Shortly afterwards I got an article from him written with curious felicity of phrase, in modish polite eighteenth-century English.

He had reached personal expression in a new medium in a month or so, and apparently without effort.

It was Beardsley's writing that first won Oscar to recognition of his talent, and for a while he seemed vaguely interested in what he called his "orchid-like personality." They were both at lunch one day when Oscar declared that he could drink nothing but absinthe when Beardsley was present.
"Absinthe," he said, "is to all other drinks what Aubrey's drawings are to other pictures: it stands alone: it is like nothing else: it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring: it has about it the seduction of strange sins.

It is stronger than any other spirit, and brings out the sub-conscious self in man.

It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one's nerves and is cruel.
"Baudelaire called his poems _Fleurs du Mal_, I shall call your drawings _Fleurs du Peche_--flowers of sin.
"When I have before me one of your drawings I want to drink absinthe, which changes colour like jade in sunlight and takes the senses thrall, and then I can live myself back in imperial Rome, in the Rome of the later Caesars." "Don't forget the simple pleasures of that life, Oscar," said Aubrey; "Nero set Christians on fire, like large tallow candles; the only light Christians have ever been known to give," he added in a languid, gentle voice.
This talk gave me the key.