gathered their knowledge of English life almost entirely from _Punch_,
and it would be difficult to imagine a more abundant, and on the whole a
more accurate, informant. The accumulated volumes of this periodical
contain evidence on a multitude of points of which there is no mention
in the serious works--not even in the novels--of the day. The smallest
details of social habit are depicted there, and the oddities of a race
of people in whom oddity is strangely compatible with the dominion of
convention. That the ironical view of these things is given does not
injure the force of the testimony, for the irony of _Punch_, strangely
enough, has always been discreet, even delicate. It is a singular fact
that, though taste is not supposed to be the strong point of the English
mind, this eminently representative journal has rarely been guilty of a
violation of decorum. The taste of _Punch_, like its good-humour, has
known very few lapses. The _London Charivari_--we remember how difficult
it was (in 1853) to arrive at the right pronunciation--has in this
respect very little to envy its Parisian original. English comedy is
coarse, French comedy is fine--that would be the general assumption,
certainly, on the part of a French critic. But a comparison between the
back volumes of the _Charivari_ and the back volumes of _Punch_ would
make it necessary to modify this formula. English humour is simple,
innocent, plain, a trifle insipid, apt to sacrifice to the graces, to
the proprieties; but if _Punch_ be our witness English humour is not
coarse. We are fortunately not obliged to declare just now what French
humour appears to be--in the light of the _Charivari_, the _Journal
Amusant_, the _Journal Pour Rire_. A Frenchman may say, in perfect good
faith, that (to his sense) English drollery has doubtless every merit
but that of being droll. French drollery, he may say, is salient,
saltatory; whereas the English comic effort has little freedom of wing.
The French, in these matters, like a great deal of salt; whereas the
English, who spice their food very highly and have a cluster of sharp
condiments on the table, take their caricatures comparatively mild.
_Punch_, in short, is for the family--_Punch_ may be sent up to the
nursery. This surely may be admitted; and it is the fact that _Punch_ is
for the family that constitutes its high value. The family is, after
all, the people; and a satirical sheet which holds up the mirror to this
institution can hardly fail to be instructive. “Yes, if it hold the
mirror up impartially,” we can imagine the foreign critic to rejoin;
“but in these matters the British caricaturist is not to be trusted. He
slurs over a great deal--he omits a great deal more. He must, above all
things, be proper; and there is a whole side of life which, in spite of
his Juvenalian pretensions, he never touches at all.” We must allow the
foreign critic his supposed retort, without taking space to answer
back--we may imagine him to be a bit of a “naturalist”--and admit that
it is perhaps because they are obliged to be proper that Leech and Du
Maurier give us, on the whole, such a cleanly, healthy, friendly picture
of English manners. Such sustained and inveterate propriety is in itself
a great force; it takes in a good deal, as well as leaves out. The
general impression that we derive from the long series of _Punch_ is a
very cheerful and favourable one; it speaks of a vigorous,
good-humoured, much-civilised people. The good-humour is, perhaps, the
most striking point--not only the good-humour of the artist who
represents the scene, but that of the figures engaged in it. The
difference is remarkable in this respect between _Punch_ and the French
comic papers. The wonderful Cham, who for so many years contributed to
those sheets, had an extraordinary sense of the ludicrous and a
boundless stock of facetious invention. He was strangely expressive; he
could place a figure before you, in the most violent action, with half a
dozen strokes of his pencil. But his people were like wild-cats and
scorpions. The temper of the French _bourgeoisie_, as represented by
Cham, is a thing to make one take to one’s heels. They perpetually tear
and rend each other, show their teeth and their claws, kick each other
down-stairs, and pitch each other from windows. All this is in the
highest degree farcical and grotesque; but at bottom it is almost
horrible. (It must be admitted that Cham and his wonderful colleague,
Daumier, are much more horrible than Gavarni, who was admirably real,
and at the same time capable of beauty and grace. Gavarni’s women are
charming; those of Cham and Daumier are monsters.) There is nothing, or
almost nothing, of the horrible in _Punch_. The author of these remarks
has a friend whom he has heard more than once maintain the too-ingenious
thesis that the caricatures of Cham prove the French to be a cruel
people; the same induction could, at least, never be made, even in an
equal spirit of paradox, from the genial pages of _Punch_. “If _Punch_
is never horrible, it is because _Punch_ is always superficial, for life
is full of the horrible”--so we may imagine our naturalistic objector to
go on. However this may be, _Punch_ is fortunate in having fallen on so
smooth a surface. English life, as depicted by Leech and Du Maurier, and
by that admirable Charles Keene--the best-humoured perhaps of the three,
whose talent is so great that we have always wondered why it is not more
comprehensive--is a compound of several very wholesome tastes: the love
of the country, the love of action, the love of a harmless joke within
the limits of due reverence, the love of sport, of horses and dogs, of
family life, of children, of horticulture. With this there are a few
other tastes of a less innocent kind--the love of ardent spirits, for
instance, or of punching people’s heads--or even the love of a lord. In
Leech’s drawings, country life plays a great part; his landscapes, in
their extreme sketchiness, are often admirable. He gave in a few strokes
the look of the hunting-field in winter--the dark damp slopes, the black
dense hedges, the low thick sky. He was very general; he touched on
everything, sooner or later; but he enjoyed his sporting subjects more
than anything else. In this he was thoroughly English. No close observer
of that people can fail to perceive that the love of sport is the thing
that binds them most closely together, and in which they have the
greatest number of feelings in common. Leech depicted, with infinite
vividness, the accidents of the chase and of the fishing-season; and his
treatment of the horse in especial contributed greatly to his
popularity. He understood the animal, he knew him intimately, he loved
him; and he drew him as if he knew how to ride as well as to draw. The
English forgive a great deal to those who ride well; and this is
doubtless why the badness of some of the sporting subjects that have
appeared in _Punch_ since Leech’s death has been tolerated: the artist
has been presumed to have a good seat. Leech never made a mistake; he
did well whatever he did; and it must be remembered that for many years
he furnished the political cartoon to _Punch_, as well as the smaller
drawings. He was always amusing, always full of sense and point, always
intensely English. His foreigner is always an inferior animal--his
Frenchman is the Frenchman of Leicester Square, the Frenchman whom the
Exhibition of 1851 revealed to the people of London. His point is
perfectly perceptible--it is never unduly fine. His children are models
of ruddy, chubby, shy yet sturdy British babyhood; and nothing could be
nicer than his young women. The English maiden, in Leech, is
emphatically a nice girl; modest and fresh, simple and blooming, and
destined evidently for use as much as for ornament. In those early days
to which we referred at the beginning of this article we were deeply in
love with the young ladies of Leech, and we have never ceased to admire
the simple art with which he made these hastily designed creatures
conform unerringly to the English type. They have English eyes and
English cheeks, English figures, English hands and feet, English
ringlets, English petticoats. Leech was extremely observant, but he had
not a strong imagination; he had a sufficient, but not a high sense of
beauty; his ideal of the beautiful had nothing of the unattainable; it
was simply a _résumé_ of the fresh faces he saw about him. The great
thing, however, was that he was a natural, though not in the least an
analytic or an exact, draughtsman; his little figures live and move;
many of his little scenes are stamped on the memory. I have spoken of
his representations of the country, but his town-pictures are numerous
and capital. He knew his London, and his sketches of the good people of
that metropolis are as happy as his episodes in the drawing-room and the
hunting-field. He was admirably broad and free; and no one in his line
has had more than he the knack of giving what is called a general
effect. He conveys at times the look of the London streets--the colour,
the temperature, the damp blackness. He does the winter weather to
perfection. Long before I had seen it I was acquainted, through his
sketches, with the aspect of Baker Street in December. Out of such a
multitude of illustrations it is difficult to choose; the two volumes of
_Sketches of Life and Character_, transferred from _Punch_, are a real
museum. But I recall, for instance, the simple little sketch of the
worthy man up to his neck in bed on a January morning, to whom, on the
other side of the door, the prompt housemaid, with her hammer in her
hand, announces that “I have just broken the ice in your bath, sir.” The
black cold dawn, the very smell of the early chill, that raw sootiness
of the London winter air, the red nose of the housemaid, the
unfashionable street seen through the window--impart a peculiar
vividness to the small inky-looking woodcut.
We have said too much about Leech, however, and the purpose of these
remarks is not to commemorate his work. _Punch_, for the last fifteen
years, has been, artistically speaking, George du Maurier. (We ought,
perhaps, before this, to have said that none of our observations are to
be taken as applying to the letterpress of the comic journal, which has
probably never been fully appreciated in America.) It has employed other
talents than his--notably Charles Keene, who is as broad, as jovial, as
English (half his jokes are against Scotchmen) as Leech, but whose sense
of the beautiful, the delicate, is inferior even to Leech’s. But for a
great many people, certainly in America, Du Maurier has long been, as I
say, the successor of Leech, the embodiment of the pictorial spirit of
_Punch_. Shut up in the narrow limits of black and white, without space,
without colour, without the larger opportunities, Du Maurier has
nevertheless established himself as an exquisite talent and a genuine
artist. He is not so much of a laugher as Leech--he deals in the smile
rather than the laugh--but he is a much deeper observer, and he carries
his drawing infinitely further. He has not Leech’s animal spirits; a
want of boyishness, a tendency to reflection, to lowness of tone, as his
own Postlethwaite would say, is perhaps his limitation. But his
seriousness--if he be too serious--is that of the satirist as
distinguished from the simple joker; and if he reflects, he does so in
the literal sense of the word--holds up a singularly polished and lucid
mirror to the drama of English society. More than twenty years ago, when
he began to draw in _Once a Week_--that not very long-lived periodical
which set out on its career with a high pictorial standard--it was
apparent that the careful young artist who finished his designs very
highly and signed them with a French name, stood very much upon his own
feet. The earliest things of his that we know have the quality which has
made him distinguished to-day--the union of a great sense of beauty with
a great sense of reality. It was apparent from the first that this was
not a simple and uniform talent, but a gift that had sprung from a
combination of sources. It is important to remember, in speaking of Du
Maurier--who is one of the pillars of the British journal _par
excellence_--that he has French blood in his veins. George du Maurier,
as we understand his history, was born in England, of a French father
and an English mother, but was removed to France in his early years and
educated according to the customs of that country. Later, however, he
returned to England; and it would not be difficult for a careful
student of his drawings to guess that England is the land of his
predilection. He has drawn a great many French figures, but he has drawn
them as one who knows them rather than as one who loves them. He has
perhaps been, as the phrase is, a little hard upon the French; at any
rate, he has been decidedly easy for the English. The latter are
assuredly a very handsome race; but if we were to construct an image of
them from the large majority of Du Maurier’s drawings we should see
before us a people of gods and goddesses. This does not alter the fact
that there is a very Gallic element in some of Du Maurier’s gifts--his
fineness of perception, his remarkable power of specifying types, his
taste, his grace, his lightness, a certain refinement of art. It is hard
to imagine that a talent so remarkable should not have given early
evidences; but in spite of such evidences Du Maurier was, on the
threshold of manhood, persuaded by those to whom it was his duty to
listen to turn his attention, as Mrs. Micawber says, to chemistry. He
pursued this science without enthusiasm, though he had for some time a
laboratory of his own. Before long, however, the laboratory was
converted into a studio. His talent insisted on its liberty, and he
committed himself to the plastic. He studied this charming element in
Paris, at Düsseldorf; he began to work in London. This period of his
life was marked by a great calamity, which has left its trace on his
career and his work, and which it is needful to mention in order to
speak with any fairness of these things. Abruptly, without a warning,
his eyesight partly forsook him, and his activity was cruelly
threatened. It is a great pleasure, in alluding to this catastrophe, to
be able to speak of it as a signal example of difficulty vanquished.
George du Maurier was condemned to many dark days, at the end of which
he learned that he should have to carry on his task for the rest of his
life with less than half a man’s portion of the sense most valuable to
the artist. The beautiful work that he has produced in such abundance
for so many years has been achieved under restrictions of vision which
might well have made any work impossible. It is permitted, accordingly,
to imagine that if the artist had had the usual resources, we should not
at the present moment have to consider him simply as an accomplished
draughtsman in black and white. It is impossible to look at many of his
drawings without perceiving that they are full of the art of the
painter, and that the form they have taken, charming as it has been, is
arbitrary and inadequate.
John Leech died on 27th October 1864, and the first sketches in _Punch_
that we recognise as Du Maurier’s appeared in that year. The very
earliest that we have detected belong, indeed, to 5th December 1863.
These beginnings are slight and sketchy head-pieces and vignettes; the
first regular “picture” (with a legend beneath it) that we remember is
of the date of 11th June 1864. It represents a tipsy waiter (or college
servant) on a staircase, where he has smashed a trayful of crockery. We
perceive nothing else of importance for some time after this, but
suddenly his hand appears again in force, and from the summer of 1865
its appearances are frequent. The finish and delicacy, the real elegance
of these early drawings, are extreme: the hand was already the hand of a
brilliant executant. No such manner as this had hitherto been seen in
_Punch_. By the time one had recognised that it was not a happy
accident, but an accomplished habit, it had become the great feature,
the “attraction,” of the comic journal. _Punch_ had never before
suspected that it was so artistic; had never taken itself, in such
matters, so seriously. Much the larger part of Du Maurier’s work has
been done for _Punch_, but he has designed as well many illustrations
for books. The most charming of these perhaps are the drawings he
executed in 1868 for a new edition of Thackeray’s _Esmond_, which had
been preceded several years before by a set of designs for Mrs.
Gaskell’s _Wives and Daughters_, first ushered into the world as a
serial in the _Cornhill_. To the _Cornhill_ for many years Du Maurier
has every month contributed an illustration; he has reproduced every
possible situation that is likely to be encountered in the English novel
of manners; he has interpreted pictorially innumerable flirtations,
wooings, philanderings, ruptures. The interest of the English novel of
manners is frequently the interest of the usual; the situations
presented to the artist are apt to lack superficial strangeness. A lady
and gentleman sitting in a drawing-room, a lady and a gentleman going
out to walk, a sad young woman watching at a sick-bed, a handsome young
man lighting a cigarette--this is the range of incident through which
the designer is called upon to move. But in these drawing-room and
flower-garden episodes the artist is thoroughly at home; he accepts of
course the material that is given him, but we fancy him much more easily
representing quiet, harmonious things than depicting deeds of violence.
It is a noticeable fact that in _Punch_, where he has his liberty, he
very seldom represents such deeds. His occasional departures from this
habit are of a sportive and fantastic sort, in which he ceases to
pretend to be real: like the dream of the timorous Jenkins (15th
February 1868), who sees himself hurled to destruction by a colossal
foreshortened cab-horse. Du Maurier’s fantastic--we speak of the extreme
manifestations of it--is always admirable, ingenious, unexpected,
pictorial; so much so, that we have often wondered that he should not
have cultivated this vein more largely. As a general thing, however, in
these excursions into the impossible it is some _charming_ impossibility
that he offers us--a picture of some happy contrivance which would make
life more diverting: such as the playing of lawn-tennis on skates (on a
lawn of ice), or the faculty on the part of young men on bicycles of
carrying their sweethearts behind them on a pillion. We recommend the
reader to turn to _Punch’s Almanac_ for 1865, in which two brilliant
full-page illustrations represent the “Probable Results of the
Acclimatisation Society.” Nothing could be fuller of delicate fancy and
of pictorial facility than this prophecy of the domestication in the
London streets, and by the Serpentine of innumerable strange
beasts--giraffes, ostriches, zebras, kangaroos, hippopotami, elephants,
lions, panthers. Speaking of strange beasts, the strangest of all
perhaps is the wonderful big dog who has figured of late years in Du
Maurier’s drawings, and who has probably passed with many persons as a
kind of pictorial caprice. He is depicted as of such super-canine
proportions, quite overshadowing and dwarfing the amiable family to whom
he is represented as belonging, that he might be supposed to be another
illustration of the artist’s turn for the heroic in the graceful. But,
as it happens, he is not an invention, but a portrait--the portrait of a
magnificent original, a literally gigantic St. Bernard, the property of
the artist--the biggest, the handsomest, the most benignant of all
domesticated shaggy things.
We think we are safe in saying that those ruder forms of incongruity
which as a general thing constitute the stock-in-trade of the
caricaturist fail to commend themselves to this particular satirist. He
is too fond of the beautiful--his great passion is for the lovely; not
for what is called ideal beauty, which is usually a matter of not very
successful guess-work, but for loveliness observed in the life and
manners around him, and reproduced with a generous desire to represent
it as usual. The French express a certain difference better than we;
they talk of those who see _en beau_ and those who see _en laid_. Du
Maurier is as highly developed an example as we could desire of the
former tendency--just as Cham and Daumier are examples of the latter;
just, too, if we may venture to select instances from the staff of
_Punch_, as Charles Keene and Linley Sambourne are examples of the
latter. Du Maurier can see ugliness wonderfully well when he has a
strong motive for looking for it, as witness so many of the figures in
his crusade against the “æsthetic” movement. Who could be uglier than
Maudle and Postlethwaite and all the other apparitions from “passionate
Brompton”? Who could have more bulging foreheads, more protuberant eyes,
more retreating jaws, more sloping shoulders, more objectionable hair,
more of the signs generally of personal debility? To say, as we said
just now, that Du Maurier carries his specification of types very far is
to say mainly that he defines with peculiar completeness his queer
people, his failures, his grotesques. But it strikes us that it is just
this vivid and affectionate appreciation of beauty that makes him do
such justice to the eccentrics. We have heard his ugly creations called
malignant--compared (to their disadvantage) with similar figures in
Leech. Leech, it was said, is always good-natured and jovial, even in
the excesses of caricature; whereas his successor (with a much greater
brilliancy of execution) betrays, in dealing with the oddities of the
human family, a taint of “French ferocity.” We think the discrimination
fallacious; and it is only because we do not believe Du Maurier’s
reputation for amiability to be really in danger that we do not hasten
to defend him from the charge of ferocity--French or English. The fact
is he attempts discriminations that Leech never dreamt of. Leech’s
characterisations are all simple, whereas Du Maurier’s are extremely
complicated. He would like every one to be tall and straight and fair,
to have a well-cut mouth and chin, a well-poised head, well-shaped legs,
an air of nobleness, of happy development. He perceives, however, that
nature plays us some dreadful tricks, and he measures her departure from
these beautiful conditions with extreme displeasure. He regrets it with
all the force of his appreciation of the beautiful, and he feels the
strongest desire to indicate the culpability of the aberration. He has
an artistic æsthetic need to make ugly people as ugly as they are; he
holds that such serious facts should not be superficially treated. And
then, besides that, his fancy finds a real entertainment in the
completeness, in the perfection, of certain forms of facial queerness.
No one has rendered like Du Maurier the ridiculous little people who
crop up in the interstices of that huge and complicated London world. We
have no such finished types as these in America. If the English find us
all a little odd, oddity, in American society, never ripens and rounds
itself off so perfectly as in some of these products of a richer
tradition. All those English terms of characterisation which exist in
America at the most only as precarious exotics, but which are on every
one’s lips in England--the snob, the cad, the prig, the duffer--Du
Maurier has given us a thousand times the figure they belong to. No one
has done the “duffer” so well; there are a hundred variations of the
countenance of Mr. McJoseph, the gentleman commemorated in _Punch_ on
the 19th August 1876; or the even happier physiognomy of the other
gentleman who on the 2d November 1872 says to a lady that he “never
feels safe from the British snob till he is south of the Danube,” and to
whom the lady retorts, “And what do the South Danubians say?” This
personage is in profile: his face is fat, complacent, cautious; his hair
and whiskers have as many curves and flourishes as the signature of a
writing-master; he is an incarnation of certain familiar elements of
English life--“the great middle class,” the Philistinism, the absence of
irony, the smugness and literalism. Du Maurier is full of soft irony: he
has that infusion of it which is indispensable to an artistic nature,
and we may add that in this respect he seems to us more French than
English. This quality has helped him immensely to find material in the
so-called æsthetic movement of the last few years. None of his duffers
have been so good as his æsthetic duffers. But of this episode we must
wait a little to speak. The point that, for the moment, we wished to
make is, that he has a peculiar perception of the look of breeding, of
race; and that, left to himself, as it were, he would ask nothing better
than to make it the prerogative of all his characters. Only he is not
left to himself. For, looking about into the world he perceives Sir
Gorgius Midas and Mr. McJoseph, and the whole multitude of the vulgar
who have not been cultivated like orchids and race-horses. But his
extreme inclination to give his figures the benefit of the supposition
that most people have the feelings of gentlemen makes him, as we began
by saying, a very happy interpreter of those frequent works of fiction
of which the action goes on for the most part in the drawing-room of the
British country house. Every drawing-room, unfortunately, is not a home
of the graces; but for the artist, given such an apartment, a group of
quiet, well-shaped people is more or less implied. The “fashionable
novel,” as it flourished about 1830, is no more; and its extinction is
not to be regretted. We believe it was rarely accompanied with
illustrations; but if it were to be revived Du Maurier would be the man
to make the pictures--the pictures of people rather slim and still, with
long necks and limbs so straight that they look stiff, who might be
treated with the amount of derision justified (if the fashionable novel
of 1830 is to be believed) by their passion for talking bad French.