After he vacated _The Yellow Book_ art editorship, and _The Savoy_ had been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher. There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had a courage of his own--a courage great enough to issue _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. It was Smithers who issued _The Savoy_, the two books of _Fifty Drawings_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, and among others the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than _A Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1897), and _A Second Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept into it far too many of his immature _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful method of design. Indeed, the _Salomé_ decorations (1894) had bridged this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of _The Rape of the Lock_ (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he ‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it--I mean it.”’
In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in the _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For example, the true Beardsley type of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley: