Throughout 1896 the general tendency his style remains uniform, though without sameness. He adapted his technique to the requirements of his subject. Mindful of the essential, rejecting the needless, he always realized his genius and its limitations. From the infinite variety of the Savoy Magazine it is difficult to choose any of particular importance: for his elaborate manner, the first plate to "_Under the Hill_"; and in a simpler style, the fascinating illustration to his own poem, "_The Barber_"; "_Ave Atque Vale_" and "_The Death of Pierrot_" have, besides, a human interest over and above any artistic quality they possess. For the "Volpone" drawings Beardsley again developed his style, and seeking for new effects, reverted to pure pencil work. The ornate, delicate initial letters, all he lived to finish, must be seen in the originals before their sumptuous qualities, their solemn melancholy dignity, their dexterous handling, can be appreciated. The use of a camel's-hair brush for the illustrations to "_Mademoiselle de Maupin_," one of his last works, should be noted, as he so rarely used one. Beardsley's invention never failed him, so that it is almost impossible to take a single drawing, or set of drawings, as typical of his art. Each design is rather a type of his own intellectual mood.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF BEAUX AND BELLES _From "The Rape of the Lock"_]
If the history of grotesque remains to be written, it is already illustrated by his art. A subject little understood, it belongs to the dim ways of criticism. There is no canon or school, and the artist is allowed to be wilful, untrammelled by rule or precedent. True grotesque is not the art either of primitives or decadents, but that of skilled and accomplished workmen who have reached the zenith of a peculiar convention, however confined and limited that convention may be. Byzantine art, one of our links with the East, should some day furnish us with a key to a mystery which is now obscured by symbolists and students of serpent worship. The Greeks, with their supreme sanity and unrivalled plastic sense, afford us no real examples, though their archaic art is often pressed into the category. Beardsley, who received recognition for this side of his genius, emphasized the grotesque to an extent that precluded any popularity among people who care only for the trivial and "pretty." In him it was allied to a mordant humour, a certain fescennine abstraction which sometimes offends: this, however, does not excuse the use of the word "eccentric," more misapplied than any word in the English language, except perhaps "grotesque" and "picturesque." All great art is eccentric to the conservative multitude. The decoration on the Parthenon was so eccentric that Pheidias was put in prison. The works of Whistler and Burne-Jones, once derided as eccentric, are now accepted as the commencement of great traditions. All future art will be dubbed eccentric, trampled on, and despised; even as the first tulip that blossomed in England was rooted out and burnt for a worthless weed by the conscientious Scotch gardener.