It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial minds--the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city and scholastic circles. _Under the Hill_ was published in mutilated form in the coming _Savoy_, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing--if indeed he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning--a sheer laboured stupidity, revealing nothing--a posset, a poultice of affectations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only value out of it--a real revelation of life--and it yields us nothing but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to express emotion--even though in halting fashion it does discover the real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw. [Illustration: THE FRUIT BEARERS] [Illustration: A CHRISTMAS CARD]