[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 moment when he rejected the advice that his future lay in painting and stressed instead the "importance of outline", Beardsley had less than seven years to live, and he seems to have understood this as well. "I shall not live longer than did Keats", he proclaimed, and reinforcing both the truth of, and the reason for, this prophecy is the moving painting by Sickert, which is reproduced here, of Beardsley leaving Hampstead Church in 1894 after attending the ceremonial unveiling of a bust of Keats. Elegantly dressed, gaunt, and appallingly thin, Beardsley seems to be dragging himself away from the gravestones. It is a picture, as Brigid Brophy says, "terrifying in the nakedness of its symbolism".

The format of the Thames and Hudson series in which Beardsley and His World is published depends for its success on a skilful blending of pictures and text, and here again this is managed superbly. There are photographs of Beardsley at various moments in his life, and of his relatives, homes, and lodgings, and examples of his work from the juvenile "Kate Greenaway" sketches; through the drawings published in The Studio, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy, to the highly ornate illustrations for an edition of Volpone on which Beardsley was working when he died. Among the less familiar drawings are those illustrating Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and, just as sinister in every respect, there is a welcome reproduction of one of Beardsley's two surrealistic oil paintings.

The only curious omissions are the openly erotic illustrations of Lysistrata. Curious because one of them was reproduced in Brigid Brophy's earlier study of Beardsley, Black and White (1968). It is described here, in almost the same words, as a picture "aching with an explicit sexual frustration that was probably Beardsley's own", but without the drawing itself. It is tempting to ask why? Brigid Brophy is so insistent, and perceptive, on the generally erotic nature of Beardsley's art (especially phallic tassels and erections, which she finds everywhere) that the absence of the gigantic "aching" phalluses from Lysistrata seems almost wilful or imposed.

In Black and White Brigid Brophy largely restricted herself to a critical examination of Beardsley's work: here, a far stronger emphasis is given to his life. Brighton, where Beardsley was born and spent many of his early years, is discussed as a major formative influence upon his imagination; the misleading reminiscences and exaggerated claims of his mother, Ellen Beardsley, are firmly corrected; some basic biographical facts are established for the first time; and throughout, there are illuminating conjectures on the relationship between Beardsley's brief, intense life, and the amazing emergence and fruition of his genius. Beardsley and His World is an exceptionally attractive book and, at today's prices, a real bargain.