Sporion was a tall, depraved young man, with a slight stoop, a troubled walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long Japanese eyes, and a great gilt toupet.
We seem to gaze with the Abbé Fanfreluche at the prints on his bedroom wall:
Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque and domino, smiling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and huge, bird-like women mingling in some rococo room.
One rubs one’s eyes. Are these not the drawings Franz von Bayros of Vienna realised later? But Beardsley’s output of both prose and verse is actually so limited that one cannot compare his double art work to that of an artist like Rossetti. When all is said and done, his great literary work is the unfinished ‘fairy’ tale of _Under the Hill_. In its complete form it belongs to the class of works like Casanova’s _Mémoires_, the _Reigen_ of Schnitzler, the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, and some of the _Thousand and One Nights_. It is an enchanting book in the same way as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ or _Le Roi Pausole_ are enchanting books. In its rococo style it surpasses the best rhythms of Wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of beautiful things, while Aubrey Beardsley suggests more than he says in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties. Indeed, the purple patches of Beardsley are as rich in fine phrases as any paragraphs of the period--as _faisandée_ as any French writer has written. Elizabethan euphuists, Restoration conceit-makers, later Latins with all the rich byzantium _floræ_ of brains like Apuleius, can make as finely-sounding phrases, but I doubt whether they can pack away in them as rich a pictorial glamour as many of the writers of the nineties, and Beardsley amongst them, achieved. We have Helen in ‘a flutter of frilled things’ at ‘taper-time’ before her mirror displaying her neck and shoulders ‘so wonderfully drawn,’ and her ‘little malicious breasts ... full of the irritation of loveliness that can never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.’ Whole scenes of the book are unrolled before us like priceless tapestries. The ‘_ombre_ gateway of the mysterious hill’ stands before us: