nly
properly tell upon the stage. But great as these qualities are, in
Shakespeare's case they far from represent his whole art; there remains
unexpressed the fragrance of field and flower, the secrets of mood,
which do not lie with facts that acting can express, and which float
like a perfume between us and the pages. All this the dust of stage
carpentry destroys, and the unnaturalness of lime-light dispels. The
charm in _Trilby_ is overlaid by the obvious, but the charm is there
for the reader, just as the obviousness is there for the stage when the
charm is gone in the adaptation. The stage is the throne of the obvious.
It is possible for art to be obvious and great, as the art of Turner was
in painting. His art was theatrical. It is the obvious that is
theatrical. For that which is theatrical, as the word implies, must be
spectacular. Theatricality before everything else in this world, in any
art, achieves wide and popular success, the kind of success that Turner
achieves in the pictures for which the English public admire him.

Mr. W.D. Howells, in an article written just after the novelist's death,
said:[3]--"It was my good fortune to have the courage to write to du
Maurier when _Trilby_ was only half printed, and to tell him how much I
liked the gay sad story. In every way it was well that I did not wait
for the end, for the last third of it seemed to me so altogether forced
in its conclusions that I could not have offered my praises with a whole
heart, nor he accept them with any pleasure, if the disgust with its
preposterous popularity, which he so frankly, so humorously expressed,
had then begun in him."

The American critic describes the fact of du Maurier commencing novelist
at sixty and succeeding, as one of the most extraordinary things in the
history of literature, and without parallel. Perhaps the parallel has
been shown in the case of Mr. de Morgan. Mr. Howells also speaks of du
Maurier perfecting an attitude recognisable in Fielding, Sterne, Heine,
and Thackeray--the confidential one. Du Maurier's _Trilby_ was a
confidence. But he adds, "It wants the last respect for the reader's
intelligence--it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very
greatest novelists--the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot,
Tourgenief, Tolstoy. But short of this supreme truth, it has every
grace, every beauty, every charm." The word "Every" here seems to us an
American exaggeration. We should ask ourselv