under
impressionism. Aubrey Beardsley did not shirk a difficulty by leaving
lines to the imagination of critics, who might enlarge on the reticence
of his medium. Art cant and studio jargon do not explain his work. It
is really only the presence or absence of beauty in his drawing, and
his wonderful powers of technique which need trouble his admirers or
detractors. Nor are we confronted with any conjecture as to what Aubrey
Beardsley might have done--he has left a series of achievements. While
his early death caused deep sorrow among his personal friends, there
need be no sorrow for an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." Old age
is no more a necessary complement to the realization of genius than
premature death. Within six years, after passing through all the
imitative stages of probation, he produced masterpieces he might have
repeated but never surpassed. His style would have changed. He was
too receptive and too restless to acquiesce in a single convention.

[Illustration: ATALANTA]

This is hardly the place to dwell on the great strides which black and
white art made in the nineteenth century. It has been called the most
modern of the arts; for the most finished drawings of the old masters
were done with a view to serve as studies or designs to be transferred
to canvas, metal, and wood, not for frames at an expensive dealer's.
Vittore Pisano and Gentile Bellini would hardly have dared to mount
their delightful studies and offer them as pictures to the critics
and patrons of their day. At all events it were safer to say, that
appreciation of a drawing for itself, without relation to the book or
page it was intended to adorn or destroy, is comparatively modern. It is
necessary to keep this in mind, because the suitability of Beardsley's
work to the books he embellished was often accidental. His designs
must be judged independently, as they were conceived, without any view
of interpreting or even illustrating a particular author. He was too
subjective to be a mere illustrator. Profoundly interested in literature
for the purposes of his art, he only extracted from it whatever was
suggestive as pattern; he never professed to interpret for dull people,
unable to understand what they read, any more than the mediaeval
illuminator and carver of grotesques attempted to explain the mysteries
of the Christian faith on the borders of missals and breviaries or
the miserere seats of the choir. His art was, of course, intensely
_l