Maurier loved comedy, and your appreciator of comedy cannot stand the
presence of a "funny man." In the pages of _Punch_ it was Leech and not
du Maurier who first replaced the art of the merely "funny man." He
began with the pencil the kind of art that would answer to Meredith's
description of the comic muse. Throughout _The Egoist_, by George
Meredith, a comedy in which Clara Middleton's life comes near to being
tragic, the air would clear at any moment if Sir Willoughby and Clara
had not both lost through over-civilisation the power of saying
precisely what they mean. The book is the story of how Clara tries to
find words, and of how, when she finds them, the conversational genius
of Willoughby seemingly deflects them from the meaning she intends them
to bear. It was in the mid-region between two people in conversation
where false constructions are put by either party upon what is said that
du Maurier, like Meredith himself, perceived the source of comedy was to
be found.


§4

We have already defined the drawing-room as a Victorian institution. It
belonged to an age that was willing to sacrifice too much to
appearances--one in which everyone seemed to live for appearances. It
was a sort of stage, occupied by people in afternoon or evening
costume, with even the chairs arranged, not where they were wanted, but
where they made a good appearance. Oscar Wilde suggested to the
Victorians that they shouldn't _arrange_ chairs; they should let them
occur. Against the false setting manners were bound to become
false--good manners becoming almost synonymous with perfect insincerity.
Perhaps the only thing that ever really came to life in a drawing-room
was the æsthetic movement! At its worst it was what we have described