ison. The works of Whistler and Burne-Jones, once derided as
eccentric, are now accepted as the commencement of great traditions.
All future art will be dubbed eccentric, trampled on, and despised;
even as the first tulip that blossomed in England was rooted out
and burnt for a worthless weed by the conscientious Scotch gardener.

[Illustration: A DESIGN FROM "LYSISTRATA"]

To compare Beardsley with any of his contemporaries would be unjust to
them and to him. He belonged to no school, and can leave no legend, in
the sense that Rossetti, Whistler, and Professor Legros have done; he
proclaimed no theory; he left no counsel of perfection to those who
came after him. In England and America a horde of depressing disciples
aped his manner with a singular want of success; while admirable and
painstaking artists modified their own convictions in the cause of
unpopularity with fatal results. The sensuous charm of Beardsley's
imagination and his mode of expression have only a superficial
resemblance to the foreign masters of black and white. He continued
no great tradition of the 'sixties; has nothing in common with the
inventive and various genius of Mr Charles Ricketts; nothing of the
pictorial propriety that distinguishes the work of his friend, Mr
Pennell, or the homogeneous congruity of Boyd Houghton, Charles Keene,
and Mr Frederic Sandys. He made use of different styles where other
men employed different mediums. Unperplexed by painting or etching
or lithography, he was satisfied with the simplest of all materials,
attaining therewith unapproachable executive power. Those who cavil
at his flawless technique ignore the specific quality of drawing
characterising every great artist. The grammar of art exists only to be
violated. Its rules can be learnt by anyone. Those who have no artistic
perception invariably find fault with the perspective, just as those
who cannot write a well-balanced sentence are always swift to detect
faults in grammar or spelling. There are, of course, weaknesses in
the extremities of Beardsley's figures--the hands and feet being
interruptions rather than continuations of the limbs. Occasional
carelessness in this respect is certainly noticeable, and the structure
of his figures is throughout capricious. It was no fault in his early
work; the hands and feet in the "_Joan of Arc_," if crude and
exaggerated, being carefully modelled. While the right hand of "Salome"
in "_The Dancer's Reward_," grasping