[1] _The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene_, by Charles Somes
Layard. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1892.




III

DU MAURIER AS AUTHOR

§1


Queen Victoria was the Queen of Hearts; her reign was the reign of
sentiment. The redundancy of tender reference to Prince Albert at
Windsor has been known to bore visitors to the town. Life must have been
tiring in those days, tossed, as everyone was, if we believe the art of
the time, from one wave of sentiment to another. Men went "into the
city" to get a little rest, and there framed this code: that there
should be no sentiment in business.

So the Victorians put their sentiment into art, into stories and
illustrations. They put some of the best of their black-and-white art
into a Magazine called _Good Words_. Only the Victorians could have
invented such a title for a Magazine, or lived up to it.

The literary tradition of that time, so far as the novel was concerned,
expired with du Maurier. He came near to having a style as natural as
Thackeray's, and he was quite as sentimental.