had begun to parade erotic images before his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. "I make a blot upon the paper" he said to me, "And I begin to shove the ink about and something comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective, concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge, but for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin in act, while the preparation of the Saint is by the like exhaustion of his pride, and instead of the Saint's humility, he had come to see the images of the mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect.
Does not all art come, when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, exhausts personal emotion through action and desire so completely that something impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the mind between sleeping and waking. But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those privately published drawings which he tried upon his death-bed to have destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896 I was in despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the impersonal beauty that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to mystery. I said to him once, "You have never done anything to equal your Salome with the head of John the Baptist." I think that he was sincere, though but for the moment; when he replied "Yes, Yes, but beauty is so difficult" it was for the moment, for as the popular rage increased and his own disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested quiet or even the quiet satisfied passion.
The distinction between the image, between the apparition as it
