s present-day characteristic,
putting upon one of the very lightest forms of art the stamp of a noble
time. The point is that whilst du Maurier thus deferred to the dignity
of human nature he remained a satirist, not a humorist merely, as was
Keene.

[Illustration]

II

THE ART OF DU MAURIER

Section 1

If we wish to estimate the art of du Maurier at its full worth we must
try and imagine _Punch_ from 1863 without this art, and try for a moment
to conceive the difference this absence would make to our own present
knowledge of the Victorians; also to the picture always entertained of
England abroad.

If we are to believe du Maurier's art England is a petticoat-governed
country. The men in his pictures are often made to recede into the
background of Victorian ornament merely as ornaments themselves. As for
the women, the mask of manner, the pleasantness concealing every shade
of uncharitableness, all the arts of the contention for social
precedence--in the interpretation of this sort of thing du Maurier is
often quite uncanny, but he is never ruthless.

We have noticed that when du Maurier tried to draw ugly people he often
only succeeded in turning out a figure of fun. Not to be beautiful and
charming is to fail of being human, seems the judgment of his pencil.
This was his limitation. And another was that, whilst professing to be
concerned with humanity as a whole, he nearly always broke down with
types that outraged the polite standard. He was a master in the
description of Bishops and Curates, Generals and Men-about-town, but he
broke down when he came to "the out-sider." And, as we have already
pointed out, he seldom got away from types to individuals.

In the last respect, however, we gain more perhaps than we lose. We gain
a very vivid impression of the whole tone of the society in his time.
And the fact of his art passing over the individual, for ever prevented
it from cruelty, for to be cruel the individual must be hit. He did not
satirise humanity, but Society. And his criticism was not of its
members, but of its ways. Except in the case of children, he left
unrevealed the individual heart that Keene so sympathetically exposed.

He made an original--and who will deny it?--a unique contribution to
the history of satire, when he went to work through literalness and care
for beauty in a field where nearly all previous success had rested with
a sort of ruffianism. But chiefly one praises Heaven f