[Illustration: Illustration for "Recollections of an English Gold-Mine"
_Once a Week_, 1861.]


§2


If it were possible to imagine a world without any women or children in
it, du Maurier's contemporary, Keene, so far as we can judge from his
art, would have got along very well in such a world. He would have
missed the voluminous skirt that followed the crinoline, with its
glorious opportunity for beautiful spacing of white in a drawing, more
than he would have missed its wearer. But du Maurier's art is Romantic;
in the background of its chivalric regard for women there is the history
of the worship of the Virgin. The source of such an art would have to be
sought for in the neighbourhood of Camelot. It is impossible to overlook
the chivalry that will not allow him, except with pain, to make a woman
ugly. He was first of all a Poet, and though it may be a man's business
to put a poem on to paper, it is a woman's to create it. He was a poet
put into the business of satire with sufficient wit to sustain himself
there. Many a time he has to make the satire rest almost entirely with
the legend at the foot of his drawing; by obscuring their legends we find
that drawing after drawing has nothing to tell us but of the beauty of
those involved in "the joke," and this, as we shall show further on,
gives a peculiar salt, or rather sweetness, to satire from his pencil.
He is a romancer. His dialogues are romances. It is the novelist and
artist running side by side in the legend and the drawing, but almost
independently of each other, the wit and the poet in him trying to play
each other's game, that provides the contradictoriness--the charm in his