ictims. What makes
the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels,
that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own
methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the
grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that
we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist
to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly
young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the
curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right
of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the
fun of the youth destined to do and to triumph. Already, in his later
work, are signs of the passing of the first youthful stage of his art.
It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the
grinning little monstrosities in some of the illustrations for the _Rape
of the Lock_; the few drawings for his _Volpone_ have a dignity he had
not hitherto achieved.

Nobody can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun
got no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to
shield their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a
keen sense of humour that helped him to snatch all the joy there is
in the old, time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of
established respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend,
has said of him, "he possessed what is _called_ an artificial
manner"; that is, his manner was called affected, as was his art,
because it wasn't exactly like everybody else's. I have never yet
come across the genius whose manner was exactly like everybody
else's, and shyness, self-consciousness, counted for something in
his, at least at the start. He had only to exaggerate this manner,
or mannerism, to set London talking. It was the easier because
rumours quickly began to go about of the darkened room in which he
worked, of his turning night into day and day into night like
Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange habit or taste,
until people began to see all sorts of things in him that weren't
there, just as they read all sorts of things into his drawings that
he never put into them, always seeking what they were determined to
find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his
knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art,
for, if he had not been an artist, he mo