Among our illustrations there is a portrait of Canon Ainger, representing the artist as a painter. Du Maurier's colour was never such that an injustice is done to it by reproducing it only by half-tone process. The interest of this portrait is in the psychological grasp of character it seems to show. The painter was in the habit of contributing interior _genre_ scenes in water-colour to the Old Water-colour Society, of which he was made an Associate in 1881. That may be said against his painting, which may be said against the painting of so many eminent black-and-white men who have changed to the art of painting too late in the day. It shows failure to think in paint. An artist is only a great "black-and-white" artist because he thinks in that medium. Possibly, if there were no such thing as a "black-and-white" art, as we have it in journalism to-day, some of the greatest men in it would instead have been great painters. But successful transference to the one art after unusual mastery has been acquired in the other is rarely witnessed. To think in line, to see the world as resolving itself into the play of alternating lines, so to habituate thought and vision to that one aspect of everything is not the best preparation in the world for seeing it over again in another art where the element of line is not the chief incident of the impression to be created. Failure in the one art does not mean failure as an artist. Those artists who have worked in a variety of mediums with apparently equal success in each have always attained the ability to make each medium in turn express the same personal feeling. But nearly always there is in such cases that sacrifice of the inherent qualities of one or other of the mediums employed which a great virtuoso never makes. Black-and-white men put themselves into an attitude of receptivity towards that aspect of things which suggests representation in line. Their acquired sensitiveness in this respect is expressed in the learned character of their touch in drawing. Painters cultivate a similarly receptive attitude towards nature, but lay themselves open to receive a different impression of it. We might say of du Maurier that by the time he tried to apply himself to painting he had become constitutionally a black-and-white artist. Moreover, his impaired vision compromised the more complex range of effect represented in painting in a way that it never could the simplicity of good black-and-white work. How seriously threatened du Maurier's sight was at times we may know by the reliance he put upon being read to by others. Thus only did he manage to keep his small stock of visual energy in reserve for his artistic work. § 9 During the sixties and seventies the artist illustrated many works of fiction. The most notable instance was Thackeray's _Esmond_ in 1868--a work which he had long wished to be chosen to illustrate.