respond to life.

Though du Maurier fell short of Keene in breadth of inspiration, there
were still aspects of life which he represented better than that master,
phases of life which he approached with greater eagerness. He expressed
perfectly once and for all in art the life of the drawing-room in the
great days of the drawing-room, as did Watteau the life of the Court in
the great days of a Court. Men take their rank in art by expressing
completely something which others have expressed incidentally.

There is now the glamour of the past upon du Maurier's work in _Punch_.
The farther we are away in distance of time from the date of the
execution of a work of art the more legendary and fabulous its tale
becomes. In good work forgotten costumes seem bizarre but not
preposterous. Whenever in a picture a thing looks preposterous--except
in the art of caricature, and du Maurier was not a caricaturist--the
representation of it in the picture is a bad one. We never find in the
paintings of Vandyke, Velasquez, Gainsborough, or other great artists,
however difficult the period of fashion with which they had to deal,
anything preposterous--always something beautiful, however unreasonable
in ornamentation and clothes. Sometimes it is said that beauty and
simplicity are the same. But we have to remember that complexity remains
simple whilst unconsciousness of complexity remains. There were several
periods of dress that retained beauty and complexity side by side. We
find beauty to-day in the avoidance of complexity, because, being at
last really civilised, we are impatient of irrelevance even in dress. Du
Maurier was never for a moment conscious that there was in all the
rigmarole of Victorian costume and decoration anything redundant. He
seemed to take, in decoration for instance, the draped mantelpiece with
its bows of ribbons, and pinned fans quite as seriously as Velasquez
took the hooped skirt in costume. Artifice is fascinating in those with
whom it is natural to be artificial. When du Maurier thought he
recognised merely a passing "fashion" and hit out at it, he made far
less interesting pictures for posterity than when he took the outward
aspect of the age he lived in as being in the natural order of things.

Section 5

The Victorian age--which invented _Punch_, the greatest humorous paper
the world has ever known--had no sense of humour. It was the age of
serious people. The secret of the character of _Punch_ as an o