As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great world of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit to Burne-Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Æsthetic conventions of the mediæval academism of Burne-Jones to which his whole previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once he became intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so far shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christmas cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as indeed was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, now that he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise whereon to found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 18th century loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had become the keynote of the Æsthetic Movement under Morris and Burne-Jones, but his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of the great Teutonic sagas, Tristan and Tannhäuser and the Gotterdammerung saw him back at his beloved operas and music again. Frederick Evans, who was as much a music enthusiast as literary and artistic in taste, saw much of the young fellow in his shop in Cheapside this year. He was striving hard to master the craftsmanship of artistic utterance. Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was the Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan conquered London as she had conquered France--if rather a pallid ghost of Japan. The London house became an abomination of desolation, “faked” with Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. There is nothing more alien to an English room than Eastern decorations, no matter how beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers sent out the word and it was so. It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of pure line by the Japs--he saw prints in shops and they interested him, but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spacing, and use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a sort of bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types with English types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard of perspective and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery which appealed to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting in the grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him.