If it were possible to imagine a world without any women or children in it, du Maurier's contemporary, Keene, so far as we can judge from his art, would have got along very well in such a world. He would have missed the voluminous skirt that followed the crinoline, with its glorious opportunity for beautiful spacing of white in a drawing, more than he would have missed its wearer. But du Maurier's art is Romantic; in the background of its chivalric regard for women there is the history of the worship of the Virgin. The source of such an art would have to be sought for in the neighbourhood of Camelot. It is impossible to overlook the chivalry that will not allow him, except with pain, to make a woman ugly. He was first of all a Poet, and though it may be a man's business to put a poem on to paper, it is a woman's to create it. He was a poet put into the business of satire with sufficient wit to sustain himself there. Many a time he has to make the satire rest almost entirely with the legend at the foot of his drawing; by obscuring their legends we find that drawing after drawing has nothing to tell us but of the beauty of those involved in "the joke," and this, as we shall show further on, gives a peculiar salt, or rather sweetness, to satire from his pencil. He is a romancer. His dialogues are romances. It is the novelist and artist running side by side in the legend and the drawing, but almost independently of each other, the wit and the poet in him trying to play each other's game, that provides the contradictoriness--the charm in his pictures. The point of the "joke" seems very often a mere excuse for working off several incidents of beauty that have been perceived. In dealing with _fashion_ du Maurier scores with posterity. Beauty, when it really is recorded, is the one element in any transitory fashion that survives the challenge of time. It is natural for one generation to hate more than anything else in the world the fashions immediately preceding the one affected. Pointed contemporary satire has, from the very shape it must assume, an ephemeral success. It is only when something more than the mere object of the satire is involved by some grace of the satirist's genius--some response on his part to charm in the thing assailed, that the work of satire comes down from its own time with an indestructible ingredient in it.