this troubled introspective art, especially at the present day. There is hardly room for an inverted Watts. At the same time, even those who from age and training cannot take a sentimental interest in faded rose-leaves, whose perfume is a little overpowering, may care to explore an interesting byway of art. For poor Solomon there was no place in life. Casting reality aside, he stepped back into the riotous pages of Petronius. Perhaps on the Paris boulevards, with Verlaine and Bibi la Purée, he might have enjoyed a distinct artistic individuality. Expeditions conducted by Mr. Arthur Symons might have been organized in order to view him at some popular café. Mr. George Moore might have written about him. But in respectable London he was quite impossible. In the temple of Art, which is less Calvinistic than artists would have us suppose, he will always have his niche. To the future English Vasari he will be a real gold-mine.

(1905.)

AUBREY BEARDSLEY.

Middle-aged, middle-class people, with a predilection for mediæval art, still believe that subject is an important factor in a picture or drawing. I am one of the number. The subject need not be literary or historical. After you have discussed in the latest studio jargon its carpentry, valued the tones and toned the values, motive or theme must affect your appreciation of a picture, your desire, or the contrary, to possess it. That the artist is able to endow the unattractive, and woo you to surrender, I admit. Unless, however, you are a pro-Boer in art matters, and hold that Rembrandt and the Boer school (the greatest technicians who ever lived) are finer artists than Titian, you will find yourself preferring Gainsborough to Degas, and the unskilful Whistler to the more accomplished Edouard Manet. Long ago French critics invented an æsthetic formula to conceal that poverty of imagination

which sometimes stares from their perfectly executed pictures, and this was eagerly accepted by certain Englishmen, both painters and writers. Yet, when an artist frankly deals with forbidden subjects, the canons regular of English art begin to thunder; the critics forget their French accent; the old Robert Adam, which is in all of us, asserts himself; we fly for the fig-leaves.

I am led to these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. ‘A wish to épater le bourgeois,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons, ‘is a natural one.’ I do not think so; at least, in an artist. Now much of Beardsley’s work shows the éblouissement of the burgess on arriving at Montmartre for the first time—a weakness he shared with some of his contemporaries. This must be conceded in praising a great artist for a line which he never drew, after you have taken the immortal Zero’s advice and divested yourself of the scruples.

‘I would rather be an Academician than an artist,’ said Aubrey Beardsley to me one day. ‘It takes thirty-nine men to make an Academician, and only one to make an artist.’ In that sneer lay all his weakness and his strength. Grave friends (in those days it was the fashion) talked to him of ‘Dame Nature.’ ‘Damn Nature!’ retorted Aubrey Beardsley, and pulled down the blinds and worked by gaslight on the finest days. But he was a real Englishman, who from his glass-house peppered the English public. No Latin could have contrived his arabesque. The grotesques of Jerome Bosch are positively pleasant company beside many of Beardsley’s inventions. Even in his odd little landscapes, with their twisted promontories sloping seaward, he suggested mocking laughter; and the flowers of ‘Under the Hill’ are cackling in the grass.

An essay, which Mr. Arthur Symons published in 1897, has always been recognised as far the most sympathetic and introspective account of this strange artist’s work. It has been reissued, with additional illustrations, by Messrs. Dent. Those who welcome it as one of the most inspiring criticisms from an always

inspired critic, will regret that eight of the illustrations belong to the worst period of Beardsley’s art. Kelmscott dyspepsia following on a surfeit of Burne-Jones, belongs to the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence. Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires them any more than I do; he never mentions them in his text. ‘Le Débris d’un Poète,’ the ‘Coiffing,’ ‘Chopin’s Third Ballad,’ and those for Salome would have sufficed. With these omissions the monograph might have been smaller; but it would have been more truly representative of Beardsley’s genius and Mr. Arthur Symons’s taste.

At one time or another every one has been brilliant about Beardsley. ‘Born Puck, he died Pierrot,’ said Mr. MacColl in one of the superb phrases with which he gibbets into posterity an art or an artist he rather dislikes. ‘The Fra Angelico of Satanism,’ wrote Mr. Roger Fry of an exhibition of the drawings. There seems hardly anything left even for Mr. Arthur Symons to write. Long