he three admiring ladies is perfect. In our
own time ladies have gazed like this at genius. Sometimes genius is
really there, sometimes it is not--but the profound and undying belief
of women in it, often expressed beautifully as well as absurdly, is the
rain from heaven enabling it to thrive. In the expressive drawing of the
faces and the bearing of the three ladies in this picture we have du
Maurier's real humour--its reality in its closeness to life, and his
genius in expressing through contour the whole tale of strange aesthetic
enthusiasm.

In an earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed
"aestheticism" from the inside. He hardly draws any figures so happily as
those of bored, poetic youths. In _Sic Transit Gloria Mundi_ he does not
depict "The Duke" of the scene half so convincingly as the young gossip
talking to the Duchess. No one else in the world could have drawn so
well that young man, with his weak, but Oxford voice--it is almost to be
heard--and tired but graceful manners.

The drawing "Post-Prandial Pessimists" is not so sympathetic--which
means that it is not so intimate in touch and full of knowledge. The
straight mechanical lines with which the clothes are drawn are rather
meaningless. This treatment represents a convention, and a bad one,
because it covers the paper without really conveying the elasticity of
clothing or the animation of muscle determining its folds. At this stage
of his career du Maurier has begun to work rather mechanically and by a
recipe; he is less curious of form as it actually is to be observed, and
more content with just making a drawing in as neat and as businesslike a
way as possible, with the wording of the legend uppermost in his
thoughts. The artist is disappearing in the "_Punch_ Artist." The
drawing of detail, for instance, inclines to be blotty; it is no
longer affectionately done. At least the pre-Raphaelite in du Maurier is
now dead. The artist's early drawings, where his native tastes break
into expression, are pre-Raphaelite in feeling. He made a bad
impressionist, a thoroughly bad imitator of Keene's success with
impressionism. He lost what was most his own when he "threw over" his
belief in glamour, and took to laughing at his own enthusiasms; when he
ceased to confine his mockery to things that he hated, as he hated the
aesthetic movement. The gods revenged his satire of the inspiration of
the pre-Raphaelites in the _Tale of Camelot_ by taking tha