At one time it was customary for critics to plead that he was only a supreme imitator of the Japanese or somebody; but, in reality, as has been pointed out by Robert Ross in his admirable essays on his work, he was as intensely original as an illustrator as Sandro Botticelli was in his designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy, or William Blake for the drama of Job. None of them interpreted authors for dull people who could not understand what they read. Perhaps the very best way to appreciate his work of this kind is often to take it away from the text, and say this is the way Beardsley saw _The Rape of the Lock_. As for all the supposed influences he is pretended to have laboured under, it can be at once said, he was too restless a personality to accept merely one influence at a time. If he took from anywhere, he took from everywhere, and the result is a great and original draughtsman, the music of whose line has been the theme of many artists. With little stippled lines in the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us the colour of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong; but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what knowledge went to their composition! ‘He sketched everything in pencil, at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines, afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built up, and completed on the same sheet of paper.’[4] ‘But Beardsley’s subtlety does not lie only in his technique, but also in what he expresses thereby. Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest; and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment of the artist’s unique personality.’[5] [4] _Aubrey Beardsley_, by Robert Ross, pp. 38-39. 1909.