walks. But he disliked dinners and evening
parties in London, not because he was unsociable, but because good
dinners and long journeys 'took it out of him' and endangered the task
of the following morning. The distance from town and the long hills made
late hours inevitable. To listen to some new book read aloud in the
studio, which was also the common sitting-room of wife and children,
made the chief happiness of his evening."

"We owed it," says his friend, "to Hampstead air with its many sylvan
beauties that du Maurier was able for so long, notwithstanding defective
sight and health gradually failing, to prosecute his daily work with
scarce an interruption."

The link between the place and the work produced in it is in the case of
du Maurier, apart from the fact that Hampstead scenes so frequently
recur in his pictures, anything but a superficial one. "Hampstead," the
artist wrote, "is healthy but dull." It was the very monotony of the
place, the even conditions under which it was possible to work there in
his day--when it was farther away than it is in the present age of
"tubes"--that assisted the building up of the remarkable record in
_Punch_--the indispensable contribution made every week by du Maurier to
the journalism which, in the days when the fashionable world counted
several influential journals devoted to itself, placed _Punch_ in its
unique position among them. Society reserved quite a touching deference
for the opinions of Mr. Punch. It gives us some idea of the position
into which the paper had worked itself a generation ago when we find
Ruskin, the greatest social critic of his day, going straight to it for
an authoritative picture of the time. People have not sufficiently
remembered how often when they have referred to _Punch_ they were really
referring to du Maurier, or what is left now of his tradition--his way
of dealing with the foibles of society. The position of the paper in
Society was won by appositeness of political criticism, and the delicate
edge of its satire. It was du Maurier who put that edge on. Society
returned fascinated after every wound to inspect the weapon. Keene's pen
brought immense artistic prestige to _Punch_, but its social prestige it
owes to du Maurier more than to anyone; we only become aware that Leech
had begun a tradition in its pages by its supreme fulfilment in du
Maurier's art.

Section 9

Henry Silver, a member of the _Punch_ staff, who came to the table in