In _Peter Ibbetson_ the artist told the story of his childhood; in _Trilby_ he recounted the brightest period of his Bohemian youth; in _The Martian_ he records the nature of the shock he received from threatened blindness, and the depression of days before his genius had discovered itself and revealed the prospect of a great career to him. The effect of Pentonville, the grey suburb, and of the absence of worthy companions upon a romantic, highly-strung young man in _Peter Ibbetson_ is quite autobiographical, as is the description of student life in Paris by which afterwards the uninspiring environment is replaced. The continuation of the studentship at Antwerp, the consultation with the specialist at Dusseldorf, completes the story of du Maurier's life until he came to London. There is literally nothing that a biographer could add to it. And du Maurier wrote his autobiography thus, in tales, which are histories too, in their graphic description of the aspect of places and people at a given time. Up to the day when the artist came to London to seek employment from the publishers he seems to have had disheartening times. In the last years of his life, when he went over the ground of these early experiences in his books, it was, as is evident from the style, in the mood of one who had survived danger by flood and field to recount his tales in an atmosphere of peace he had hardly hoped to realise. [Illustration: Illustration for "The Adventures of Harry Richmond" _The Cornhill_, 1870.] It is evident from his books that he had many inward experiences of a dramatic kind; that his life was only uneventful upon the surface, and in appearance. In each of his novels, as we have seen, the rather crude machinery of his plot secures the revelation of a curious, but a not at all uncommon state of mind. He experimented empirically in psychology, interesting himself in the processes of his own mind. No one can doubt that in more than in outward incident his novels were autobiographical; that also he drew upon the resources of his personal history for some of the less usual and partly religious frames of mind in which his "Heroes," each in his own way, outwit the apparently ugly intentions of destiny towards themselves. § 6