s worst, and it may help
them to estimate his achievement to note how even on this occasion it
surpasses easily all later modern work in the same vein.

There is one other book, published in 1874, which du Maurier illustrated
at that time which should be mentioned. It had, we believe, a great
success of a popular kind. We refer to _Misunderstood_, by Florence
Montgomery. In the light of the illustrations, which are in the artist's
finest vein, one wonders how much of this success could with justice
have been attributed to the illustrations. We are inclined to think not
a little. These pictures show many of the most interesting qualities of
his work. In the portrait of Sir Everard Duncombe, Misunderstood's
father, we have a skill in portraying a type that cannot have failed in
impressing readers with the reality of the character. The delicacy of du
Maurier's psychology in this portrait of a middle-aged man of the period
is in marked contrast with the improbability of so many of his
renderings of elderly people wherever he went outside of his stock
types. It justifies his realism and mistrust of memory drawing. Through
his failure to sustain his interest in life always at this pitch his art
at the end of his career showed just the lack of this close observation
of character. It often then seems too content to rest its claims on
accurate drawing, even when what was drawn was not worth accuracy. And
this is the fault of all the modern school.

Good drawing does not so much interest us in things as in the drama
centred in them. Thus we have actually such things as horror, passion,
gentleness, and other invisible things conveyed to us in the lines of a
drawing. We may indeed know genius from talent by the much more of the
invisible which it transfers to visible line. Du Maurier, in drawing
children, for instance, secures their prepossessing qualities. Drawing
is great when it conveys something which in itself has not an
outline--like the "atmosphere" of a Victorian drawing-room.

Section 10

Intensely artistic natures make everything very self-expressive without
conscious intention. For this reason an artist's handwriting tends to be
more worth looking at than other people's. The draughtsman lavishes some
of his skill upon his handwriting. This more particularly applies to the
signature, which is written with fuller consciousness than other
words. Artists, owing to their intense interest in "appearances,"
generally star