SOURCE: "Outline Is All," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3907, January 28, 1977, p. 108.

In the following review, Keating highly commends Beardsley and His World.

"I am anxious to say something somewhere, on the subject of lines and line drawing", Aubrey Beardsley wrote to his former school teacher A. W. King on Christmas Day 1891, and added: "How little the importance of outline is understood even by some of the best painters." At this time Beardsley was nineteen years old; he had recently been told by Burne-Jones that he would one day "assuredly paint very great and beautiful pictures", and, on Burne-Jones's advice, he was attending evening classes at the Westminster School of Art.

As Brigid Brophy points out in this excellent book [Beardsley and His World], Burne-Jones had "recognised the existence but not the nature of Beardsley's genius", this being to "create drawings which were completed pictures in themselves". At the...