don: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.
Introduction: W.D. Howells.

IV

LIFE OF THE ARTIST

Section 1

To write of the work of an artist who is not a contemporary without
reference to the circumstances of his life would be an incomplete
performance, and yet criticism and biography are hardly ever happily
fused. The gifts of a biographer are of a kind very dissimilar to those
employed in criticism. The true biographer loves uncritically every
detail that has to do with his subject, as a portrait-painter loves
every detail that has to do with the appearance of his sitter. The best
portraits, whether in biography--which is nothing if it is not
portraiture--or in painting, are those in which the interpreter has been
in a wholly receptive mood. This is not the critical attitude, which
involuntarily takes arms against first one thing and then another in the
subject before it; and this sensitiveness is in proportion to the
critic's interest in his subject.

Du Maurier told us the story of himself completely in his novels. It was
said of de Quincey that in his writings he could tell the story of his
own life and no other. This might be said of du Maurier too.

The story of his childhood, as we read it through his books, gives us
the picture of an extremely sensitive and romantic child possessed of a
great power of responding affectionately to the scenes in which he grew
up, as well as to the people who surrounded him. It is this sentiment
for place as well as for people that sometimes gives us in his books a
remarkable poetic strain--a strain like music in its caressing revival
of old associations. And we really get a very accurate idea of the
inward story of the artist when we contrast this temperamental
sensitiveness with the kind of work upon which he employed his skill
during the chief part of his career.

Everywhere in du Maurier's life we find the testimony to his sweetness
of disposition. He had the great loyalty to friends which is really
loyalty to the world at large, made up of possible friends. Friends are
not an accident, but they are made by a process of natural selection,
which, if we are wise and generous, we do not attempt to superintend.

[Illustration:

Proxy

"As you're going to say your Prayers, Maud, _please_ mention I'm so
dreadfully tired I can't say mine to-night, but I'll be sure to
remember to-morrow!"

_Punch's Almanack_, 1874.]

Du Maurier was optimistic, he had the ge