[5] _The Renaissance of the Nineties_, by W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, p. 29. 1911. This charming personality stood him in good stead when the Beardsley craze burst upon London. He had literally set the Thames on fire. It was in 1894, when he became art editor of _The Yellow Book_ (which I discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. His poster for Dr. John Todhunter’s _The Comedy of Sighs_, at the Avenue Theatre, a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink dress standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising Fisher Unwin’s _Pseudonym Library_, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid commercial advertising. _Punch_ parodied ‘The Blessed Damozel’ with a new version of lauds for ‘The Beardsley Girl.’ A famous tea-shop exploited the type of female beauty. Oscar Wilde’s play _Salomé_ was illustrated by the newly arrived young artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or more often belittled it. The new art magazine, _The Studio_, not only raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the black and white art of the world. He was to be at once accepted in Paris. He was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or less detrimentally dozens of good artists. Yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming personality in the least. He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted to enjoy life.