at that time which should be mentioned. It had, we believe, a great
success of a popular kind. We refer to _Misunderstood_, by Florence
Montgomery. In the light of the illustrations, which are in the artist's
finest vein, one wonders how much of this success could with justice
have been attributed to the illustrations. We are inclined to think not
a little. These pictures show many of the most interesting qualities of
his work. In the portrait of Sir Everard Duncombe, Misunderstood's
father, we have a skill in portraying a type that cannot have failed in
impressing readers with the reality of the character. The delicacy of du
Maurier's psychology in this portrait of a middle-aged man of the period
is in marked contrast with the improbability of so many of his
renderings of elderly people wherever he went outside of his stock
types. It justifies his realism and mistrust of memory drawing. Through
his failure to sustain his interest in life always at this pitch his art
at the end of his career showed just the lack of this close observation
of character. It often then seems too content to rest its claims on
accurate drawing, even when what was drawn was not worth accuracy. And
this is the fault of all the modern school.
Good drawing does not so much interest us in things as in the drama
centred in them. Thus we have actually such things as horror, passion,
gentleness, and other invisible things conveyed to us in the lines of a
drawing. We may indeed know genius from talent by the much more of the
invisible which it transfers to visible line. Du Maurier, in drawing
children, for instance, secures their prepossessing qualities. Drawing
is great when it conveys something which in itself has not an
outline--like the "atmosphere" of a Victorian drawing-room.
§10
Intensely artistic natures make everything very self-expressive without
conscious intention. For this reason an artist's handwriting tends to be
more worth looking at than other people's. The draughtsman lavishes some
of his skill upon his handwriting. This more particularly applies to the
signature, which is written with fuller consciousness than other
words. Artists, owing to their intense interest in "appearances,"
generally start by being a little self-conscious about their signature.
But that period passes, and the autograph becomes set, to grow fragile
with old age and shrink, but not to alter in its real characteristics.
The signature at the foot of a picture presents a rather different
problem from the signature at the foot of a letter. It must necessarily
be a more deliberate and self-conscious affair, but it is no less
expressive. German deliberation was never so well expressed as in Albert
Durer's signature.
[Illustration: Caution
"Don't keep your Beer-Barrel in the same cellar as your _Dust-Bin!_"
_Punch_, February 23, 1867.]
Self-advertisers always give themselves away with their signature. As a
rule, the finer the artist the more natural his signature in style. And
fine artists like to subscribe to the great tradition of their craft,
that the work is everything, the workman only someone in the fair light
of its effect; the name is added out of pride but not vain-glory, with
that modest air with which a hero turns the conversation from himself.
Naturalness and mastery arrive at the same moment; students cannot sign
their works naturally. Du Maurier's signature passed through many
transformations, and there were times, too, when the artist was quite
undecided between the plentiful choice of his Christian names--George
Louis Palmella Busson. An artist beginning his career at the present day
with such a choice of names would most certainly have made use of the
"Palmella" in full--an advertisement asset. But advertisement _is_
vulgar. Du Maurier belonged to the Victorians, who were never vulgar.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene_, by Charles Somes
Layard. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1892.
III
DU MAURIER AS AUTHOR
§1
Queen Victoria was the Queen of Hearts; her reign was the reign of
sentiment. The redundancy of tender reference to Prince Albert at
Windsor has been known to bore visitors to the town. Life must have been
tiring in those days, tossed, as everyone was, if we believe the art of
the time, from one wave of sentiment to another. Men went "into the
city" to get a little rest, and there framed this code: that there
should be no sentiment in business.
So the Victorians put their sentiment into art, into stories and
illustrations. They put some of the best of their black-and-white art
into a Magazine called _Good Words_. Only the Victorians could have
invented such a title for a Magazine, or lived up to it.
The literary tradition of that time, so far as the novel was concerned,
expired with du Maurier. He came near to having a style as natural as
Thackeray's, and he was quite as sentimental.
Before he began to write novels, he prided himself upon the fact that a
store of "plots" for novels lay undeveloped in his mind. It was the
offer of a "plot" to Mr. Henry James one evening when they were walking
up and down the High Street, Bayswater, that resulted in du Maurier
becoming a novelist. Du Maurier told him the plot of _Trilby._ "But you
ought to write that story," cried James. "I can't write," he replied; "I
have never written. If you like the plot so much you may take it." Mr.
James said that it was too valuable a present to take, and that du
Maurier must write the story himself.
On reaching home that night he set to work. By the next morning he had
written the first two numbers not of _Trilby_ but of _Peter Ibbetson_.
"It seemed all to flow from my pen, without effort in a full stream," he
said, "but I thought it must be poor stuff, and I determined to look for
an omen to learn whether any success would attend this new departure. So
I walked out into the garden, and the very first thing that I saw was a
large wheelbarrow, and that comforted me and reassured me, for, as you
will remember, there is a wheelbarrow in the first chapter of _Peter
Ibbetson._"[2]
_Peter Ibbetson_--"The young man, lonely, chivalrous and disquieted by a
touch of genius," as the hero has been well described--was written for
money, and brought its author a thousand pounds.
_Peter Ibbetson_ was not put above _Trilby_ in the author's lifetime;
but we believe it to have much more vitality than the latter work. The
actual writing of it was not perhaps taken quite so seriously as that of
_Trilby_, and it gains nothing on that account; but it is a book in
which there is intensity, in which everything is not spread out thinly
as in _Trilby_. Du Maurier himself believed that _Peter Ibbetson_ was
the better book. It certainly witnesses to the nobility of the author's
mind; it expresses the quick sympathy of the artist temperament--the
instinct for finding extenuating circumstances which artists share with
women, and which both rightly regard as the same thing as the sense of
justice. The tale of _Peter Ibbetson_ breathes a great human sympathy.
The simplicity with which it is written adds to its effect. We cross a
track of horror in it by the ray of a generous light. It is by this book
I like to think that du Maurier will be remembered as a writer. It was
characteristic of him that he could touch a theme that in all
superficial aspects was sordid without the loss of the bloom of true
romance. The real plot of this story, however, does not lie with
incident, but with the maintenance of an elevated frame of mind in
defiance of circumstances. The author realises that mind triumphs always
more easily over matter than over "circumstances." To the damage of the
plot he brings his hero the utmost psychic assistance from an
inadmissible source, but the picture of the prisoner's soul prevailing
in the face of complete temporal disaster is still a true one.
Du Maurier's publishers believed in _Trilby_ from the very first. They
began by offering double the _Peter Ibbetson_ terms, while generously
urging him to retain his rights in the book by accepting a little less
in a lump sum and receiving a royalty. But so little faith did he pin to
_Trilby_ that he said "No!"
Within a few weeks the "boom" began. And when Harpers' saw what
proportions it was likely to assume, they voluntarily destroyed the
agreement, and arranged to allow him a handsome royalty on every copy
sold. An admirer of Byron, du Maurier repudiated as cruelly unfair the
poet's line, "Now Barabbas was a publisher." The publisher also handed
over to him the dramatic rights with which he had parted for a small sum
like fifty pounds, and thus he became a partner in the dramatic property
called _Trilby_ as a "play."
[Illustration]
§ 2
_Trilby_ was a name that had long lain _perdu_ somewhere "at the back of
du Maurier's head." He traced it to a story by Charles Nodier, in which
Trilby was a man. The name Trilby also appears in a poem by Alfred de
Musset. And to this name, and to the story of a woman which was once
told to him, du Maurier's _Trilby_ owed her birth. "From the moment the
name occurred to me," he said, "I was struck with its value. I at once
realised that it was a name of great importance. I think I must have
felt as happy as Thackeray did when the title of _Vanity Fair_ suggested
itself to him."
_Trilby_ is written with a daintiness that corresponds with the neatness
of its illustrations. It has the attractiveness which du Maurier had
such skill in giving. But though dealing with Bohemia, the author is
conventional; that is, he keeps strictly to the surface of things. And
every true sentiment of the book is spoilt by the quickly following
laugh in which the author betrays his dread of being thought to take
anything seriously.
[Illustration: Berkeley Square, 5 P.M.
_Punch_, August 24, 1867.]
The machinery of the plot is crude; perhaps this reason as well as the
delicate one assigned made Mr. Henry James refuse it. But du Maurier had
a curious skill in revealing states of mind of real psychological and
pathological interest. The sudden cessation of the power to feel
affection, and of the ability to respond emotionally to nature, the
curious loss of bloom in mental faculty in the case of Little Billee, in
this we have an inquiry into a by no means unusual state of mind carried
out with scientific exactness to an artistic end. Mr. Henry James would
no doubt have preferred this phenomenon as the basis of a plot to the
preposterous mesmerism which forms the plot of _Trilby_, he being one of
the few who understand that a dramatic situation is a mental experience.
In _Peter Ibbetson_ the "dreaming truly"--the illusion that becomes as
great as reality--is the phenomenon the author examines. "Dreaming
truly" is like the ecstasy of the saints: it is the "will to believe" in
the very act of willing.
Du Maurier was spoilt for romance by his long connection with a comic
paper. It had become a habit with him to be on his guard against
everything that could be travestied. This was the conventional side of
du Maurier in evidence, as it is also in that other flaw in the simple
story of _Trilby_--the adulation of worldly success. We find him
constantly writing in this strain in the description of character: "He
is now one of the greatest artists in the world, and Europeans cross the
Atlantic to consult him"; or of another character: "And now that his
name is a household word in two hemispheres"; and of another: "Whose
pinnacle (of pure unadulterated fame) is now the highest of all," &c.
[Illustration]
§3
In all his books the author shows some of that response to old-time
associations which gives to authors like Dumas and Scott their freedom
from things that only belong to the present moment--precisely the
things, by the way, which do not last beyond the present. The
consciousness that the experiences of life to be valued are the ones
which unite us to those who preceded us in life, and which will in turn
give us a share in the future, is in the possession of the Romantic
school. But du Maurier seems to have felt himself paid to be funny, and
to conceal his sense of romance as Jack Point concealed his
love-sickness. His master, Thackeray, less than anyone apologised to his
readers for the parade of his own feelings.
There is a note of smugness that spoils _Trilby_; in fact Little Billee,
"frock-coated, shirt-collared within an inch of his life, duly scarfed
and scarf-pinned, chimney-pot-hatted, most beautifully trousered, and
balmorally booted," is the most insufferable picture of a hero of a
romance. This person compromises the effect of the charmingly haunting
presence of Trilby herself, and of the great-hearted gentleman in
Taffy. There is, moreover, the failure to convince us of Little Billee's
genius. We are not assisted to belief in the immortality of his works,
by the illustrations of the mid-Victorian upholstery in the midst of
which they were manufactured. On the other hand, we merely have a vision
of the type of art which won popular success a generation ago,
encouraged by the Royal Academy at the expense of something better, and
keeping a large group of well-dressed painters so much in Society, that,
like Little Billee himself, they actually grew tired of the great before
the great had time to tire of them--"incredible as it may seem, and
against nature."
Du Maurier put portraits of his friends into _Trilby_, softening the
outlines, and giving the touches, legitimate in a work of art, which
promote variation. He wrote impulsively, and a spirit of generous
recognition of the achievements of all his friends almost ruined his
book. The "lived happy ever afterwards" sentiment follows up every
reference to them. In the famous character of "Joe Sibley"
(Whistler)--afterwards altered to Antony, a Swiss, and ruined--a witty,
a debonair and careless genius was created. Just such an impression was
made upon us by this character as Whistler's own studied butterfly-pose
in life seemed intended to make. It was with the greatest regret we
missed the fascinating figure from the novel when published in book
form, a regret even confessed to by Whistler himself, though he had not
been able to refrain from dashing into print over its publication. There
was none other of the Bohemians described that so endeared himself to
us, or that was so alive--witnessing to the degree to which Whistler's
personality affected those with whom he was thrown in contact. Du
Maurier represented a character in Sibley with the defects of his
qualities, to the greater emphasis of the qualities. To attribute to a
man the genius to be king of Bohemia, and to receive from everyone
forgiveness for everything, _à cause de ses gentillesses_ to make him
witty also, and a most exquisite and original artist--this would have
been enough for most men, though it was not enough for Whistler. Joe
Sibley, not Little Billee, is the real creation of "an artist" that is
in the book.
§ 4
When _Trilby_ was put on the English stage a girl to play the heroine's
part had to be found. That was the first problem. And speaking of the
fact that a _Trilby_ did appear almost immediately, du Maurier said,
"There is a school which believes that wherever Art leads Nature is
bound to follow. I ought to belong to it, if there is." A _Trilby_ was
heard of; more, du Maurier had often commented upon the beauty of the
lady when she was a child living near him at Hampstead Heath. He
inquired her name. She was already on the stage, and showing promise as
an actress. He still felt sceptical, we are told, and so a photograph
was sent. He said, "No acting will be wanted; for here is Trilby." Miss
Baird was interviewed. "In face and manner," said du Maurier, telling
the story of the interview, "she seemed still more Trilby-like than
ever; but Mr. Tree, who was present, was on thoughts of acting-power
intent. And when he gravely announced that to be an actress a woman
should not be well-born and well-bred, and that if possible she should
have had her home in the wings or the gutter, I considered the matter
settled. We drove away in silence, and I, at any rate, in gloom. For
Miss Baird, refined and gentle, and well-born and well-bred, was still
Trilby for me, and I flatly refused to see either of the ladies whom Mr.
Tree had in mind. Finally, he thought he would see Miss Baird again, and
with her read over a scene or two. He got another cab--returned there
and then--in forty-eight hours the engagement was made."
[Illustration: Illustration for "Esmond"]
It may be found interesting if we revive here a criticism which throws
light on the first reception of the adaption of _Trilby_ for the stage.
The play was put on before the _Trilby_ boom had spent itself, but
critics would, from the nature of their species, be rather prejudiced
against, than carried away in favour of, anything which came in with a
"boom" that was not of their own making. There was a criticism written
of the play at the time by Mr. Justin Huntly Macarthy which, quoted,
will give us the history of the "boom." It was his good fortune to be in
the United States "when," he says, "the taste for _Trilby_ became a
passion, when the passion grew into a mania and the mania deepened into
a madness," and he noted that in England the play and not the novel
kindled the passion; though in the criticism of the novel, classed as it
had been even in this country with the work of Thackeray, he could only
recall one note of dispraise, "so earnest and scornful that, in its
loneliness, it seemed to fall like the clatter of a steel glove in a
house of prayer." He recalled a friend of his goaded to ferocity by
another's exuberance of rapture for some latter-day singers, crying out
"Hang your Decadents! Humpty-Dumpty is worth all they ever wrote."
"This," he continued, "is a variety of the mood which accepts _Trilby_.
In _Trilby_ we get back, as it were, to Humpty-Dumpty--to its simplicity
at least, if not to its pitch of art. The strong man and the odd man and
the boy man, brothers in Bohemianism, brothers in art, brothers
in love for youth and beauty; the girl, the fair, the kind, the
for-ever-desirable, pure in impurity, and sacred even in shame; the dingy
evil genius who gibbers in Yiddish to the God he denies; the hopeless,
devoted musician, whose spirit in a previous existence answered to the
name of Bowes; the mother who makes the appeal that so many parents have
made on behalf of their sons to fair sinners since the days when Duval
the elder interviewed Marguerite Gauthier; all this company of puppets
please in their familiarity, their straightforwardness, their undefeated
obviousness, very much as a game of bowls on a village green with decent
rustics, or a game of romps in a rose-garden with laughing children,
might please after a supper with Nana or an evening with the
Theosophists."
This seems to us to diagnose the case as far as the success of the play
was concerned. But as regards the book at which it was partly aimed, it
is wide of the mark. There is something in a work of fiction when it is
of sufficient power to make a success simply as fiction which cannot be
carried over the footlights. If we only knew Shakespeare through seeing
him acted we should rate him much lower than we do. The success of
Shakespeare upon the stage rests with certain qualities that can only
properly tell upon the stage. But great as these qualities are, in
Shakespeare's case they far from represent his whole art; there remains
unexpressed the fragrance of field and flower, the secrets of mood,
which do not lie with facts that acting can express, and which float
like a perfume between us and the pages. All this the dust of stage
carpentry destroys, and the unnaturalness of lime-light dispels. The
charm in _Trilby_ is overlaid by the obvious, but the charm is there
for the reader, just as the obviousness is there for the stage when the
charm is gone in the adaptation. The stage is the throne of the obvious.
It is possible for art to be obvious and great, as the art of Turner was
in painting. His art was theatrical. It is the obvious that is
theatrical. For that which is theatrical, as the word implies, must be
spectacular. Theatricality before everything else in this world, in any
art, achieves wide and popular success, the kind of success that Turner
achieves in the pictures for which the English public admire him.
Mr. W.D. Howells, in an article written just after the novelist's death,
said:[3]--"It was my good fortune to have the courage to write to du
Maurier when _Trilby_ was only half printed, and to tell him how much I
liked the gay sad story. In every way it was well that I did not wait
for the end, for the last third of it seemed to me so altogether forced
in its conclusions that I could not have offered my praises with a whole
heart, nor he accept them with any pleasure, if the disgust with its
preposterous popularity, which he so frankly, so humorously expressed,
had then begun in him."
The American critic describes the fact of du Maurier commencing novelist
at sixty and succeeding, as one of the most extraordinary things in the
history of literature, and without parallel. Perhaps the parallel has
been shown in the case of Mr. de Morgan. Mr. Howells also speaks of du
Maurier perfecting an attitude recognisable in Fielding, Sterne, Heine,
and Thackeray--the confidential one. Du Maurier's _Trilby_ was a
confidence. But he adds, "It wants the last respect for the reader's
intelligence--it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very
greatest novelists--the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot,
Tourgénief, Tolstoy. But short of this supreme truth, it has every
grace, every beauty, every charm." The word "Every" here seems to us an
American exaggeration. We should ask ourselves whether in spite of all
its confidentialness _Trilby_ makes an intimate revelation. The rare
quality of intimacy, that is the greatest thing in the very greatest
novels.
The "boom" of _Trilby_, we are told, surprised du Maurier immensely, for
he had not taken himself _au sérieux_ as a novelist. Indeed it rather
distressed him when he reflected that Thackeray never had a "boom."
[Illustration: Unpublished drawing from sketch-book]
§5
Although du Maurier had said that his head was full of plots the supply
seemed to have run thin by the time he set to work on _The Martian_. The
value of this book rests with its autobiographical character. The knot
is not tied in the first half and unravelled in the second, after the
approved manner in which plots should be woven. The story is chiefly a
record of people and places, vivid, and written in a breathless, chatty
style. It somewhat resembles the conversation of a boy on returning from
his holidays. It reveals a perfectly amazing resource in imparting life
to mere description. As a writer, du Maurier seemed immediately to
acquire a style unlike that of anyone else. Everything is described with
a zest that carries the reader along, and this manner is even extended
to things that are not worth describing. But he was always slightly
apologetic with pen in hand, never permitting himself the professional
air, or giving a full challenge to criticism by disclaiming the
privileges of a distinguished amateur.
In _Peter Ibbetson_ the artist told the story of his childhood; in
_Trilby_ he recounted the brightest period of his Bohemian youth; in
_The Martian_ he records the nature of the shock he received from
threatened blindness, and the depression of days before his genius had
discovered itself and revealed the prospect of a great career to him.
The effect of Pentonville, the grey suburb, and of the absence of worthy
companions upon a romantic, highly-strung young man in _Peter Ibbetson_
is quite autobiographical, as is the description of student life in
Paris by which afterwards the uninspiring environment is replaced. The
continuation of the studentship at Antwerp, the consultation with the
specialist at Dusseldorf, completes the story of du Maurier's life until
he came to London. There is literally nothing that a biographer could
add to it. And du Maurier wrote his autobiography thus, in tales, which
are histories too, in their graphic description of the aspect of places
and people at a given time. Up to the day when the artist came to London
to seek employment from the publishers he seems to have had
disheartening times. In the last years of his life, when he went over
the ground of these early experiences in his books, it was, as is
evident from the style, in the mood of one who had survived danger by
flood and field to recount his tales in an atmosphere of peace he had
hardly hoped to realise.