"The career of the future social pictorial satirist is," he continues, "full of splendid possibilities undreamed of yet.... The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling. All we want for my little dream to be realised is that, among these precocious wielders of the pencil, there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope...." Does not this precisely sum the situation up? Du Maurier could not live to foresee that, for all the expert skill of modern illustration, the "youths who can draw beautifully" lack "a point of view." It was the possession of this that distinguished Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Leech, and du Maurier. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [2] The circumstances in which du Maurier took up novel-writing, and the history of the staging of _Trilby_ in England were related by him to Mr. R.H. Sherard for an "Interview" which appeared in _McClure's Magazine_ 1895. And I have referred to this source for the genealogy of the artist, as given by himself, and particulars of his early life.--AUTHOR. [3] _English Society_, "Du Maurier." London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co. Introduction: W.D. Howells. IV LIFE OF THE ARTIST §1 To write of the work of an artist who is not a contemporary without reference to the circumstances of his life would be an incomplete performance, and yet criticism and biography are hardly ever happily fused. The gifts of a biographer are of a kind very dissimilar to those employed in criticism. The true biographer loves uncritically every detail that has to do with his subject, as a portrait-painter loves every detail that has to do with the appearance of his sitter. The best portraits, whether in biography--which is nothing if it is not portraiture--or in painting, are those in which the interpreter has been in a wholly receptive mood. This is not the critical attitude, which involuntarily takes arms against first one thing and then another in the subject before it; and this sensitiveness is in proportion to the critic's interest in his subject. Du Maurier told us the story of himself completely in his novels. It was said of de Quincey that in his writings he could tell the story of his own life and no other. This might be said of du Maurier too. The story of his childhood, as we read it through his books, gives us the picture of an extremely sensitive and romantic child possessed of a great power of responding affectionately to the scenes in which he grew up, as well as to the people who surrounded him. It is this sentiment for place as well as for people that sometimes gives us in his books a remarkable poetic strain--a strain like music in its caressing revival of old associations. And we really get a very accurate idea of the inward story of the artist when we contrast this temperamental sensitiveness with the kind of work upon which he employed his skill during the chief part of his career.