BEARDSLEY AND ARTHUR SYMONS.—“Unbounded” admiration is precisely what I cannot feel for Aubrey Beardsley’s work, even “within its own sphere.” I ought to say, perhaps, “because of its sphere.” Pure æsthetic is a matter for contemplation only, and we should be prepared upon occasion to suspend every other kind of judgment. Or, would it not be true to say that the purely æsthetic does itself suspend in the beholder every other form of judgment or reaction—such as the moral, the intellectual, and the practical? A great tragedy, for instance, is a kind of focus of the whole nature of man; every faculty is engaged in it, and all are lifted up and transfigured into the pure æsthetic of contemplation. But one is not aware, in that case, of moral or other reservations; one has not to apologise for the experience by pretending that the “essentially repulsive and diabolic decadence” contained in the tragedy is merely an expression of the age. Beardsley is only “something of a genius” precisely because he failed to transfigure the moral and other reactions of the spectator of his work. He did not occupy the _whole_ of one’s mind. All the while that one’s æsthetic sense was being led captive by his art, several other of one’s senses were in rebellion. His command (his genius, in short) was not “absolute,” but only a quite limited monarchy. This is not to deny that he was an artist; it is to deny only that he was one of the greatest of artists. Other artists owe him a greater debt than the world at large. He was a great art-master, but not a master of art. The doctrine of Mr. Arthur Symons is dangerous. Juggling with the terms good and evil is always dangerous, since in a prestidigital exhibition of them, one can so easily be made to look like the other. _Demon est Deus inversus._ The paradoxical truth about the matter, however, is that evil is good only so long as it is regarded as evil. The moment it is thought of as good it is nothing but evil. Mr. Arthur Symons has confused in his mind the problem of good and evil with the quite alien problem of quantity of energy.