We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the lay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced indefinitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling as _The Neophyte_. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage? Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his poverty thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts--or rather contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it possible for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic developments, to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless incongruity? Could the _Salome_ drawings for instance have appeared in the _Morte d’Arthur_? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and genius and his high achievement would have suffered--and Death was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go. Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the commercial contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings for a book, would he deserve censure?