Artists are blamed for what they have not tried to do; or for the absence of qualities distinguishing the work of an entirely different order of intellect; for their indifference to the observations of _others_. As who should ask from Reynolds a faithful reproduction of textile fabrics; and from Carlo Crivelli the natural phenomena of nature we expect from Turner and Constable? For nature as it should be, in the works of Corot and Turner; for nature made easy, in modern English landscape; for nature without tears, in the impressionist fashion, or as popularly viewed through the camera, Aubrey Beardsley had no feeling. He was frankly indifferent to picturesque peasants, the beauties of "lovely spots," either in England or France. A devout Catholic, the ringing of the Angelus did not lure him to present fields of mangel-wurzels in an evening haze. The treatment of nature in the larger and truer sense of the word had little attraction for him; he never tried, therefore, to represent air, atmosphere, and light, as many clever modern artists have done in black and white! Though Claude, that master of light and shadow, was a landscape painter who really interested him. Beardsley's landscape, therefore, is formal, primitive, conventional; a breath of air hardly shakes the delicate leaves of the straight poplars and willows that grow by his serpentine streams. The great cliffs, leaning down in promontories to the sea, have that unreal, architectural appearance so remarkable in the West of Cornwall, a place he had never visited. Yet his love and observation of flowers, trees, and gardens are very striking in the drawings for the "Morte d'Arthur" and the Savoy Magazine, but it is the nature of the landscape gardener, not the landscape painter. There is some truth in the half-playful, half-unfriendly criticism, that his pictures were a form of romantic map-making. Future experts, however, may be trusted to deal with absence of chiaroscuro, values, tones, and the rest. In only one of his drawings, conceived, curiously enough, in the manner of Burne-Jones (an unlikely model), is there anything approaching what is usually termed atmosphere. Eliminating, therefore, all that must not be expected from his art--mere illustration, realism, symbolism and naturalism--in what, may be asked, does his supreme achievement consist? He has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before; whether hung on the wall, reproduced in a book, or concealed in a museum, they remain among the most precious and exquisite works in the art of the nineteenth century, resembling the designs of William Blake only--in that they must be hated, misunderstood, and neglected, ere they are recognized as works of a master. With more simple materials than those employed by the fathers of black and white art, Beardsley has left memorials no less wonderful than those of the Greek vase-painters, so highly prized by artists and archæologists alike, but no less difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate and understand.