ans could have
invented such a title for a Magazine, or lived up to it.

The literary tradition of that time, so far as the novel was concerned,
expired with du Maurier. He came near to having a style as natural as
Thackeray's, and he was quite as sentimental.

Before he began to write novels, he prided himself upon the fact that a
store of "plots" for novels lay undeveloped in his mind. It was the
offer of a "plot" to Mr. Henry James one evening when they were walking
up and down the High Street, Bayswater, that resulted in du Maurier
becoming a novelist. Du Maurier told him the plot of _Trilby._ "But you
ought to write that story," cried James. "I can't write," he replied; "I
have never written. If you like the plot so much you may take it." Mr.
James said that it was too valuable a present to take, and that du
Maurier must write the story himself.

On reaching home that night he set to work. By the next morning he had
written the first two numbers not of _Trilby_ but of _Peter Ibbetson_.
"It seemed all to flow from my pen, without effort in a full stream," he
said, "but I thought it must be poor stuff, and I determined to look for
an omen to learn whether any success would attend this new departure. So
I walked out into the garden, and the very first thing that I saw was a
large wheelbarrow, and that comforted me and reassured me, for, as you
will remember, there is a wheelbarrow in the first chapter of _Peter
Ibbetson._"[2]

_Peter Ibbetson_--"The young man, lonely, chivalrous and disquieted by a
touch of genius," as the hero has been well described--was written for
money, and brought its author a thousand pounds.

_Peter Ibbetson_ was not put above _Trilby_ in the author's lifetime;
but we believe it to have much more vitality than the latter work. The
actual writing of it was not perhaps taken quite so seriously as that of
_Trilby_, and it gains nothing on that account; but it is a book in
which there is intensity, in which everything is not spread out thinly
as in _Trilby_. Du Maurier himself believed that _Peter Ibbetson_ was
the better book. It certainly witnesses to the nobility of the author's
mind; it expresses the quick sympathy of the artist temperament--the
instinct for finding extenuating circumstances which artists share with
women, and which both rightly regard as the same thing as the sense of
justice. The tale of _Peter Ibbetson_ breathes a great human sympathy.
The simplicity with which it is w