those secret influences which so often put the
technical rules of criticism out of court in dealing with an artist's
work.

He succeeded to Leech in the Society subjects, but he himself has not
had a successor in these themes. No one has been able to enter the same
field as worthily, for instance, as Mr. Raven-Hill entered a field once
worked by Keene. There have been better draughtsmen--from the
photographic point of view--than du Maurier attempting to fill his
place. But "a place" on a newspaper can only be filled by a personality.
It is artistic personality that has been wanting in recent years in
_Punch_ on the side of the fashionable satire which Leech and du Maurier
successively had made their own.

We have pointed out that his work in _Punch_ was at its best when he was
going most into Society. That is characteristic of all artists--that
their inspiration flames or dies in proportion to the immediacy of their
contact with actuality. Having chosen the world for his theme, he could
make nothing of it when he ceased to go out. In his earlier and middle
period, living in evening-clothes, he drew with an inexhaustible
impulse. When he thought he had his "world" by heart and could
reconstruct with the aid of some obliging friends who consented to pose,
he gave us pleasant pictures of his friends posing, but the great record
he had put together in the sixties, seventies, the early eighties of the
London of his time was at an end. Then it was that he repeated his
formulae, his "Things one would have expressed otherwise," and others of
like series without introducing any freshness of situation, carrying out
the brief dialogues with figures in which there was little variation of
character--as little variation as there is in the same model employed on
two different days. All this has been touched upon in this book, but
we must insist upon it, for the memory of the real du Maurier has
nothing so much to fear as our memory of du Maurier when he was, as an
artist, not quite himself.

[Illustration: Things One Would Rather have Expressed Differently

_Fair Hostess_. "Good-night, Major Jones. We're supposed to breakfast at
nine; but we're not very punctual people. Indeed, the later you appear
to-morrow morning, the better pleased we shall all be!"

May 13, 1893.]

We hope we have performed the funeral of the less deserving side of his
work, thereby releasing the immortal part of it to the fuller
recognition due to it from