So far as one can judge from the study for an illustration to _Wives and Daughters_ (facing page 36), which we print with the illustration as it actually appeared in the _Cornhill_, seems to show that the artist could carry the conception of a drawing a long way without reference to a model. The sketch of the girl near the window affords us, in its Whistlerian suggestiveness and refinement, another instance of the purely artistic qualities which some critics have denied du Maurier the ability to secure, his professional ready style being too quickly accepted as completely expressing to the full his artistic nature. Du Maurier seems to have purchased his great journalistic and worldly success at the expense of qualities not altogether dissimilar from those shown in the works of Whistler, his companion at the beginning of his career. The pen sketch referred to of the girl by the window, the soft shadow outlining her face and falling upon the chair, the play of the line that suggests the contour of her figure, all reveal something of the refined skill, economy, and sensitiveness of expression that distinguished everything of Whistler's. And du Maurier's handwriting--witness the manuscript for his French version of Byron's "Sun of the sleepless--melancholy star!" which appeared in the _Illustrated Magazine_--is characteristic of an exquisite artist in its pleasant nervous beauty of style. It is the writing of one who could have etched. Etching demands only the most autographic features of a man's draughtsmanship; it prevents him from spreading himself in the irrelevancies of space-covering lines necessary in work done to meet the demand of the Editor's measure. The demand must have its effect on those who meet it, in diluting the intimate quality of their work, so that it is not always easy to estimate the real strength of artistic impulse in it. As art becomes more self-expressive it becomes more subjective; it demands that the student of it shall enter into the artist's feelings; it does not go out to meet him and explain itself after the fashion of the humbler forms of illustration with their purely objective ideal. It is only an educated public that will allow an illustrator the spontaneous style of drawing that some of the wittiest French illustrators indulge in. In England the demand for what is wrongly inferred to be good draughtsmanship has quenched spontaneity in illustration.