them. Did he ever exist? Du Maurier is very subtle here. He fully
appreciated the great aim of the public-school-trained man in his own
time--the elaborate care with which an officer studied to conceal an
enthusiasm for the profession of arms, the great air of indolence with
which over-work was concealed in the other fashionable professions. As a
matter of fact these beautiful priests in the temple of "good form" were
splendid stoics. They would lay it down that as long as correctness of
attitude was maintained nothing mattered.

The artist seems to share many of the prejudices of the older
aristocrats. He makes his Jews too Jewish. He believes that they produce
great artists, and as if this wasn't enough, he still holds them at
arm's length. We have in his art not only the record of social
innovations, but a picture of the aristocrats before the barbarian
invasion. As a picture of them then his art has now its value. And yet
he was not quite an aristocrat in temperament, which is a little
different from being one by birth. He would have been less tolerant of
the Philistines if he had been, and more Bohemian too. He made his great
excursions into Bohemia, but he reached it always by a journey through
the suburbs. His love of glamour and enchantment was aristocratic, but
he did not keep it to the end. He loses it in later drawings. His
satire, too, grows less pointed after the eighties, with an equivalent
decline in the art by which it is conveyed. The poetic vein that once
distinguished him from the Society he depicted tended also to disappear,
as he succumbed to a process of absorption into a Society which he had
once been able to observe with the freshness of a stranger. It is
familiarity that blunts our sense of beauty. It is in its last phase in
_Punch_ that his drawing loses the poetry that characterised it in the
seventies and eighties, and which gave his satire then such a potent
stealthy influence over those for whom it was intended.