when he was one of the most talked about men
in London. He knew that always by his work alone he would be judged at
Buckingham Street, and to J. he brought his drawings and his books for
criticism. He brought his schemes as well, just as he brought the youth
not only of years but of temperament to our Thursday nights. He came
almost as regularly as Henley and Henley's Young Men, adding his young
voice to the uproar of discussion, as full of life as if he too, like
Harland, grudged a minute of the years he knew for him were counted. In
no other house where it was my pleasure to meet him did he seem to me to
show to such advantage. In his own home I thought him overburdened by
the scheme of decoration he had planned for it. In many houses to which
he was asked he was amiable enough to assume the pose expected of him.
The lion-hunters hoped that Beardsley would be like his drawings.
Strange, decadent, morbid, bizarre, weird, were adjectives bestowed upon
them, and he played up to the adjectives for the edification or
mystification of the people who invented them and for his own infinite
amusement. But with us he did not have to play up to anything and could
be just the simple, natural youth he was--as simple and natural as I
have always found the really great, more interested in his work than
most young men, and keener for success.

I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him
by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his
affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?
They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted
dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a
suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why
the mediaeval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and
incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity
upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great
churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest
thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out
upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to
record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at
the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and
its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the
humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its v