. Painters cultivate a similarly
receptive attitude towards nature, but lay themselves open to receive a
different impression of it. We might say of du Maurier that by the time
he tried to apply himself to painting he had become constitutionally a
black-and-white artist. Moreover, his impaired vision compromised the
more complex range of effect represented in painting in a way that it
never could the simplicity of good black-and-white work. How seriously
threatened du Maurier's sight was at times we may know by the reliance
he put upon being read to by others. Thus only did he manage to keep his
small stock of visual energy in reserve for his artistic work.

Section 9

During the sixties and seventies the artist illustrated many works of
fiction. The most notable instance was Thackeray's _Esmond_ in 1868--a
work which he had long wished to be chosen to illustrate.

Du Maurier had all his life an intense admiration for Thackeray. He
inherited none of Thackeray's bitterness, but upon every other ground as
an author, at least, he descends from Thackeray, notably in the studied
colloquialism of his style when writing, and in a general friendliness
to the Philistine. And in his drawings in _Punch_ his satire is aimed in
the same direction as Thackeray's always was. Like Thackeray, he was
most at home on the plane where a social art, a delicate art of life is
able to flourish. Of the concealed romanticist in du Maurier we have
more than once already spoken. A Romanticist always turns to the past.
Thackeray, in his lectures, also in the house he built for himself, and
in a proposed but never finished history, went back into the past at
least as far as Queen Anne's reign. _Esmond_, also of Queen Anne's
reign, was the expression of a feature of Thackeray's temperament which
never makes its full appearance in any other of his fictions. We believe
that it was his own favourite among his works. But Thackeray did not
succeed in expressing the whole of himself in the romantic vein; perhaps
because he did not cultivate it from the start like Scott and Dumas. He
was able to put more of himself into _Vanity Fair_. To think of
Thackeray is to think first of _Vanity Fair_. From the unerring--because
instinctive--judgment of the world this book received recognition as his
masterpiece.

Du Maurier had not so much of the genuine _flair_ for the eighteenth
century as Thackeray. At heart he was much more in sympathy with the
pre-Raphaeli