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 it; at its best it was a sort of blind protest against the patterns of chair-covers that the eye was bound to absorb while listening to the inanities of drawing-room conversation. It is significant that the æsthetic movement was a man's movement. Until the leader of the movement appeared on the scene, the decoration of the Victorian, as distinct from the Georgian parlour, or that of every other period, was woman's business. Most of the Victorian patterns embodied naturalistic and sentimental representations of flowers. It was with the disappearance of the eighteenth-century tradition, when drawing-room decoration passed out of the hands of men, that beauty disappeared. Women took to heaping masses of drapery on to the mantelpieces which had once displayed classic proportion; on to this drapery they pinned all sorts of horrible fans. Du Maurier exposed it all, and he exposed, too, the æsthetes to whom the salvation of the appearance of a suburban drawing-room could come to mean more than anything else in life. Their fault was not confined to this. He always brought their "intensity" as a charge against them, for it is of the very genius of good manners to merely froth about things which, if taken seriously, would tend to destroy amenity. [Illustration: Illustration for "A Legend of Camelot"--Part III. _Punch_, March 17, 1866. A little castle she drew nigh, With seven towers twelve inches high.... O Miserie! A baby castle, all a-flame With many a flower that hath no name, O Miserie! It had a little moat all round: A little drawbridge too she found; O Miserie! On which there stood a stately maid, Like her in radiant locks arrayed.... O Miserie! Save that her locks grew rank and wild, By weaver's shuttle undefiled!... O Miserie! Who held her brush and comb, as if Her faltering hands had waxed stiff, O Miserie! With baulkt endeavour! whence she sung A chant, the burden whereof rung: O Miserie! "These hands have striven in vain To part These locks that won GAUWAINE His heart!"]