evision. Why is the name of Leonard Smithers--here simply called _a_
publisher--omitted, when the other Capulets and Montagus are faithfully
recorded? When no one would publish Beardsley's work, Smithers stepped
into the breach. I do not know that the _Savoy_ exactly healed the
breach between Beardsley and the public, but it gave the artist another
opportunity; and Mr. Arthur Symons an occasion for song. Leonard
Smithers, too, was the most delightful and irresponsible publisher I ever
knew. Who remembers without a kindly feeling the little shop in the
Royal Arcade with its tempting shelves; its limited editions of _5000_
copies; the shy, infrequent purchaser; the upstairs room where the roar
of respectable Bond Street came faintly through the tightly-closed
windows; the genial proprietor? In the closing years of the nineteenth
century his silhouette reels (my metaphor is drawn from a Terpsichorean
and Caledonian exercise) across an artistic horizon of which the _Savoy_
was the afterglow. Again, why is Mr. Arthur Symons so precise about
forgetting the date of Beardsley's expulsion from the _Yellow Book_? It
was in April 1895, April 10th. A number of poets and writers blackmailed
Mr. Lane by threatening to withdraw their own publications unless the
Beardsley Body was severed from the Bodley Head. I am glad to have this
opportunity, not only of paying a tribute to the courage of my late
friend Smithers, but of defending my other good friend, Mr. John Lane,
from the absurd criticism of which he was too long the victim. He could
hardly be expected to wreck a valuable business in the cause of unpopular
art. Quite wrongly Beardsley's designs had come to be regarded as the
pictorial and sympathetic expression of a decadent tendency in English
literature. But if there was any relation thereto, it was that of
Juvenal towards Roman Society. Never was mordant satire more evident. If
Beardsley is carried away in spite of himself by the superb invention of
_Salome_, he never forgets his hatred of its author. It is
characteristic that he hammered beauty from the gold he would have
battered into caricature. _Salome_ has survived other criticism and
other caricature. And Mr. Lane once informed an American interviewer
that since that April Fool's Day poetry has ceased to sell altogether.
The bards unconsciously committed suicide; and the _Yellow Book_ perished
in the odour of sanctity.

Recommending the perusal of some l