or the nurseryful
of delightful children he let loose in his pages against the army of
little monsters who reign as children in the Comic Press, bearing
witness as they do to the unpleasant kind of mind even an artist can
possess.

Though he ridiculed "Camelot," his own tradition, as we have shown, was
received from the Arthurian source. His chivalry gave his satire a very
delicate edge. It was infinitely more cutting in showing the misfit of
vulgarity with beauty than in showing vulgarity alone.

But du Maurier's gentlemanliness narrowed his range. It forced him into
putting down something preposterous instead of a true type as soon as he
wished to create "a bounder." He found it impossible to get inside of a
"bounder"--to be for the time a "bounder" himself. It is necessary for
an artist to be able to be every character that he would create. And
perhaps a satirist never wounds others so much as when he most wounds
himself. Thackeray succeeded with snobbery because he had enough of it
to go on with himself. We have shown the success of du Maurier with the
aesthetes to go upon similar lines. The soul of satire is very often the
bitterness of confession. In his very style the satirist of the aesthetes
stood confessed almost as one of their number, whether he wished this to
be seen or not--at least as one of the romantic school from whom they
immediately descended. But he was genuine; where Postlethwaite and
Maudle posed, his irritation was with the pose, the pretended
preoccupation with beauty. He genuinely admired the Florentine revival,
and to admire is to be jealous of those who take in vain. He wished to
show up the "aesthetes" as the parasites they were, trading socially upon
an inspiration too fragrant to be traded with at all.

Du Maurier, who assuredly knew what elegance was as well as any man of
his time, took a great delight in pointing out to all whom it might
concern, by illustration, that if there was any beauty of representation
possible to him, as an artist, in depicting modern society, it was not
in anything put forward in the shape of costume by the ladies of the
aesthetic movement, but in the unacknowledged genius of ordinary
dressmakers.

It was in his time that Philistinism met its match in Oscar Wilde, and
for the first time in its history felt its self-complacency shaken. Up
to that time it had been very proud of itself. With the loss of that
pride it blundered, and it remained for du Maurier to