iterary_, to use the word hated of modern critics, but his expression
of it was the legitimate literature of the artist, not the art peculiar
to literature. He did not attempt, or certainly never succeeded in
giving, pictorial revision to a work of literature in the sense that
Blake has done for the book of Job, and Botticelli for the "Divine
Comedy." While hardly satisfying those for whom any work of art guilty
of "subject" becomes worthless, this immunity from the conventions of
the illustrator will secure for Beardsley a larger share of esteem among
artists pure and simple than has ever fallen to William Blake, who
appeals more to men of letters than to the artist or virtuoso. The
uncritical profess to find many terrible meanings in Aubrey Beardsley's
drawings; and he will probably never be freed from the charge of
symbolism. However morbid the sentiment in some of his work, and often
there was a _macabre_, an unholy insistence on the less beautiful side
of human things, the cabala of the symbolists was a sealed book to
him. Such things were entirely foreign to his lucid and vigorous
intelligence. There is hardly a drawing of his that does not explain
itself; the commentator will search in vain for any hieroglyphic or
symbolic intention. The hieratic archaism of his early work misled many
people, for whom pre-Raphaelitism means presupposition. Of mysticism,
that stumbling-block, he had none at all. "_The Initiation of a Neophyte
into the Black Art_" would seem to contradict such a statement. The
fantasy and grotesqueness of that lurid and haunting composition have
nothing in common with the symbolism of black magic, the ritual of
freemasonry, or all the fascinating magic to be found in the works of
Eliphaz Levi. The sumptuous accessories in which he revelled had no
other than a decorative intention, giving sometimes balance to a
drawing, or conveying a literary suggestion necessary for its
interpretation.

Artists are blamed for what they have not tried to do; or for the
absence of qualities distinguishing the work of an entirely different
order of intellect; for their indifference to the observations of
_others_. As who should ask from Reynolds a faithful reproduction of
textile fabrics; and from Carlo Crivelli the natural phenomena of nature
we expect from Turner and Constable? For nature as it should be, in
the works of Corot and Turner; for nature made easy, in modern English
landscape; for nature without tears,