nces where it can expand
without loss of bloom through contention with unhappy circumstances. It
shows the human beauty that expands from the conserved force of life
when it has not to contend with unfavourable environment. Beauty is
perhaps the one certain result of favourable environment. The ideal
within "Socialism" which makes even its opponents Socialists is the
aspiration that some day everyone will be favourably environed.

Section 2

It was a long while before the result of always working for a comic
paper took effect on du Maurier. Not for some time did the knowledge
that everything can be made to appear ridiculous persuade the artist to
believe with his editor that everything is ridiculous. The humour of his
subjects is still a part and not the whole of those subjects in his art,
and this was all to the glory of the great comic paper in which he drew,
for the humour of nothing in the world is the whole of that thing. Farce
represents it so to be. Du Maurier had no genius for Farce. He responded
to actual life; Farce is artificial; it is thus that the beauty and
charm as well as the humour of life were involved in his
representations.

Humour for humour's sake has brought about the downfall of every comic
paper that has tried it. _Punch_ has been saved from it by the wilful
seriousness of some of its contributors. Every now and then, with
something like "The Song of the Shirt" or, in another vein, a cartoon of
Tenniel's, _Punch_ has been brought back to Reality and thus to the only
source of humour.

In the drawing "Honour where Honour is Due" the point is made in the
legend, but the illustration illuminates it rather brutally. It is a
picture in which we find du Maurier expressing the prejudices of the old
regime against the _nouveau riche_. It illustrates a prejudice rather
than a fact. It was not at all true in Victoria's reign that money
would carry a man anywhere. In that time the man with money only but
without birth wanted better manners than the man with everything else
but money to get him into Society. It was less the objectionableness of
trade--as du Maurier in such a drawing as this tried to imply--than the
advance of it that the old aristocracy really resented.

A drawing characteristic of the artist's work in the eighties--in 1880
to be definite--is that entitled "Mutual Admirationists." It really
dates itself. It is descriptive of one of the moods of "passionate
Brompton." The satire of t