nd Symons consented on the condition that Beardsley
were Art Editor--and I was delighted at his condition, as I think were all
his other proposed contributors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from
the Art editorship of _The Yellow Book_ under circumstances that had made
us indignant. He had illustrated Wilde's _Salome_, his strange satiric art
had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height of the excitement
aroused by Wilde's condemnation, a popular novelist, a woman who had great
influence among the most conventional part of the British public, had
written demanding his dismissal. "She owed it to her position before the
British people," she had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of
Wilde's--they even disliked each other--he had no sexual abnormality, but
he was certainly unpopular, and the moment had come to get rid of
unpopular persons. The public at once concluded--they could hardly
conclude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram--that there was evidence
against him, and Beardsley, who was some twenty-three years old, being
embittered and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew that we must
face an infuriated press and public, but being all young we delighted in
enemies and in everything that had an heroic air.

XIII

We might have survived but for our association with Beardsley, perhaps,
but for his _Under the Hill_, a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary
genius as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the refusal of the
bookseller who controlled the railway bookstalls to display our wares. The
bookseller's manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley's,
pitched upon Blake's _Anteus setting Virgil and Dante upon the verge of
Cocytus_ as the ground of refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that
Blake was considered "a very spiritual artist" replied, "O, Mr Symons, you
must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an
audience of agnostics." However, he called Arthur Symons back from the
door to say, "If contrary to our expectations _The Savoy_ should have a
large sale, we should be very glad to see you again." As Blake's design
illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon that remarkable
saying to a principal daily newspaper. But I had mentioned Beardsley, and
I was told that the editor had made it a rule that his paper was never to
mention Beardsley's name. I said upon meeting him later, "Would you have
made the same rule in the case of Hogar