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GEORGE DU MAURIER, THE SATIRIST OF THE VICTORIANS
A Review of His Art and Personality
by
T. MARTIN WOOD
With Forty-One Illustrations
London Chatto & Windus
1913
[Illustration:
George du Maurier
From a portrait in water-colour by himself.
In the possession of the Artist's widow.]
PREFACE
Du Maurier worked for periodicals which buried in a back number each
phase of his work as it came to an end. Thus it is that he is,
unfortunately, chiefly now remembered by the last--the most accessible,
but not by any means the finest--period of his work.
The present book is an attempt to correct this and to bring forward du
Maurier's name again in the light of his earlier achievement.
No book on the artist, however, would be complete which omitted all
reference to his literary attainment; nor would it be in order in an
essay of this extent not to seek to demonstrate that connection which
always exists between the life and the work of an artist of distinctive
temperament. The author has endeavoured, in the chapter devoted to
outlining the main incidents of du Maurier's career, to regard the
feeling of his representatives that the autobiography of the novels is
itself so complete and sensitive as scarcely to call at present for
anything supplemental. He wishes to acknowledge the kindness of the
artist's family in lending him portraits, sketch-books, and manuscript
with the permission for reproduction; also of Mr. W. Lawrence Bradbury,
so zealous a guardian of all that redounds to the fame of his great
journal, for every kind of assistance; and of Sir Francis Burnand, du
Maurier's Editor and comrade, for letters assisting him to form an
impression of du Maurier in the flesh. Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. have
also been generous in allowing the reproduction of the four drawings
included here, which appeared originally in the _Cornhill Magazine_. The
author only wishes that he felt that what he has written more justified
this consideration from everyone who was approached in connection with
his undertaking.
CONTENTS
I. THE WORLD OF DU MAURIER
II. THE ART OF DU MAURIER
III. DU MAURIER AS AUTHOR
IV. LIFE OF THE ARTIST
V. THE ILLUSTRATIONS
ILLUSTRATIONS
GEORGE DU MAURIER, from a Portrait in Water-colour by Himself
(Frontispiece)
ILLUSTRATION FOR "RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ENGLISH GOLD-MINE":
_Once a Week_, 1861
"THE CILICIAN PIRATES": _The Cornhill,_ 1863
ILLUSTRATION FOR "WIVES AND DAUGHTERS": _The Cornhill_, 1864
ILLUSTRATION FOR "WIVES AND DAUGHTERS": _The Cornhill_, 1865
SKETCH FOR ABOVE
PENCIL STUDIES FROM THE ARTIST'S SKETCH-BOOK
ILLUSTRATION FOR "A LEGEND OF CAMELOT"--PART III: _Punch_, 1866
INITIAL LETTER FROM _The Cornhill_
ILLUSTRATION FOR "THE STORY OF A FEATHER": 1867
ILLUSTRATION FOR "THE STORY OF A FEATHER": 1867
"CAUTION": _Punch_, 1867
BERKELEY SQUARE, 5 P.M.: _Punch_, 1867
ILLUSTRATION FOR "ESMOND"
ILLUSTRATION FOR "THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND":
_The Cornhill_, 1870
ILLUSTRATION FOR "THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND":
_The Cornhill_, 1871
"PROXY": _Punch's Almanack_, 1874
QUEEN PRIMA-DONNA AT HOME: _Punch_, 1874
HONOUR WHERE HONOUR is DUE: _Punch_, 1880
CANON AINGER, from a Portrait in Water-colour by du Maurier
THE MUTUAL ADMIRATIONISTS: _Punch_, 1880
MANUSCRIPT
GEORGE DU MAURIER, from a Photograph
SPEED THE PARTING GUEST: _Punch_, 1883
SKETCH FOR INITIAL LETTER IN _The Cornhill_, 1883
"Sic TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI!" _Punch_, 1884
POST-PRANDIAL PESSIMISTS: _Punch_, 1892
THINGS ONE WOULD RATHER HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY: _Punch_, 1893
There are also several Tailpieces, chronologically arranged
GEORGE DU MAURIER
I
THE WORLD OF DU MAURIER
§1
We have in the portfolio of du Maurier the epic of the drawing-room.
Many of the Victorians, including the Queen, and Alfred Lord Tennyson,
seem to have viewed life from the drawing-room window. They gazed
straight across the room from the English hearthrug as from undoubtedly
the greatest place on earth. They were probably right. But some of this
confidence has gone. Actually in these days there are people who won't
own up to having a drawing-room at all. If they have a room that could
possibly answer to such a description, they go out of their way to call
it the library, though its only available printed matter is a Bradshaw;
or the music-room, though the only music ever heard in it is when the
piano is dusted.
In turning over the old volumes of _Punch_ it is surprising how many of
the points made by du Maurier in his drawings and in the legends beneath
them still hold good. As a mere "joker" he was perhaps the least able of
the _Punch_ staff. His influence began when he started inventing
imaginary conversations. In many cases these do not represent the
discussion of topical subjects at all, but deal with social aberrations,
dated only in the illustration by the costume of the time.
In these imaginary conversations he is already a novelist. They record
the strokes of finesse and the subterfuges necessary to the attainment
of the vain ambitions which are the preoccupation of human genius in
superficial levels of Society in all ages. We realise the waste of
energy and diplomacy expended to score small points in the social game.
His art is a mirror to weed-like qualities of human nature which enjoy a
spring-time with every generation. But it also provides a remarkable
record of the effect of the sudden replacement of old by new ideals in
the world which it depicted.
The rise of the merchant capitalist upon the results of industrial
enterprises rendered possible through the invention and rapid perfecting
of machinery, created a class who suddenly appeared in the drawing-rooms
of the aristocrats as strangers. Du Maurier himself seems to join in the
amazement at their intrusion. Much of this first surprise is the theme
of his art. Before the death of the artist the newcomers had proved
their right to be there, having shamed an Aristocracy, which had lost
nearly all its natural occupations, by bringing home to it the fact that
the day was over for despising men who traded instead of fighting, who
achieved through barter what the brave would once have been too proud to
take except by conquest. The business of the original division of human
possessions by the sanguinary method was well over; it was now the
merchant's day. It was plain that trade could no longer be despised,
when, literally in an age of peace and inventive commerce, indolence was
the only alternative to engagement in it.
Du Maurier was very tolerant to social intruders when they were pretty.
He rather entered into Mrs. de Tomkyns' aims, and showed it by making
her pretty. Her ends might not be the highest, but the tact and the
subtlety displayed in her campaign were aristocratic in character, and
he would not have her laughed at personally, though we may laugh at the
topsy-turvy of a Society in which the entrance into a certain
drawing-room becomes the fun reward for the perseverance of a lifetime.
But du Maurier shuddered when behind this lady, distinguished in the
fact of the possession of genius, he saw a multitude of the aspirateless
at the door. We never lose upon the face, which showed as his through
his art, the expression of well-bred resentment, yet certainly of
amusement also.
During the period of du Maurier's work for _Punch_ the actor gets his
position in Society; and we see desolate gentlemen in other professions
drifting about at the back of the room like ships that drag their
anchor, while all the feminine blandishment of the place is concentrated
on the actor. By following up his drawings we can see the whole surface
of Victorian Society change in character; we can see one outrageous
innovation after another solidify into what was correct.
There never was a period like the Victorian; in many respects the
precedents of all older periods of Society fail to apply. In it the
aristocrats believed in democracy, and resented the democrat who was
practically their own creation. While the democrat held no faith with
the same fervour as his belief that "whatsoever is lovely and of good
report" could only be obtained by mingling with the upper classes. It
was the commercial glory of the great Industrial Reign that turned the
whole character of London Society upside down in du Maurier's time. It
became the study of the Suburbs to model themselves on Mayfair, to
imitate its "rages" and "crazes" in every shade. It is all the vanities
of this emulation which du Maurier records; there is little in his art
to betray the great influences Ecclesiastically, scientifically, and
politically, which expressed the genius of the Victorians. His splendid
Bishops are as tranquil as if the controversial Newman, and Gladstone
with his Disestablishment programme, had never disturbed the air. And
one fancies that politics must have bored him, so studiously does he
through over thirty years avoid even a slanting glance at the events
which preoccupied Mr. Punch in his cartoons. There is evidence that
there was more than the policy of the Paper in this. Du Maurier was an
optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right
when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to
recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere
amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society
going swiftly to Gehenna. It is the entire absence of despair,
bitterness, or cynicism in his work that gives it its altogether unique
place in the history of social satire. Never before was there such a
lenient barb on such a well-aimed arrow.
But if his business is not with the causes which contributed to the
character of English Society in his time, it is with their effects. No
satirist has ever put more highly representative figures on to his
stage. They are so highly representative because they conform so
strictly to type. He puts a valuation upon everyone whom he introduces
on his stage. He shows exactly the regard in which we are to hold them
and their profession. And it is interesting, in the light of the favour
with which he always treated the typical _savant_, to hear from his son
that he was always as much interested in what was being accomplished in
science as in anything else in the world. We must conclude scientists
were first in his estimation as men, from the pains he was at to give
them the appearance of distinction in his pictures. Then he had much
regard for Generals, great Admirals, and other magnificent specimens,
the Adonis, for instance, that figures almost as often, and nearly
always in company with, his charming woman. This gentleman is difficult
to describe. He seems too languid even for the profession of
man-about-town, but his clothes are such that one would think their
irreproachability could only be maintained by a life of dedication to
them. Did he ever exist? Du Maurier is very subtle here. He fully
appreciated the great aim of the public-school-trained man in his own
time--the elaborate care with which an officer studied to conceal an
enthusiasm for the profession of arms, the great air of indolence with
which over-work was concealed in the other fashionable professions. As a
matter of fact these beautiful priests in the temple of "good form" were
splendid stoics. They would lay it down that as long as correctness of
attitude was maintained nothing mattered.
The artist seems to share many of the prejudices of the older
aristocrats. He makes his Jews too Jewish. He believes that they produce
great artists, and as if this wasn't enough, he still holds them at
arm's length. We have in his art not only the record of social
innovations, but a picture of the aristocrats before the barbarian
invasion. As a picture of them then his art has now its value. And yet
he was not quite an aristocrat in temperament, which is a little
different from being one by birth. He would have been less tolerant of
the Philistines if he had been, and more Bohemian too. He made his great
excursions into Bohemia, but he reached it always by a journey through
the suburbs. His love of glamour and enchantment was aristocratic, but
he did not keep it to the end. He loses it in later drawings. His
satire, too, grows less pointed after the eighties, with an equivalent
decline in the art by which it is conveyed. The poetic vein that once
distinguished him from the Society he depicted tended also to disappear,
as he succumbed to a process of absorption into a Society which he had
once been able to observe with the freshness of a stranger. It is
familiarity that blunts our sense of beauty. It is in its last phase in
_Punch_ that his drawing loses the poetry that characterised it in the
seventies and eighties, and which gave his satire then such a potent
stealthy influence over those for whom it was intended.
[Illustration: Illustration for "Recollections of an English Gold-Mine"
_Once a Week_, 1861.]
§2
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.
As a record of feminine fashion du Maurier's drawings in _Punch_ are
remarkable. It must not be imagined that the history of fashion is
merely the tale of dressmakers' caprice. The very language of changing
ideals is the variation of the toilet. When women were restricted to an
oriental extent within convention, when to be "prim" was the aim of
life, no feature of dress was lacking that could put "abandonment" of
any but a moral kind, out of the question. A shake of the head too
quickly and the coiffure was imperilled; the movements that came within
the prescribed circle of dignity within the circle of the crinoline were
all of a rhythmical order. Women did not take to moving with freedom
because the crinoline went out, but the crinoline went out when they
took to moving with freedom. It went out simply because it was a
confounded nuisance. It was a natural costume only as long as women
imagined it was natural to them to be very still in demeanour. Once they
began to have opinions about that matter they soon sent the crinoline on
its way. The same process goes on with the fashions of wearing the
hair. The Blue-stocking, constantly running her nervous fingers up her
forehead into her hair, has given to Girton a style of its own,
equivalent to none at all. _Fashion_ is more sensible than most things.
If it changes with a rapidity that dazzles man, is not that only because
man is stupid?
To study hair-dressing in du Maurier's pictures, is to study the growth
of the nineteenth-century woman's mind. The head-dress becomes more
natural as woman herself becomes more natural. It becomes more Greek
when she takes up the Amazon idea, and simple when she discards some of
the complications of convention, always to return to elaboration in the
winter when it is not easy to live the simple life after the bell goes
for dinner.
When the crinoline went out the train came in; so that though woman had
allowed _herself_ more freedom, man could only walk behind her at a
respectful distance with a ceremonial measure of pace. The dressmaker
did not control all this; the resources of her transcendent art were
strained to keep up with the march of womanhood--that was all. If we may
believe du Maurier's art, the note of beauty never entirely disappeared
from _fashion_ until the æsthetic women of the eighties seemed to take
in hand their own clothes. The æsthetic ladies failed, as the movement
to which they attached themselves did, for beauty is something attendant
upon life, arriving when it likes, going away very often when everyone
is on his knees for it to remain.
[Illustration]
§3
When it comes to his drawings of children du Maurier is very far away
from the sentimentalist of the Barrie school. He does not attempt to go
through the artifice of pretended possession of the realm of the child's
mind. He was of those who find the curious attractiveness of childhood
in the unreality, and not, as claimed by the later school, the superior
reality of the child's world. His view of the child is the affectionate,
but the "Olympian" one, with its amused appreciation of the _naïveté_
and the charm of childhood's particular brand of self-possession. It is
possible that his nursery scenes played some part in promoting the
respect that is given to-day to the impulses of childhood, the
enlightened and beautiful side of which respect after all so far
outweighs the ridiculous and sentimental one. His nursery drawings
contribute much of the fragrance associated with his work in _Punch_. He
takes rank under the best definition of an artist, namely, one who can
put his own values upon the things that come up for representation on
his paper. By his insistence upon certain pleasant things he helped to
establish them in the ideal, which, on the morrow, always tends to
become the real. He was a realist only to the extent of their
possibility. It gave him no pleasure whatever to enumerate, and
represent over again, the many times in which the beautiful intentions
of nature had gone astray. He liked to be upon the side of her
successes. He constantly helped us to believe in, and to will towards
the existence of such a world here on earth, as we have set our heart
upon. He is not an idealist in the vague sense, for he imports no beauty
merely from dreamland. Like the Greeks, he makes _the possible_ his
single ideal. In insisting upon the possibility of beauty and
suppressing every reference to the monstrous story of failure which the
existence of hideousness implies, once more he puts the world in debt to
art after the fashion of the old masters. For after all it seems to have
been left for modern artists to grow wealthy and live comfortably upon
the proceeds of their own relation of the world's despair; if they are
playwrights, to live most snugly upon the box-receipts of an entrapped
audience unnerved for the struggle of life by their ghastly picture of
life's gloom.
However splendid the art in such a case we put it well down below that
art which exerts the same amount of effort in trying to sustain the will
to believe in, and so to bring about the reign of things we really want.
Du Maurier's art was nearer to reality, and not farther away, in the
charming side of it. Realism does not necessarily imply only the
representation of the mean and the defaulting. It is perhaps because
humanity so passionately desires the reign of beauty that it is inclined
to doubt that art which witnesses to the dream of it as already partly
true.
Although du Maurier's art in its tenderness is romantic, in its belief
in the ideal and in its insistence upon type rather than individuality
it is Classic. In the fact that it is so it fails in intimacy of
mood--just the intimacy that is the soul of Keene's art, which descends
from Rembrandt's. But this point will come up for consideration farther
on. Here it only concerns us in its connection with the psychology of
the people it interprets in satire. There is the psychology of
individuals and the psychology of a whole society--the latter was du
Maurier's theme. It is generally an obsession, a "fad," a "craze," or
"fashion" that his pencil exploits. He does not with Keene laugh with an
individual at another individual. His art is well-bred in its style
partly through the fact of its limitations. Moreover, in "Society"
individuality tends to be less evident than amongst the poorer classes,
with whom eccentricity is respected. In "Society" the force of
individuality now runs beneath the surface of observable varieties of
costume, taking a subterranean course with an impulse to avoid
everything that would give rise to comment. But the conformity of
"Society" in small things is only a mask. Du Maurier's real weakness in
satire was that he did not quite perceive this. He was inclined to
accept appearances for realities, with the consequence that the record
he transmits of late Victorian Society obscures the quite feverish
genius of that age.
§4
It has often been remarked that the comparative failure of du Maurier's
successors seems the result of a difficulty in drawing "a lady"
unmistakably. We can forgive much to the artist who brought the English
lady, by many accounted the finest in the world, into real existence in
modern comic art. We shall have to forgive him for turning into a lady
every woman who was not middle-aged. Du Maurier's picture of Society was
largely falsified by his inability to appreciate variety in feminine
genius. But we are quite prepared to believe that his treatment of the
dainty parlour-maid, for instance, helped to confirm that tradition of
refinement in table service which is the pleasant feature of English
home life. All the servants shown in his pictures are ladies, and this
before the fashion had made any headway of engaging ladies as servants.
And we cannot help feeling such delightful child-life as he represents
could only have retained its characteristics under the wing of the
beautiful women who nurse it in his pictures.
[Illustration: "The Cilician Pirates"
_The Cornhill_, April 1863.]
Both du Maurier and Keene knew the _genus_ artist in all its varieties;
and it is very interesting to contrast, and note the difference between,
the "Artist" whom du Maurier brings into his society scenes and the one
of Keene's drawings. In Keene's case the "artist" is generally a
slouching Bohemian creature who belongs to a world of his own, and bears
the stamp of "stranger" upon him in any other. But the "artist" of du
Maurier, putting aside the æsthete coterie, with whom we shall deal
presently, wears upon him every outward symbol of peace with the
world--_The_ world, Mayfair. He is always an "R.A."--symbol of
respectability--whether du Maurier mentions it or not. With this type
Art is one of the great recognised professions like The Army or The Bar.
We have no curiosity as to what sort of pictures they paint. We know
that their art was suitable for the Academy, therefore for the Victorian
Drawing-room. We are merely amused at the solemnity of manner with which
they assumed that their large-sized Christmas cards had anything to do
with art at all--cards which lost the purchasers of them such enormous
sums when sold again at Christie's that the shaken confidence of the
public as to the worth of modern pictures has not recovered to this day.
All through this state of things, too, the really vital work of the time
was left to the encouragement of those whom "Society" would then have
called "outsiders," and it was just this failure on the part of the
aristocracy to enlist the genius of the period on its own side that
betrayed its decrepitude.
§5
The enduring feature of du Maurier's art, that which survives in it
better than its sometimes scathing commentary upon a passing "craze," is
his close representation of the air with which people seek to foil each
other in conversation and conceal their own trepidations. His "Social
Agonies" are among the best of this series. If he does not lay stress
upon individual character, he still remains the master draughtsman of a
state of mind. He succeeds thus in the very field where probably all
that is most important in modern art, whether of the novel or of
illustration, will be found.
Behind the economy of word and gesture in the conversational method of
to-day there lies the history of the long struggle of the race through
volubility to refinement of expression. Du Maurier's _Punch_ pictures
take their place in the field of psychology in which the modern novel
has secured its greatest results, and the best appreciation of his
_Punch_ work was written in the eighties by Mr. Henry James, the supreme
master in this field; the master of suspenses that are greater than the
conversations in which they happen; the explorer of twilights of
consciousness in which little passions contend.
The Society du Maurier depicted held its position upon more comfortable
terms than any preceding it in history. It did not have, on the one
hand, to trim to a court party, or, on the other, to concede anything to
the people to keep itself in power. Yet it was as swollen with pride in
its position as any society has ever been. The industrial phenomena of
the age had suddenly filled its pockets; and it had nothing else in the
world to do but to blow itself out with pride. But a Society holding its
position without an effort of some kind of its own is bound to lose in
character, and the confession of all the best literature of this time
was of the baffled search for the soul of the prosperous class.
§6
For the appreciation of the artist's management of dialogue we must move
for a page or two in Mrs. de Tomkyns' circle with Miss Lyon Hunter, Sir
Gorgius Midas the Plutocrat, Sir Pompey Bedel (of Bedel, Flunke & Co.)
the successful professional man, and the rest of the whole set, who
understand each other in the freemasonry of a common ambition to get
into another set.
_Mamma_. "Enfin, my love! We're well out of this! _What_ a gang!!!
Where shall we go next?"
_Daughter_. "To Lady Oscar Talbot's, Mamma."
_Mamma_. "She _snubs_ one so I really can't _bear_ it! Let us go to
Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It's just as select (except the Host and
Hostess) and quite as amusing."
_Daughter_. "But Mrs. Tomkyns snubs one worse than Lady Oscar,
Mamma!"
_Mamma_. "Pooh, my love! who cares for the snubs of a Mrs. Ponsonby
de Tomkyns I should like to know, so long as she's clever enough to
get the right people."
This is the conversation in the hall between two ladies leaving a party
in one of du Maurier's most characteristic drawings. On every side there
are footmen and a crowd of guests cloaking and departing. Of Mrs.
Ponsonby de Tomkyns Mr. Henry James has said: "This lady is a real
creation.... She is not one of the heroines of the æsthetic movement,
though we may be sure she dabbles in that movement so far as it pays to
do so. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns is a little of everything, in so far as
anything pays. She is always on the look-out; she never misses an
opportunity. She is not a specialist, for that cuts off too many
opportunities, and the æsthetic people have the _tort_ as the French
say, to be specialists. No, Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns is--what shall we
call her?--well, she is the modern social spirit. She is prepared for
everything; she is ready to take advantage of everything; she would
invite Mr. Bradlaugh to dinner if she thought the Duchess would come to
meet him. The Duchess is her great achievement--she never lets go of her
Duchess. She is young, very nice-looking, slim, graceful, indefatigable.
She tires poor Ponsonby completely out; she can keep going for hours
after poor Ponsonby is reduced to stupefaction. This unfortunate husband
is indeed almost stupefied. He is not, like his wife, a person of
imagination. She leaves him far behind, though he is so inconvertible
that if she were a less superior person he would have been a sad
encumbrance. He always figures in the corner of the scenes in which she
distinguishes herself, separated from her by something like the gulf
that separated Caliban from Ariel. He has his hands in his pockets, his
head poked forward; what is going on is quite beyond his comprehension.
He vaguely wonders what his wife will do next; her manoeuvres quite
transcend him. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns always succeeds. She is never
at fault; she is as quick as the instinct of self-preservation. She is
the little London lady who is determined to be a greater one--she
pushes, gently but firmly--always pushes. At last she arrives."
We have quoted this delightful picture almost in its entirety from the
essay upon du Maurier written by Mr. Henry James in the eighties to
which we have referred. It describes the type of woman revealed in Mrs.
de Tomkyns when we have followed her adventures up a little way in the
back numbers of _Punch_. But, if we may be permitted the slang, the type
itself is anything but "a back number." Du Maurier's work bids fair to
live in the enjoyment of many generations, from the fact that its chaff,
for the most part, is directed against vanities that recur in human
nature. Mr. James tells us that the lady of whom we write "hesitates at
nothing; she is very modern. If she doesn't take the æsthetic line more
than is necessary, she finds it necessary to take it a little; for if we
are to believe du Maurier, the passion for strange raiment and blue
china has during the last few years made ravages in the London world."
Mr. Henry James himself is one of the experts of the London world. There
is almost a hint in the last sentence that he thought du Maurier's
genius helped to nurse the crazes it made fun of.
Since writing this I have been told by one to whom du Maurier related
the incident, that the hero of the æsthetic movement himself, Oscar
Wilde, offered to sit to du Maurier for the chief character in his skit.
Wilde was very young, but already master of that art of
self-advertisement which he received from Byron and Disraeli, perfected,
and, I think, handed on to Mr. Bernard Shaw. But such anxiety for every
kind of celebrity at any cost seems to have lost the youthful genius the
esteem of the great _Punch_ artist once and for all. The representative
of humorous journalism seems the one upon whom the delicate humour of
the proposal was lost.
As far as du Maurier was capable of vindictiveness it was reserved for
Maudle and Postlethwaite. He went out of his way to give a contemptible
appearance to those who took the name of Art in vain. His only spiteful
drawings are those of æsthetes. They are spiteful to the extent of the
great disgust which he, the most amiable of satirists, felt for them.
But still he was careful not to treat a craze which afforded him
inexhaustible variations of subject matter with so much bitterness as
to kill it right out. It was only towards this craze that he showed any
bitterness at all, for the rest he is always amused with Society. He has
none of the bitter Jeremiahlike anger against it of a Swift.
Mr. Henry James defending du Maurier from a charge of being malignant,
brought against him for his ugly representation of queer people,
failures, and grotesques, refused to allow that the taint of "French
ferocity" of which the artist was accused, existed. But Mr. Henry James
sees in du Maurier's ugly people a real specification of type, where we
confess that we have felt that his "ferocity" missed the point of
resemblance to type through clumsy exaggeration. One noticeable
instance, however, to our mind, where the too frequent outrageousness is
replaced by an exquisite study of character, is in the face of the fair
authoress who, when the gallant Colonel, anxious to break the ice, and
full of the fact that he has just been made a proud father, asks if she
takes any interest in very young children, replies, "I loathe _all_
children!" (January 13, 1880).
[Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters"
_The Cornhill_, 1864.]
§7
The story of children's conversation has perhaps never been told quite
so charmingly as du Maurier tells it. We could quote endlessly from the
admirably constructed nursery dialogues in which he does not attempt to
make a joke, and in which he very carefully refrains from giving a
fantastic precocity to his little characters--dialogues in which he is
quite content to rely upon our sympathetic knowledge of children's way
of putting things, while he rests the appeal of the drawing and legend
entirely upon a _naïve_ literalness to their remarks. The charming
atmosphere of the well-ordered nursery must be felt by readers, and then
we can quote from the text of some of his drawings of the kind; this we
shall do somewhat at random and as they come to mind.
"Are you asleep, dearest? Yes, Mamma, and the Doctor particularly
said that I wasn't to be waked to take my medicine" (_July_ 10,
1880).
"Oh, Auntie! There's your tiresome cook's been and filled my egg
too full" (_April_ 22, 1882).
Already we are seized with misgivings as to whether, with the reader
very much on the look-out for the jokes, we shall be successful in
making our point in claiming for du Maurier that, as much as any author
who has ever written upon children, he captures "the note" of children's
speeches. But anyhow we will try.
For an instance there is the delightful picture of a child clasping its
mother round the knees, whilst the mother, shawled for an evening
concert, bends affectionately down--
"Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma! I like you
to go out, because if you didn't you'd never come home again, you
know."
The artist perhaps invented this pretty speech, but the "Good Night!
Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma" is of the very spirit of the
redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express
accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert
answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar
smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers
generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"--_The Tale of
the House_ it might be called--when he affords us realistic glimpses of
nursery conversation.
_Mamma_. "What is Baby crying for, Maggie?"
_Maggie_. "I don't know."
_Mamma_. "And what are you looking so indignant about?"
_Maggie_. "That nasty, greedy dog's been and took and eaten my
punge-take!"
_Mamma_. "Why, I saw you eating a sponge-cake a minute ago!"
_Maggie_. "O--that was Baby's."
We need hardly labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an
instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and
making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of the
reconstruction.
_Ethel_. "Isn't it sad, Arthur? There's the drawing-room cleared
for a dance, and all the dolls ready to begin, only they've got no
partners!"
_Arthur_. "Well, Ethel! There's the four gentlemen in my Noah's
Ark; but they don't look as if they cared very much about
_dancing_, you know!" (_February_ 24, 1872).
_Ethel_. "And O, Mamma, do you know as we were coming along we saw
a horrid woman with a red striped shawl drink something out of a
bottle, and then hand it to some men. I'm sure she was tipsy."
_Beatrice_ (who always looks on the best side of things). "Perhaps
it was only Castor Oil, after all!"
_A whispered appeal_. "Mamma! Mamma! don't scold him any more, it
makes the room so dark."
It is the _poetry_ of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du
Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of
childhood. For instance, the large drawing "Farewell to Fair Normandy"
(October 2, 1880), extending across two full pages of _Punch_, in which
the children away for their seaside holiday leave the sands for the last
time in a mournful procession. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud.
Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene. It has been said
that "there is only one art," and this seems to be proved on great
occasions by those who can command more than one art for the expression
of their feelings. It is difficult to say where in this picture the
artist in du Maurier gives place to the poet, as difficult as it is to
say before a picture of Rossetti.
[Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters"
_The Cornhill_, 1865.]
Sometimes du Maurier even depicted delightful children as the victims of
the fashionable crazes that he loved to attack, and thus we are brought
to another series of dialogues--as a rule though only involving the
"grown-ups"--in which the legend and the type of person depicted,
together, form a most valuable document of the times. There is for
instance the China mania--in the following in the incipient stage:--
"O Mamma! O! O! N--N--Nurse has given me my C--C--Cod-liver Oil out
of a p--p--plain white mug" (_December_ 26, 1874).
Then the inimitable colloquies of the æsthetes--and especially the now
famous one about the six-mark tea-pot.
_Aesthetic Bridegroom_. "It is quite consummate, is it not?"
_Intense Bride_. "It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to
it!"
Also the direction, to the architect about the country house:
_Fair Client_. "I want it to be nice and baronial, Queen Anne and
Elizabethan, and all that; kind of quaint and Nuremburgy you
know--regular Old English, with French windows opening to the lawn,
and Venetian blinds, and sort of Swiss balconies, and a loggia. But
I'm sure _you_ know what I mean!" (_November_ 29, 1890).
And farther on in the _Punch_ volumes:--
"O, Mr. Robinson, does not it ever strike you, in listening to
sweet music, that the Rudiment of Potential Infinite Pain is subtly
woven into the tissue of our keenest joy" (_December_ 2, 1891).
But perhaps before closing this chapter we should give some examples of
drawing-room conversation pure and simple, without reference to any sort
of craze, as specimens of their author's skill. Familiarity with the
artist's characters will enable the reader to appreciate the note of a
shy man's agony in some, and of feminine spite in others.
Among the "Speeches to be lived down, if possible," there are these:
_She_. "Let me introduce you to a very charming lady, to take down
to supper."
_He_. "A--thanks--no. I never eat supper."
"By George! I am so hungry I can't talk."
_Fair Hostess_ (on hospitable thoughts intent). "Oh, I'm so glad!"
"Things one would rather have left unsaid":
_Amiable Hostess_. "What! must you go already? Really, Professor,
it's too bad of this sweet young wife of yours to carry you off so
early! She always does!"
_Professor_. "No, no, not _always_, Mrs. Bright. At _most_ houses I
positively have to drag her away!"
"Truths that might have been left unspoken":
_Hostess_. "What? haven't you brought your sisters, Mr. Jones?"
_Mr. Jones_. "No, they couldn't come, Mrs. Smith. The fact is,
they're saving themselves for Mrs. Brown's Dance to-morrow, you
know!" (_January_ 9, 1886).
Under the heading "Feline Amenities":
_Fair Hostess_ (to Mrs. Masham, who is looking her very best).
"How-dy-do, dear? I hope you're not so tired as you look!"
_Sympathetic Lady Guest_. "Don't be unhappy about the rain, dear
Mrs. Bounderson--it will soon be over, and your garden will be
lovelier than ever."
_Little Mrs. Goldmore Bounderson_ (who is giving her first Garden
Party). "Yes; but I'm afraid it will keep my most desirable guests
from coming!"
This last duologue is pure du Maurier. It is subtle.
"Feline Amenities" again:
"How kind of you to call--I'm sorry to have kept you waiting!"
"Oh, don't mention it.--I've not been at all bored! I've been
trying to imagine what I should do to make this room look
comfortable if it were mine!" (_November_ 22, 1892).
The "Things one would rather have expressed otherwise" is a good series
too:
_The Professor_ (to Hostess). "Thank you so much for a most
delightful evening! I shall indeed go to bed with pleasant
recollections--and _you_ will be the very _last_ person I shall
think of!"
And again, of the same series:
_Fair Hostess_. "Good-night, Major Jones. We're supposed to
breakfast at nine, but we're not very punctual people. Indeed the
later you appear to-morrow morning, the better pleased we shall all
be" (_May_ 13, 1893).
"Things one would rather have left unsaid":
_He_. "Yes, I know Bootle slightly, and confess I don't think much
of him!"
_She_. "I know him a little too. He took me in to dinner a little
while ago!"
_He_. "Ah, that's just about all he's fit for!"
_The Hostess_. "Dear Miss Linnet! would you--would you sing one of
those charming ballads, while I go and see if supper's ready?"
_The Companion_. "O, don't ask me--I feel nervous. There are so
many people."
_The Hostess_. "O, they won't listen, bless you! not one of them!
_Now_ DO!!!"
And here is a conversation that betrays the presence of one of the
currents of public feeling below the smooth surface of well-bred
twaddle:
_In the Metropolitan Railway_. "I beg your pardon, but I think I
had the pleasure of meeting you in Rome last year?"
"No, I've never been nearer to Rome than St. Alban's."
"St. Alban's? Where is that?"
"Holborn."
Some rather amusing speeches of a different character in which du
Maurier assails the more obvious forms of snobbery of a class below
those with whom his art was generally concerned may be given:
_Among the Philistines_. _Grigsby_. "Do you _know_ the Joneses,
Mrs. Brown?"
"No, we--er--don't care to know _Business_ people as a rule,
although my husband's in business; but then he's in the _Coffee_
Business and they're all _gentlemen_ in the _Coffee_ Business, you
know!"
_Grigsby_ (who always suits himself to his company). "_Really_ now!
Why, that's more than can be said of the Army, the Navy, the
Church, the Bar, or even the _House of Lords_! I don't _wonder_ at
your being rather _exclusive_!" (_Punch's Almanac_, 1882).
"I see your servants wear cockades now, Miss Shoddson!"
"Yes, Pa's just become a member of the Army and Navy Stores."
When du Maurier confined himself to observing and to recording he never
failed for subjects. But we suppose as a concession to a section of the
public he felt a leaven of mere jokes was demanded from him every year.
The scene of his struggle to invent those "jokes" is one to be veiled.
It is safe to say that it is his distinction to have contributed at once
the best satire and the worst jokes that _Punch_ has ever published. A
black and white artist has told the writer that the _Art_-Editors of
papers look first at the joke. The drawing is accepted or rejected on
the joke. We can only be glad that this was not entirely the editorial
practice on _Punch_ in du Maurier's time. Perhaps the subjoined "joke"
of du Maurier's from _Punch_ is the worst in the world:
"I say, cousin Constance, I've found out why you always call your
Mamma 'Mater.'"
"Why, Guy?"
"Because she's always trying to find a mate for you girls."
[Illustration: Sketch for illustration for "Wives and Daughters" 1865.]
And yet if the drawing accompanying this joke be looked at _first_, it
delights with its charm and distinction. Here then is a psychological
fact; the drawing itself seems to the eye a poorer affair once the poor
joke has been read. Having suffered in this way several times in
following with admiration the pencil of du Maurier through the old
volumes of _Punch_, we at last hit upon the plan of always covering the
joke and enjoying first the picture for its own sake, only uncovering
the legend when this has been thoroughly appreciated lest it should turn
out to be merely a feeble joke instead of a happily-invented
conversation. There are some of the drawings for jokes which we should
very much like to have included with our illustrations, but the human
mind being so constituted that it goes direct to the legend of an
illustration, feeling "sold" if it isn't there, and the "jokes" in some
of these instances being so fatal to the understanding of the atmosphere
and charm of the drawing, we have had to abandon the idea of doing so.
What the reader has to understand is that circumstances harnessed du
Maurier to a certain business; he imported all manner of extraneous
graces into it, and thus gave a determination to the character of the
art of satire which it will never lose. The pages of _Punch_ were
enriched, beautified, and made more delicately human. _Punch_ gained
everything through the connection and du Maurier a stimulus in the
demand for regular work. But it is not impossible to imagine
circumstances which, but for this early connection with _Punch_, would
have awakened and developed a different and perhaps profounder side of
du Maurier, of which we seem to get a glimpse in the illustrations to
Meredith in _The Cornhill Magazine_.
§8
The famous reply of an early Editor to the usual complaint that _Punch_
was not as good as it used to be--"No, sir, it never was"--cannot be
considered to hold good in any comparison between the present period and
that in which the arts of du Maurier and Keene held sway. There have
been periods, there is such a one now, when the literary side of
_Punch_ has touched a high-water mark. But on the illustrative side
_Punch_ seems to be always hoping that another Keene or du Maurier will
turn up. It does not seem prepared to accept work in quite another
style. But there is no more chance of there ever being another Keene
than of there being another Rembrandt, or of there ever being another du
Maurier than another Watteau. The next genius to whom it is given to
illuminate the pages of the classic journal in a style that will rival
the past is not likely to arise from among those who think that there is
no other view of life than that which was discovered by their immediate
predecessors. By force of his genius--or, if you prefer it, of
sympathy--which means the same thing--for some particular phase of life,
some artist may at any moment uncover in its pages an altogether fresh
kind of humour and of beauty.
§ 9
Du Maurier's art covers the period when England was flushed with
success. Artists in such times grow wealthy, and by their work refine
their time. But in spite of the number of wealthy Academicians living
upon Society in the mid-Victorian time, the influence of Art upon
Society was less than at any time in history in which circumstances have
been favourable to the artist.
The great wave of trade that carried the shop-keeper into the West-end
drawing-room strewed also the curtains and carpets with that outrageous
weed of _trade_ design which gave to the mid-Victorian world its
complexion of singular hideousness.