was du Maurier's senior on the paper by a year or two. He has very
kindly sent the writer the following impression of the artist: "That he
was beloved as a cheery, witty _confrère_, goes without saying. Rarely
did he mix himself up with politics in any shape or form. I doubt if he
ever gave us any assistance in devising a political cartoon. What his
politics were I am unable to say, and I do not think he troubled himself
about the matter. In 'the old days' he delighted in chaffing Horace
Mayhew, with whom he exchanged 'slang' in French. With the jovial
proprietor, William Bradbury, he was always on the best of terms of
friendly nonsense, being invariably his left-hand neighbour at 'The
Table.' He was a genuine Bohemian of the artistic fraternity (as given
in his _Trilby_) with the true polish of an English gentleman, of the
kindest disposition, and of the warmest heart. All who knew him well
loved him, and none missed him more than his fellow-workers on _Punch_."
"His religion," Sir Francis volunteered in a further note, "as that of
the majority of his French _confrères_, you will find it in the artistic
sketches of the men and women in _La Bohème_" "His guardian angel,
humanly and socially, was his wife."
Everyone who knew du Maurier now speaks of his attractiveness and the
simplicity and honesty of his nature. He was not really very fond of
"Society" because of its code of insincerity. He was its satirist for
the same reason that, much as he liked "to be with people," he was not
at-home where manners were affected. The Victorians who survive to this
day hold up their hands in horror at present-day manners; they object to
our natural, comfortable ways and clothes; they define our naturalness
as laziness. But just because it is so constitutional to be lazy, the
casual modern manners, so true to the exact shade of our enthusiasm for,
or indifference to any particular person or thing, express our virtue.
We are too honest to pretend. We look back with amusement to the
Victorians, who put all their goods in the shop window, whose very
movements were so far without freedom as to be subservient to the
maintenance of uncreased clothing. A regard for "appearances" seemed to
regulate action. It was an age of _poseurs_--the age of the
"professional air." In that age came into use among doctors "the bedside
manner." Shop-walkers then distinguished themselves from the rest of the
race by their preposterous antics, artists endured the misery of velvet
jackets; women tight-laced, men about town invented the crease in the
trouser-leg to keep which in order alone demands the fealty of a
lifetime. In summer men consented to be roasted alive on the London
pavement rather than part with the frock-coat in which their depraved
conception of beauty delighted. In those days one imagines people were
only comfortable when once safely in bed, and that was never for long at
a time; for the sake of appearances the Victorians got up early.
[Illustration:
Speed the Parting Guest
(Things one would rather have left unsaid.)
"We've had such a pleasant evening, Mr. Jones! _May_ I beg of you to ask
one of your servants to call a Hansom?"
"With _pleasure_, Mrs. Smith!"
_Punch_, March_ 10, 1883.]
The Royal Academy Exhibitions of the time proved that it was impossible
for a Victorian to be an artist. The artists of the time did not belong
to their own age. We had Rossetti ever seeking to lose himself in the
illusion of another time and country, and Whistler trying to find
himself in the reality of another place. Chelsea was well outside of
Victorian London. Perhaps Hampstead, a place like Chelsea, that belongs
to no particular time, was outside of it too. Kensington and Bayswater
are Victorian to this day. Rossetti in Kensington is a vision from which
imagination recoils, Whistler in Bayswater one which passes the
invention of human fancy. Du Maurier liked to come into Victorian London
in a carriage from a distance, as a visitor, to be driven away again. He
approached its society critically. He acknowledged the distinction of
its grave self-consciousness while exposing its ridiculous airs.
* * * * *
Just as Chelsea is a more desirable place to live in because of its
"Rossetti" associations, so Hampstead gains from the memory of the witty
and generous satirist who made it his home. New Grove House, where du
Maurier lived for over twenty years, might have been designed for him;
it escapes the suburban style that would have been an affliction to one
so romantic.
Nearly all artists who have sustained their powers in a refined field
of expression have been glad to count upon monotony in the passage of
their days. The adventurous temperament is not the artistic one. The
artist values security from interruptions above everything, and
interruption is of the essence of adventure. Du Maurier lived a life
that was for an artist characteristic. He was at pains to preserve his
days from being broken into. It is above the plane where human life is
open to crude forms of calamity and the stress of elemental passion,
upon a plane where freedom from anxiety is secure that art is able to
exert itself in attaining to the expression of the more valuable,
because more intimate, experiences of human nature.
Du Maurier died on the 8th October 1896. His grave at Hampstead is
singularly happily placed and constructed. It consists of two carved
wood crosses, respectively at head and foot, connected by a panel
containing, in addition to the name and dates, only the concluding lines
of _Trilby_:--
"A little trust that when we die
We reap our sowing! And so--good-bye!"
The grave is close to the pavement, and it is impossible to go that way
without seeing it. We can imagine that one who was so entirely the
opposite of misanthropic would wish to lie like this within sound of
passing conversation.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Pennell's _Life of Whistler_.
[5] Archibald Constable & Co.
V
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
§1
It may be well to touch upon some of the characteristics of our
illustrations in detail before closing this book. Many of them are so
obviously involved in what has already been said here of the artist's
work that we do not propose to mention them again; but others suggest
remarks which would not have incorporated easily in the attempt we have
made to demonstrate the significance of du Maurier's art in general.
Taken in the order in which they are printed here, the first
illustrations show the range of effect and variety of line which the
artist was afterwards to narrow into the conventions by which he is now
chiefly remembered. But if such an effect as that in the picture
_Caution_, for instance, would not have been possible with him in his
last period, it was because the nature of the subjects required on
the journal which absorbed most of his energies afforded no stimulus for
anything so Rembrandtesque. He brought such possibilities of style over
from his romantic period in _The Cornhill Magazine_, and it must be
admitted that the effect in this drawing seems too powerful for the
music-hall comedy it has to carry off.
[Illustration: Sketch for Initial Letter in
_The Cornhill_, October, 1883.]
A picture bewitching on account of the grace it contains is that called
"Berkeley Square." Du Maurier had quickly perceived that the quality of
grace could well survive side by side with any amount of humour. It is
interesting to try and imagine what Phil May would have made of the
scene. It was intended for a poignant one, but it becomes chiefly a very
attractive one in du Maurier's hands, the pathos lying with the wording
rather than the picture.
The drawing affords us many characteristics of his work. The lady in
white reclining in the vehicle is a very embodiment of elegance, and the
discerning drawing that defines the coachman repays observation, as also
the "style" with which the white horse is swiftly shaded in. It was once
the custom for the carriages of people in fashion to draw up under the
trees in Berkeley Square, in summer, for tea brought out from Gunter's.
Last summer one of the evening papers asked the question why the custom
had lapsed. Du Maurier's drawing of the scene was accompanied by the
following lines, which perhaps provide the answer.
BERKELEY SQUARE, 5 P.M.
The weather is warm as I walk in the Square,
And observe her barouche standing tranquilly there,
It is under the trees, it is out of the sun,
In the corner where Gunter retails a plain bun.
How solemn she looks, I have seen a mute merrier--
Plumes a sky-blue, and her pet a sky-terrier--
The scene is majestic, and peaceful, and shady,
Miss Humble sits facing: I pity that lady.
Her footman goes once, and her footman goes twice,
Ay, and each time returning he brings her an ice.
The patient Miss Humble receives, when he comes,
A diminutive bun; let us hope it has plums!
Now is not this vile. When I tickle my chops,
Which I frequently do, I subside into shops:
We do not object to this solemn employment,
But why _afficher_ such material enjoyment?
Some beggars stand by--I extremely regret it--
They wish for a taste. Don't they wish they may get it?
She thus aggravates both the humble and needy,
You'll own she is thoughtless, perhaps she is greedy.
The pictures "Queen Prima Donna" and "Proxy" are two early nursery
scenes of the many du Maurier contributed to _Punch_. They show the
style, the flowing and painter-like stroke of the pen that revealed such
a Rossetti-like sense of material beauty in his earlier drawings--a
style worthy of the refinement of the subject in "Proxy," the charm in
it of sentiment that humour strengthens rather than displaces. The
drawing expresses childhood, in circumstances where it can expand
without loss of bloom through contention with unhappy circumstances. It
shows the human beauty that expands from the conserved force of life
when it has not to contend with unfavourable environment. Beauty is
perhaps the one certain result of favourable environment. The ideal
within "Socialism" which makes even its opponents Socialists is the
aspiration that some day everyone will be favourably environed.
§2
It was a long while before the result of always working for a comic
paper took effect on du Maurier. Not for some time did the knowledge
that everything can be made to appear ridiculous persuade the artist to
believe with his editor that everything is ridiculous. The humour of his
subjects is still a part and not the whole of those subjects in his art,
and this was all to the glory of the great comic paper in which he drew,
for the humour of nothing in the world is the whole of that thing. Farce
represents it so to be. Du Maurier had no genius for Farce. He responded
to actual life; Farce is artificial; it is thus that the beauty and
charm as well as the humour of life were involved in his
representations.
Humour for humour's sake has brought about the downfall of every comic
paper that has tried it. _Punch_ has been saved from it by the wilful
seriousness of some of its contributors. Every now and then, with
something like "The Song of the Shirt" or, in another vein, a cartoon of
Tenniel's, _Punch_ has been brought back to Reality and thus to the only
source of humour.
In the drawing "Honour where Honour is Due" the point is made in the
legend, but the illustration illuminates it rather brutally. It is a
picture in which we find du Maurier expressing the prejudices of the old
régime against the _nouveau riche_. It illustrates a prejudice rather
than a fact. It was not at all true in Victoria's reign that money
would carry a man anywhere. In that time the man with money only but
without birth wanted better manners than the man with everything else
but money to get him into Society. It was less the objectionableness of
trade--as du Maurier in such a drawing as this tried to imply--than the
advance of it that the old aristocracy really resented.
A drawing characteristic of the artist's work in the eighties--in 1880
to be definite--is that entitled "Mutual Admirationists." It really
dates itself. It is descriptive of one of the moods of "passionate
Brompton." The satire of the three admiring ladies is perfect. In our
own time ladies have gazed like this at genius. Sometimes genius is
really there, sometimes it is not--but the profound and undying belief
of women in it, often expressed beautifully as well as absurdly, is the
rain from heaven enabling it to thrive. In the expressive drawing of the
faces and the bearing of the three ladies in this picture we have du
Maurier's real humour--its reality in its closeness to life, and his
genius in expressing through contour the whole tale of strange æsthetic
enthusiasm.
In an earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed
"æstheticism" from the inside. He hardly draws any figures so happily as
those of bored, poetic youths. In _Sic Transit Gloria Mundi_ he does not
depict "The Duke" of the scene half so convincingly as the young gossip
talking to the Duchess. No one else in the world could have drawn so
well that young man, with his weak, but Oxford voice--it is almost to be
heard--and tired but graceful manners.
The drawing "Post-Prandial Pessimists" is not so sympathetic--which
means that it is not so intimate in touch and full of knowledge. The
straight mechanical lines with which the clothes are drawn are rather
meaningless. This treatment represents a convention, and a bad one,
because it covers the paper without really conveying the elasticity of
clothing or the animation of muscle determining its folds. At this stage
of his career du Maurier has begun to work rather mechanically and by a
recipe; he is less curious of form as it actually is to be observed, and
more content with just making a drawing in as neat and as businesslike a
way as possible, with the wording of the legend uppermost in his
thoughts. The artist is disappearing in the "_Punch_ Artist." The
drawing of detail, for instance, inclines to be blotty; it is no
longer affectionately done. At least the pre-Raphaelite in du Maurier is
now dead. The artist's early drawings, where his native tastes break
into expression, are pre-Raphaelite in feeling. He made a bad
impressionist, a thoroughly bad imitator of Keene's success with
impressionism. He lost what was most his own when he "threw over" his
belief in glamour, and took to laughing at his own enthusiasms; when he
ceased to confine his mockery to things that he hated, as he hated the
æsthetic movement. The gods revenged his satire of the inspiration of
the pre-Raphaelites in the _Tale of Camelot_ by taking that inspiration
away from himself.
[Illustration: "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi!"
"By the way, Duchess, supposing that we _do_ succeed in getting the
House of Lords abolished this Session, won't it be a great blow to the
Duke?"
"Yes, if he ever hears of it; but I shan't tell him, you know!"
_Punch_, March 22, 1884. ]
The drawing "Things one would rather have expressed Differently"
(reproduced opposite page 194) represents du Maurier's final phase at
its very best. It has the precision of workmanship of a thing executed
to a well-tried recipe. It is dainty as well as precise; and still in
the way the dimpling of soft dress fabric is touched in, sympathetic,
and characteristic of the earlier du Maurier. It belongs to the _Trilby_
period, but is better than the illustrations to _Trilby_.
§ 3
The unpublished sketches which we have been allowed to reproduce from du
Maurier's private sketch-book, and which we are using as end pieces, are
very interesting. In the strictest artistic sense there is very little
of the art of pen-drawing to-day. In the work done with the pen for
modern illustration the inking-in is too much of an after process of ink
upon pencil work. The quality of the drawing is really determined by the
pencil, which is the actual medium of work. In going over the pencil
work the ink-line follows it in many cases so closely that it cannot
assert the characteristics of penmanship. But in making preliminary
small studies for a picture with the pen, an artist, feeling less
necessity for a certain kind of accuracy, often uses the pen much more
freely, sympathetically, and happily because he is actually drawing with
it and not merely following over forms determined first in another
medium. We have printed the reproductions from the sketch-book about
their original size. Many of them express the freer qualities of real
pen-drawing--an autographic character in the line-work akin to that
secured in original etching. The pen is an instrument that works best on
a small scale, in which it can be manipulated flexibly in the fingers;
in this it is like the etching-needle itself. The artist working direct
with his pen has before him while he draws the actual effect of his ink
on paper, instead of having to imagine it in advance while he works out
his subject in pencil. The vignette of the man lying back in his chair
near the leaded window (page 147) has qualities in the shadow of the
window that we look to find in vain in du Maurier's professional work.
It is a sympathetic pen-drawing; the lines express much more than a
formula--they secure a dramatic play of shadow.
This memorandum--for that is what the drawing is--was, we believe, never
used by du Maurier, though some of the sketches appearing here--that,
for instance, of the lady with a child in her arms (page 64), and that
of the girl in a window-seat, wearing a frilled dress (facing page
176)--can be found serving as initial letters and head-pieces in the
early _Cornhill Magazines_, carried no farther in finish than they are
here.
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.
Photographs, which are driving pen illustrations out of the illustrated
papers, are in themselves many of them highly artistic and beautiful,
but in another sense familiarity with photographs has damaged the
public sense of art and lost us the taste for merry, irresponsible
freedom of drawing. There was no poverty in du Maurier's skill in
illustration; but one is compelled to believe his resources as an artist
never fully revealed themselves for the lack of the encouragement which
only a small cultivated public is prepared to give. He reconciled
himself to the big public with its less refined standard. His companion
Whistler remained loyal to the few who, by their quick response, could
follow the work of his genius in its last refinements. Du Maurier had
more artistic energy than Whistler, but he lived in a less exalted
artistic mood. Comparison of this kind would be irrelevant but for the
fact that behind all du Maurier's work in _Punch_ there seems to hover
an artist of a different kind from the one which it was possible for Mr.
Punch to employ.
[Illustration: Post-Prandial Pessimists
SCENE--The smoking-room at the Decadents.
_First Decadent_ (M.A., Oxon.). "After all, Smythe, what would Life be
without Coffee?"
_Second Decadent_ (B.A., Camb.). "True, Jeohnes, True! And yet, after
all, what is Life _with_ Coffee?"
_Punch_, October 15, 1892.]
§4
Sometimes we hear critics discussing whether beauty is or is not the
object of Art. As a matter of fact it does not really matter much
whether beauty is the object, since it is always the result of true
art. Craft is the language of an artist's sympathies--inspiration
flagging at the point where sympathy evaporates. The quality of craft is
the barometer of the degree of the artist's response to some aspect of
life. Absence of beauty in craftsmanship indicates absence of
inspiration, the failure to respond to life.
Though du Maurier fell short of Keene in breadth of inspiration, there
were still aspects of life which he represented better than that master,
phases of life which he approached with greater eagerness. He expressed
perfectly once and for all in art the life of the drawing-room in the
great days of the drawing-room, as did Watteau the life of the Court in
the great days of a Court. Men take their rank in art by expressing
completely something which others have expressed incidentally.
There is now the glamour of the past upon du Maurier's work in _Punch_.
The farther we are away in distance of time from the date of the
execution of a work of art the more legendary and fabulous its tale
becomes. In good work forgotten costumes seem bizarre but not
preposterous. Whenever in a picture a thing looks preposterous--except
in the art of caricature, and du Maurier was not a caricaturist--the
representation of it in the picture is a bad one. We never find in the
paintings of Vandyke, Velasquez, Gainsborough, or other great artists,
however difficult the period of fashion with which they had to deal,
anything preposterous--always something beautiful, however unreasonable
in ornamentation and clothes. Sometimes it is said that beauty and
simplicity are the same. But we have to remember that complexity remains
simple whilst unconsciousness of complexity remains. There were several
periods of dress that retained beauty and complexity side by side. We
find beauty to-day in the avoidance of complexity, because, being at
last really civilised, we are impatient of irrelevance even in dress. Du
Maurier was never for a moment conscious that there was in all the
rigmarole of Victorian costume and decoration anything redundant. He
seemed to take, in decoration for instance, the draped mantelpiece with
its bows of ribbons, and pinned fans quite as seriously as Velasquez
took the hooped skirt in costume. Artifice is fascinating in those with
whom it is natural to be artificial. When du Maurier thought he
recognised merely a passing "fashion" and hit out at it, he made far
less interesting pictures for posterity than when he took the outward
aspect of the age he lived in as being in the natural order of things.
§5
The Victorian age--which invented _Punch_, the greatest humorous paper
the world has ever known--had no sense of humour. It was the age of
serious people. The secret of the character of _Punch_ as an organ of
satire is that it represents the times, scorning only what the English
people scorn. This representative attitude is, I believe, quite puzzling
to many editors of foreign publications, who seem to conceive the
business of satire to be mockery of everything.