peculiar shapes, becoming more than romantic—antinomian. He does not appeal to experience but to expression. The tranquil trivialities of what is usually understood by the illustration of books had no meaning for him; and before any attempt is made to discriminate and interpret the spirit, the poetical sequence, the literary inspiration which undoubtedly existed throughout his work, side by side with technical experiments, his exemption from the parallels of criticism must be remembered duly.