Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the _Salome_, as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New Year of 1894, the _Salome_ off his hands, that _The Yellow Book_ was planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the _Salome_ into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of relief as he had aforetime flung aside the _Morte d’Arthur_ Kelmscott mediævalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he saw it--through books--and he created a decorative craftsmanship wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the Greeks had done--employing line and mass like treble and bass to each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm line and solid blacks in the _Morte d’Arthur_ now served him to splendid purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table. Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his subjects in the half-world--he took the blatant side of “life” as it was lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance” amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emotional experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else--but we are coming to that.