[2] _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_, with an Introduction by the Rev. John Gray, 1904.
Indeed, there is no more pleasing personality in the whole period than this ‘apostle of the grotesque,’ as his own decade loved to hail him. Born at Brighton in 1872 he was educated at the local Grammar School, whose magazine, _Past and Present_, contains his earliest work. The Kate Greenaway picture books, it is said, started him drawing. At school he was neither keen on his work or games, but used to be continually doing ‘little rough, humorous sketches.’ Reading was his great refuge, and when he fell in with some volumes of the Restoration dramatists he had already begun to find his feet in that world of the mad lusts of Wycherley and the perfumed artificiality of Congreve. Of school life itself he speaks bitterly and with no regret. At sixteen he must have been particularly glad to escape from it and enter, first of all, an architect’s office in London, and then, the next year, the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Office, where his fatal illness unfortunately first began to reveal its presence. Then came his seed-time up till 1891, when he did little but amateur theatricals. But at length Beardsley discovered himself. Many gentlemen have subsequently stated that they discovered him. It may be that they discovered him for themselves, but it was Beardsley and Beardsley alone who found himself. He certainly received, however, a large amount of appreciative sympathy when he started to draw a series of illustrations in his spare time for Congreve’s _Way of the World_, and Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_. He was without art training in the usual sense, though he went of nights in 1892 to Professor Brown’s night school at Westminster, but still kept to the Insurance Office stool till August, when, after being recognised by Burne-Jones and Watts with kindness, he left his post to live by his art. What had probably actually permitted him to take this step was the commission given by J. M. Dent to illustrate _Le Morte d’Arthur_. Any way he was launched out by the first number of _The Studio_ with Joseph Pennell’s article on ‘A New Illustrator,’ and, what was more important, with eleven of Beardsley’s own works. At that time all his art was intuitive without much knowledge of modern black and white. Indeed he was artistically swamped at the moment with the glory of the pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones. The _Le Morte d’Arthur_, really, was intended as a kind of rival to the Kelmscott Press publications, and Beardsley in his border designs had small difficulty in excelling Morris’s work.