the seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media, people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care about it more than they care about the other. . . . Had Rossetti not been primarily a poet the expert in painting would have acquired long ago his present penetration into the peculiar value of Rossetti's painting."
There can be no personal plaint in this essay, although Max Beerbohm himself is "a man who can express himself through two media," for no one, I dare say, has attempted to imply dissatisfaction in this case with either form of expression. Max's delicate and fantastic sense of caricature plays as happily through The Happy Hypocrite, A Christmas Garland, and Zuleika Dobson as it does through his drawings of the Rentrée of Mr. George Moore into Chelsea, Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric, and Mr. Joseph Pennell thinking of the old 'un. He turns from one art to the other with equal facility. Like Blake and Rossetti he has made his two careers run parallel. Du Maurier, also, was sib to these. To be sure, he began to write late in life and after he had produced Peter Ibbetson
