etters (written by Beardsley to an
unnamed friend) published some years ago, Mr. Arthur Symons says: 'Here,
too, we are in the presence of the real thing.' I venture to doubt this.
I do not doubt Beardsley's sincerity in the religion he embraced, but his
expression of it in the letters. At least, I hope it was insincere. The
letters left on some of us a disagreeable impression, at least of the
recipient. You wonder if this pietistic friend received a copy of the
_Lysistrata_ along with the eulogy of St. Alfonso Liguori and Aphra Behn.
A fescennine temperament is too often allied with religiosity. It
certainly was in Beardsley's case, but I think the other and stronger
side of his character should, in justice to his genius, be insisted upon,
as Mr. Arthur Symons insisted upon it. If we knew that the ill-advised
and unnamed friend was the author of certain pseudo-scientific and
pornographic works issued in Paris, we should be better able to gauge the
unimportance of these letters. Far more interesting would have been
those written to Mr. Joseph Pennell, one of the saner influences; or
those to Aubrey Beardsley's mother and sister.

'It was at Arques,' says Mr. Arthur Symons . . . 'that I had the only
serious, almost solemn conversation I ever had with Beardsley.' You can
scarcely believe that any of the conversations between the two were other
than serious and solemn, because he approaches Beardsley as he would John
Bunyan or Aquinas. Art, literature and life, are all to this engaging
writer a scholiast's pilgrim's progress. Beside him, Walter Pater, from
whom he derives, seems almost flippant--and to have dallied too long in
the streets of Vanity Fair.

(1906.)

ENGLISH AESTHETICS.

The law reports in newspapers contain perhaps the only real history of
England that has any relation to truth. Here, too, may be found
indications of current thought, more pregnant than the observations of
historians. They still afford material for the future short or longer
history of the English people by the John Richard Greens of posterity.
This was brought home to me by perusing two cases reported in the
_Morning Post_, that of Mrs. Rita Marsh and the disputed will of Miss
Browne. I yield to no one in my ignorance of English law, but I have
seldom read judgments which seemed so conspicuously unfair, so
characteristic of the precise minimum of aesthetic perception in the
English people.

The hostelries of Great