he skill, the ease and beauty of
Keene's line, to his knowledge of effect, to the very great artist is
unmeasured. In fulfilment of his contract du Maurier speaks of himself
and his "little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink--and,
alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had
gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!"
He says very little about himself. He concludes with a review of social
pictorial satire considered as a fine art. It is evident from the
lecture that du Maurier was an illustrator by instinct as well as
training. "Now conceive," says he, speaking of Thackeray, "that the
marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been
changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by
means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously
as he cultivated the other, and, finally, that he had exercised it as
seriously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in
black and white all the art and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep
knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the
tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable
perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has
written--what a pictorial record that would be!"

"The career of the future social pictorial satirist is," he continues,
"full of splendid possibilities undreamed of yet.... The number of
youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling. All we want for my
little dream to be realised is that, among these precocious wielders of
the pencil, there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there
a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope...."

Does not this precisely sum the situation up? Du Maurier could not live
to foresee that, for all the expert skill of modern illustration, the
"youths who can draw beautifully" lack "a point of view." It was the
possession of this that distinguished Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope,
Leech, and du Maurier.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The circumstances in which du Maurier took up novel-writing, and the
history of the staging of _Trilby_ in England were related by him to Mr.
R.H. Sherard for an "Interview" which appeared in _McClure's Magazine_
1895. And I have referred to this source for the genealogy of the
artist, as given by himself, and particulars of his early life.--AUTHOR.

[3] _English Society_, "Du Maurier." Lon