white! Though Claude, that master of light and shadow, was a landscape painter who really interested him. Beardsley's landscape, therefore, is formal, primitive, conventional; a breath of air hardly shakes the delicate leaves of the straight poplars and willows that grow by his serpentine streams. The great cliffs, leaning down in promontories to the sea, have that unreal, architectural appearance so remarkable in the West of Cornwall, a place he had never visited. Yet his love and observation of flowers, trees, and gardens are very striking in the drawings for the "Morte d'Arthur" and the Savoy Magazine, but it is the nature of the landscape gardener, not the landscape painter. There is some truth in the half-playful, half-unfriendly criticism, that his pictures were a form of romantic map-making. Future experts, however, may be trusted to deal with absence of chiaroscuro, values, tones, and the rest. In only one of his drawings, conceived, curiously enough, in the manner of Burne-Jones (an unlikely model), is there anything approaching what is usually termed atmosphere. Eliminating, therefore, all that must not be expected from his art—mere illustration, realism, symbolism and naturalism—in what, may be asked, does his supreme achievement consist? He has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before; whether hung on the wall, reproduced in a book, or concealed in a museum, they remain among the most precious and exquisite works in the art of the nineteenth century, resembling the designs of William Blake only—in that they must be hated, misunderstood, and neglected, ere they are recognized as works of a master. With more simple materials than those employed by the fathers of black and white art, Beardsley has left memorials no less wonderful than those of the Greek vase-painters, so highly prized by artists and archæologists alike, but no less difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate and understand.

THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN

The astonishing fertility of his invention, and the amount of work he managed to produce, were inconceivable; yet there is never any sign of hurry: there is no scamping in his deft and tidy drawing. The neatness of his most elaborate designs would suggest many sketches worked over and discarded before deciding on the final form and composition. Strange to say, this was not his method. He sketched everything in pencil, at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines, afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built up, and completed on the same sheet of paper. And the same process was repeated even when he produced replicas. At first he was indifferent to process reproduction, but, owing to Mr Pennell's influence, he later on always worked with that end in view; thereby losing, some will think, his independence. But he had nothing to complain of—Mr Pennell's contention about process was never so well proved as in Beardsley's case. His experiments in colour were not always successful, two of his most delightful designs he ruined by tinting. In the posters and Studio lithograph, however, the crude colour is highly effective, and "Mademoiselle de Maupin" shewed he might have mastered water-colour had he chosen to do so. There are at present in the market many coloured forgeries of his work: these have been contrived by tracing or copying the reproductions; the colour is often used to conceal the paucity of the drawing and hesitancy of line; they are nearly always versions of well-known designs, and profess to be replicas. When there is any doubt the history and provenance of the work should be carefully studied. It is not difficult to trace the pedigree of any genuine example.

FRONTISPIECE
From "A Nocturne of Chopin"

A good deal has been made out of Beardsley's love of dark rooms and lamp light, but this has been grossly exaggerated. He had no great faith in north lights and studio paraphernalia, so necessary for those who use mediums other than his own. He would sometimes draw on a perfectly flat table, facing the light, which would fall directly on the paper, the blind slightly lowered.

The sources of Beardsley's inspiration have led critics into grievous errors. He was accused of imitating artists, some of whose work he had never seen, and of whose names he was ignorant at the time the alleged plagiarism was perpetrated—Félicien Rops may be mentioned as an instance. Beardsley contrived a style long before he came across any modern French illustration. He was innocent of either Salon, the Rosicrucians, and the Royal Academy alike; but his own influence on the Continent is said to be considerable. That he borrowed freely and from every imaginable master, old and new, is, of course, obvious. Eclectic is certainly applicable to him. But what he took he endowed with a fantastic and fascinating originality; to some image or accessory, familiar to anyone who has studied the old masters, he added the touch of modernity which brings them nearer to us, and reached refinements never thought of by the old masters. Imagination is the great pirate of art, and with Beardsley becomes a pretext for invention.

Prior to 1891 his drawings are interesting only for their precocity; they may be regarded, as one of his friends has said, more as a presage than a precedent. You marvel, on realizing the short interval which elapsed between their production and the masterpieces of his maturity. His first enthusiasm was for the work of the Italian primitives, as Mr Charles Whibley says, distinguished "for its free and flowing line." Even at a later time, when he devoted himself to eighteenth century models and ideals, his love of Andrea Mantegna never deserted him. He always kept reproductions from Mantegna at his side, and declared that he never ceased to learn secrets from them. In the "Litany of Mary Magdalen" and the two versions of "Joan of Arc" this influence is very marked. A Botticelli phase followed, and though afterwards discarded, was reverted to at a later period. The British Museum and the National Gallery were at first his only schools of art. As a matter of course, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, but chiefly through photographs and prints, succeeded in their turn; the influence of Burne-Jones lasting longer than any other.

Fairly drugged with too much observation of old and modern masters, he entered Professor Brown's art school, where he successfully got rid of much that was superfluous. The three months' training had the most salutary effect. He now took the advice attributed to Burne-Jones, and unlearned much of his acquired pedantry. The mere penmanship which disfigured some of his early work entirely disappeared. His handling became finer, his drawing less timid. The sketch of Molière, it may be interesting to note, belongs to this period of his art.