his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. "I make a blot
upon the paper," he said to me; "And I begin to shove the ink about and
something comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage
against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective,
concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with
something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge but
for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin
in act, while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion of his pride,
and instead of the Saint's humility, he had come to see the images of the
mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect.

Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself,
exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something
impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire,
suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as
completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the
mind between sleeping and waking.

But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of
Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another
name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in
England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those
privately published drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have
destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women
are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are
poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more
understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896, I was in
despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty
that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to
mystery. I said to him once, "You have never done anything to equal your
Salome with the head of John the Baptist." I think, that for the moment he
was sincere when he replied, "Yes, yes; but beauty is so difficult." It
was for the moment only, for as the popular rage increased and his own
disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or
created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful
logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or
even satisfied passion.

The distinction between the Image, between