AUBREY BEARDSLEY died at the age of twenty-six. And yet no artist, certainly none whose work has been done in black and white, has reached a more universal fame; none has had so wide an influence on contemporary art. Beardsley is the satirist of an age without conviction. It is because he loved beauty that beauty's degradation obsessed him; it is because he was so supremely conscious of virtue that vice had the power to lay hold upon him. At times his work attains pure beauty, but it is a diabolical beauty, and the consciousness of sin is always there, sin first transfigured and then disclosed by beauty. As a purely decorative artist, Beardsley had no peer, and in his work we find new possibilities for an art conceived as pure line and conducted through mere pattern. The illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in this volume give an adequate and comprehensive idea of his purposes and accomplishments. Graceful of line, original, often grotesque and always striking, these black and white drawings are a true index of his work.