been left for modern artists to grow wealthy and live comfortably upon
the proceeds of their own relation of the world's despair; if they are
playwrights, to live most snugly upon the box-receipts of an entrapped
audience unnerved for the struggle of life by their ghastly picture of
life's gloom.

However splendid the art in such a case we put it well down below that
art which exerts the same amount of effort in trying to sustain the will
to believe in, and so to bring about the reign of things we really want.

Du Maurier's art was nearer to reality, and not farther away, in the
charming side of it. Realism does not necessarily imply only the
representation of the mean and the defaulting. It is perhaps because
humanity so passionately desires the reign of beauty that it is inclined
to doubt that art which witnesses to the dream of it as already partly
true.

Although du Maurier's art in its tenderness is romantic, in its belief
in the ideal and in its insistence upon type rather than individuality
it is Classic. In the fact that it is so it fails in intimacy of
mood--just the intimacy that is the soul of Keene's art, which descends
from Rembrandt's. But this point will come up for consideration farther
on. Here it only concerns us in its connection with the psychology of
the people it interprets in satire. There is the psychology of
individuals and the psychology of a whole society--the latter was du
Maurier's theme. It is generally an obsession, a "fad," a "craze," or
"fashion" that his pencil exploits. He does not with Keene laugh with an
individual at another individual. His art is well-bred in its style
partly through the fact of its limitations. Moreover, in "Society"
individuality tends to be less evident than amongst the poorer classes,