t. It is impossible to overlook
the chivalry that will not allow him, except with pain, to make a woman
ugly. He was first of all a Poet, and though it may be a man's business
to put a poem on to paper, it is a woman's to create it. He was a poet
put into the business of satire with sufficient wit to sustain himself
there. Many a time he has to make the satire rest almost entirely with
the legend at the foot of his drawing; by obscuring their legends we find
that drawing after drawing has nothing to tell us but of the beauty of
those involved in "the joke," and this, as we shall show further on,
gives a peculiar salt, or rather sweetness, to satire from his pencil.
He is a romancer. His dialogues are romances. It is the novelist and
artist running side by side in the legend and the drawing, but almost
independently of each other, the wit and the poet in him trying to play
each other's game, that provides the contradictoriness--the charm in his
pictures. The point of the "joke" seems very often a mere excuse for
working off several incidents of beauty that have been perceived.

In dealing with _fashion_ du Maurier scores with posterity. Beauty, when
it really is recorded, is the one element in any transitory fashion that
survives the challenge of time. It is natural for one generation to hate
more than anything else in the world the fashions immediately preceding
the one affected. Pointed contemporary satire has, from the very shape
it must assume, an ephemeral success. It is only when something more
than the mere object of the satire is involved by some grace of the
satirist's genius--some response on his part to charm in the thing
assailed, that the work of satire comes down from its own time with an
indestructible ingredient in it.

As a record of feminine fashion du Maurier's drawings in _Punch_ are
remarkable. It must not be imagined that the history of fashion is
merely the tale of dressmakers' caprice. The very language of changing
ideals is the variation of the toilet. When women were restricted to an
oriental extent within convention, when to be "prim" was the aim of
life, no feature of dress was lacking that could put "abandonment" of
any but a moral kind, out of the question. A shake of the head too
quickly and the coiffure was imperilled; the movements that came within
the prescribed circle of dignity within the circle of the crinoline were
all of a rhythmical order. Women did not take to moving with freedom