‘I would rather be an Academician than an artist,’ said Aubrey Beardsley to me one day.  ’It takes thirty-nine men to make an Academician, and only one to make an artist.’  In that sneer lay all his weakness and his strength.  Grave friends (in those days it was the fashion) talked to him of ‘Dame Nature.’ ‘Damn Nature!’ retorted Aubrey Beardsley, and pulled down the blinds and worked by gaslight on the finest days.  But he was a real Englishman, who from his glass-house peppered the English public.  No Latin could have contrived his arabesque.  The grotesques of Jerome Bosch are positively pleasant company beside many of Beardsley’s inventions.  Even in his odd little landscapes, with their twisted promontories sloping seaward, he suggested mocking laughter; and the flowers of ’Under the Hill’ are cackling in the grass.

An essay, which Mr. Arthur Symons published in 1897, has always been recognised as far the most sympathetic and introspective account of this strange artist’s work.  It has been reissued, with additional illustrations, by Messrs. Dent.  Those who welcome it as one of the most inspiring criticisms from an always inspired critic, will regret that eight of the illustrations belong to the worst period of Beardsley’s art.  Kelmscott dyspepsia following on a surfeit of Burne-Jones, belongs to the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence.  Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires them any more than I do; he never mentions them in his text.  ‘Le Debris d’un Poete,’ the ‘Coiffing,’ ‘Chopin’s Third Ballad,’ and those for Salome would have sufficed.  With these omissions the monograph might have been smaller; but it would have been more truly representative of Beardsley’s genius and Mr. Arthur Symons’s taste.

At one time or another every one has been brilliant about Beardsley.  ‘Born Puck, he died Pierrot,’ said Mr. MacColl in one of the superb phrases with which he gibbets into posterity an art or an artist he rather dislikes.  ‘The Fra Angelico of Satanism,’ wrote Mr. Roger Fry of an exhibition of the drawings.  There seems hardly anything left even for Mr. Arthur Symons to write.  Long anterior to these particular fireworks, however, his criticism is just as fresh as it was twelve years ago.  I believe it will always remain the terminal essay.

The preface has been revised, and I could have wished for some further revision.  Why is the name of Leonard Smithers—­here simply called a publisher—­omitted, when the other Capulets and Montagus are faithfully recorded?  When no one would publish Beardsley’s work, Smithers stepped into the breach.  I do not know that the Savoy exactly healed the breach between Beardsley and the public, but it gave the artist another opportunity; and Mr. Arthur Symons an occasion for song.  Leonard Smithers, too, was the most delightful