might have been organized in order to view him at some popular
cafe. 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 mediaeval 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
aesthetic 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 _epater 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 _eblouissement_ 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