Oscar used to say that he invented Aubrey Beardsley; but the truth is, it was Mr. Robert Ross who first introduced Aubrey to Oscar and persuaded him to commission the “Salome” drawings which gave the English edition its singular value.  Strange to say, Oscar always hated the illustrations and would not have the book in his house.  His dislike even extended to the artist, and as Aubrey Beardsley was of easy and agreeable intercourse, the mutual repulsion deserves a word of explanation.

Aubrey Beardsley’s genius had taken London by storm.  At seventeen or eighteen this auburn-haired, blue-eyed, fragile looking youth had reached maturity with his astounding talent, a talent which would have given him position and wealth in any other country.  In perfection of line his drawings were superior to anything we possess.  But the curious thing about the boy was that he expressed the passions of pride and lust and cruelty more intensely even than Rops, more spontaneously than anyone who ever held pencil.  Beardsley’s precocity was simply marvellous.  He seemed to have an intuitive understanding not only of his own art but of every art and craft, and it was some time before one realised that he attained this miraculous virtuosity by an absolute disdain for every other form of human endeavour.  He knew nothing of the great general or millionaire or man of science, and he cared as little for them as for fishermen or ’bus-drivers.  The current of his talent ran narrow between stone banks, so to speak; it was the bold assertion of it that interested Oscar.

One phase of Beardsley’s extraordinary development may be recorded here.  When I first met him his letters, and even his talk sometimes, were curiously youthful and immature, lacking altogether the personal note of his drawings.  As soon as this was noticed he took the bull by the horns and pretended that his style in writing was out of date; he wished us to believe that he hesitated to shock us with his “archaic sympathies.”  Of course we laughed and challenged him to reveal himself.  Shortly afterwards I got an article from him written with curious felicity of phrase, in modish polite eighteenth-century English.  He had reached personal expression in a new medium in a month or so, and apparently without effort.  It was Beardsley’s writing that first won Oscar to recognition of his talent, and for a while he seemed vaguely interested in what he called his “orchid-like personality.”

They were both at lunch one day when Oscar declared that he could drink nothing but absinthe when Beardsley was present.

“Absinthe,” he said, “is to all other drinks what Aubrey’s drawings are to other pictures:  it stands alone:  it is like nothing else:  it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring:  it has about it the seduction of strange sins.  It is stronger than any other spirit, and brings out the sub-conscious self in man.  It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one’s nerves and is cruel.