There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art from his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual upheaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been drawing the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, or indeed steeping in that novel at all, or drawing the _Arbuscula_. For months he has been led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church; yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on _Under the Hill!_ and drawn the designs for _Lysistrata_ and the _Juvenal!_ not five months since he has drawn his _Bookplate!_ And by the grim irony of circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that there appeared in _The Idler_ his confession: “To my mind there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have the sun shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March _Idler_ by Lawrence, one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the framework and then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in the details, was as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend John Gray, written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just departing. That interview will therefore remain always as an important evidence by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It is true that he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having despatched it, was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I have not said too many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute to the complexity of the human soul that the correspondence with the poet-priest John Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are hidden from us, was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to Rome, he was lending him books and interesting him in books, side by side with lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their fellowship with the saints. Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a week after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, staying a day or two at the Windsor Hotel--a happy halt for Beardsley as his friend John Gray was there to meet him--and crossed to France, where on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel Voltaire, quai Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted mother. Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. He loved to be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in May he was reading _The Hundred and One Nights_ for the first time, and inspired by it, drew his famous _Cover for Ali Baba_, a masterpiece of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure resplendent with gems--as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sumptuous design.”