twenty years, and Du Maurier’s work, which during this long period is
remarkably abundant and various, has given us more impressions than we
can hope to put into form. The result of sitting for several hours at
such a banquet of drollery, of poring over so many caricatures, of
catching the point of so many jokes, is a kind of indigestion of the
visual sense. This is especially the case if one happens to be liable to
confusions and lapses of memory. Every picture, every pleasantry, drives
the last out of the mind, and even the figures we recall best get mixed
up with another story than their own. The early drawings, as a general
thing, are larger than the late ones; we believe that the artist was
obliged to make them large in order to make them at all. (They were then
photographed, much reduced, upon the block; and it is impossible to form
an idea of the delicacy of Du Maurier’s work without having seen the
designs themselves, which are in pen and ink.) As the years have gone on
the artist has apparently been able to use a shorter stroke, there has
been less need of reducing it, and the full-page picture has become more
rare. The wealth of execution was sometimes out of proportion to the
jest beneath the cut; the joke might be as much or as little of a joke
as one would, the picture was at any rate before all things a picture.
What could be more charming than the drawing (24th October 1868) of the
unconscious Oriana and the ingenious Jones? It is a real work of art, a
thing to have had the honours of colour, and of the “line” at the
Academy; and that the artist should have been able to give it to us for
threepence, on the reverse of a printed page, is a striking proof of his
affluence. The unconscious Oriana--she is drawn very large--sits in the
foreground, in the shadow of some rocks that ornament the sands at a
bathing-place. Her beautiful hair falls over her shoulders (she has been
taking her bath, and has hung her tresses out to dry), and her charming
eyes are bent upon the second volume of a novel. The beach stretches
away into the distance--with all the expression of space; and here the
ingenious Jones carries out his little scheme of catching a portrait of
the object--an object profoundly indifferent--of his adoration. He
pretends to sit to an itinerant photographer, and apparently places
himself in the line of the instrument, which in reality, thanks to a
private understanding with the artist, is focussed upon the figure of
his mistress. There is not much landscape in Du Maurier--the background
is almost always an interior; but whenever he attempts an out-of-door
scene he does it admirably. What could be prettier and at the same time
more real than the big view (9th September 1876) of the low tide on
Scarborough sands? We forget the joke, but we remember the scene--two or
three figures, with their backs to us, leaning over a terrace or balcony
in the foreground, and looking down at the great expanse of the
uncovered beach, which is crowded with the activities of a populous
bathing-place. The bathers, the walkers, the machines, the horses, the
dogs, are seen with distinctness--a multitude of little black
points--as under a magnifying glass; the whole place looks vast and
swarming, and the particular impression the artist wished to convey is
thoroughly caught. The particular impression--that is the great point
with Du Maurier; his intention is never vague; he likes to specify the
place, the hour, the circumstances. We forget the joke, but we remember
the scene. This may easily happen, as one looks over Du Maurier’s work;
we frankly confess that though he often amuses us, he never strikes us
primarily as a joker. It is not the exuberance of his humour but the
purity of his line that arrests us, and we think of him much less as a
purveyor of fun than as a charming draughtsman who has been led by
circumstances to cultivate a vein of pleasantry. At every turn we find
the fatal gift of beauty, by which we mean that his people are so
charming that their prettiness throws the legend into the shade. Beauty
comes so easily to him that he lavishes it with unconscious freedom. If
he represents Angelina reprimanding the housemaid, it is ten to one that
Angelina will be a Juno and the housemaid a Hebe. Whatever be the joke,
this element of grace almost makes the picture serious. The point of
course is not that Angelina should be lovely, but that the housemaid
should be ridiculous; and you feel that if you should call the artist’s
attention to this he would reply: “I am really very sorry, but she is
the plainest woman I can make--for the money!” This is what happens
throughout--his women (and we may add his children) being monotonously,
incorrigibly fair. He is exceedingly fond of children; he has
represented them largely at every age and in every attitude; but we can
scarcely recall an instance of his making them anything but beautiful.
They are always delightful--they are the nicest children in the world.
They say droll things, but they never do ugly ones, and their whole
child-world is harmonious and happy. We might have referred that critic
whom we quoted above, who observed in Du Maurier’s manner the element of
“ferocity,” to the leniency of his treatment of the rising generation.
The children of Cham are little monsters; so are Daumier’s; and the
infants of Gavarni, with a grace of their own, like everything he drew,
are simply rather diminutive and rather more sophisticated adults. Du
Maurier is fond of large families, of the picturesqueness of the British
nursery; he is a votary of the _culte du bébé_ and has never a happier
touch than when he represents a blooming brood walking out in gradations
of size. The pretty points of children are intimately known to him, and
he throws them into high relief; he understands, moreover, the infant
wardrobe as well as the infant mind. His little boys and girls are
“turned out” with a completeness which has made the despair of many an
American mother. It may perhaps appear invidious to say that the little
girls are even nicer than the little boys, but this is no more than
natural, with the artist’s delicate appreciation of female loveliness.
It begins, to his vision, in the earliest periods and goes on increasing
till it is embodied in the stature of those slim Junos of whom we have
spoken.
It is easy to see that Du Maurier is of the eminently justifiable
opinion that nothing in the world is so fair as the fairness of fair
women; and if so many of his women are fair, it is to be inferred that
he has a secret for drawing out their advantages. This secret, indeed,
is simply that fineness of perception of which we have already had
occasion to speak and to which it is necessary so often to refer. He is
evidently of the opinion that almost any woman has beauty if you look at
her in the right way--carefully enough, intelligently enough; and that
_a fortiori_ the exceptionally handsome women contain treasures of
plasticity. Feminine line and surface, curves of shoulder, stretches of
arm, turns of head, undulations of step, are matters of attentive study
to him; and his women have for the most part the art of looking as if
they excelled in amiability as much as in contour. We know a gentleman
who, on being requested to inscribe himself on one of those formidable
folios kept in certain houses, in which you indite the name of your
favourite flower, favourite virtue, favourite historical character,
wrote, in the compartment dedicated to the “three favourite qualities in
a woman” the simple words: “Grace. Grace. Grace.” Du Maurier might have
been this gentleman, for his women are inveterately and imperturbably
graceful. We have heard people complain of it; complain too that they
all look alike, that they are always sisters--all products of a single
birth. They have indeed a mutual resemblance; but when once the
beautiful type has been found, we see no reason why, from a restless
love of change, the artist should depart from it. We should feel as if
Du Maurier had been fickle and faithless if he were suddenly to cease to
offer us the tall, tranquil persons he understands so well. They have an
inestimable look of repose, a kind of Greek serenity. There is a figure
in a cut of which we have forgotten both the “point” and the date (we
mention it at hazard--it is one in a hundred), which only needed to be
modelled in clay to be a truly “important” creation. A couple of
children address themselves to a youthful aunt, who leans her hand upon
a toilet-table, presenting her back, clothed in a loose gown, not
gathered in at the waist, to the spectator. Her charming pose, the way
her head slowly turns, the beautiful folds of her robe, make her look
more like a statuette in a museum than like a figure in _Punch_. We have
forgotten what the children are saying, but we remember her charming
attitude, which is a capital example of the love of beauty for beauty’s
sake. It is the same bias as the characteristic of the poet.
The intention of these remarks has been supposed to be rather a view of
Du Maurier in his relation to English society than a technical estimate
of his powers--a line of criticism to which we may already appear
unduly to have committed ourselves. He is predominantly a painter of
social as distinguished from popular life, and when the other day he
collected some of his drawings into a volume he found it natural to give
them the title of _English Society at Home_. He looks at the luxurious
classes more than at the people, though he by no means ignores the
humours of humble life. His consideration of the peculiarities of
costermongers and “cadgers” is comparatively perfunctory, as he is too
fond of civilisation and of the higher refinements of the grotesque. His
colleague, the frank and objective Keene, has a more natural familiarity
with the British populace. There is a whole side of English life at
which Du Maurier scarcely glances--the great sporting element, which
supplies half of their gaiety and all their conversation to millions of
her Majesty’s subjects. He is shy of the turf and of the cricket-field;
he only touches here and there upon the river; but he has made “society”
completely his own--he has sounded its depths, explored its mysteries,
discovered and divulged its secrets. His observation of these things is
extraordinarily acute, and his illustrations, taken together, form a
complete comedy of manners, in which the same personages constantly
reappear, so that we have the sense, indispensable to keenness of
interest, of tracing their adventures to a climax. So many of the
conditions of English life are spectacular (and to American eyes even
romantic) that Du Maurier has never been at a loss for subjects. He may
have been at a loss for his joke--we hardly see how he could fail to be,
at the rate at which he has been obliged to produce; but we repeat that
to ourselves the joke is the least part of the affair. We mean that he
is never at a loss for scenes. English society makes scenes all round
him, and he has only to look to see the most charming combinations,
which at the same time have the merit that you can always take the
satirical view of them. He sees, for instance, the people in the Park;
the crowd that gathers under the trees on June afternoons to watch the
spectacle of the Row, with the slow, solemn jostle of the drive going on
behind it. Such a spectacle as this may be vain and unprofitable to a
mind bent upon higher business, but it is full of material for the
artist, who finds a fund of inspiration in the thousand figures, faces,
types, accidents, attitudes. The way people stand and sit, the way they
stroll and pause, the way they lean over the rail to talk to one of the
riders, the way they stare and yawn and bore themselves--these things
are charming to Du Maurier, who always reproduces the _act_ with
wonderful fidelity. This we should bear in mind, having spoken above of
his aversion to the violent. He has indeed a preference for quiet and
gradual movements. But it is not in the least because he is not able to
make the movement definite. No one represents a particular attitude
better than he; and it is not too much to say that the less flagrant the
attitude, the more latent its intention, the more successfully he
represents it.
The postures people take while they are waiting for dinner, while they
are thinking what to say, while they are pretending to listen to music,
while they are making speeches they don’t mean; the thousand strange and
dreary expressions (of face and figure) which the detached mind may
catch at any moment in wandering over a collection of people who are
supposed to be amusing themselves in a superior manner--all this is
entirely familiar to Du Maurier; he renders it with inimitable fidelity.
His is the detached mind--he takes refuge in the divine independence of
art. He reproduces to the life the gentleman who is looking with
extraordinary solemnity at his boots, the lady who is gazing with sudden
rapture at the ceiling, the grimaces of fifty people who would be
surprised at their reflection if the mirror were suddenly to be
presented to them. In such visions as these of course the comical
mingles with the beautiful, and fond as Du Maurier is of the beautiful,
it is sometimes heroically sacrificed. At any rate the comic effect is
(in the drawing) never missed. The legend that accompanies it may
sometimes appear to be wanting in the grossest drollery, but the
expression of the figures is always such that you must say: “How he has
hit it!” This is the kind of comedy in which Du Maurier excels--the
comedy of those social relations in which the incongruities are pressed
beneath the surface, so that the picture has need of a certain amount of
explanation. The explanation is often rather elaborate--in many cases
one may almost fancy that the image came first and the motive afterward.
That is, it looks as if the artist, having seen a group of persons in
certain positions, had said to himself: “They must--or at least they
_may_--be saying so and so;” and then had represented these positions
and affixed the interpretation. He passes over none of those occasions
on which society congregates--the garden-party, the picnic, the
flower-show, the polo-match (though he has not much cultivated the
humours of sport, he has represented polo more than once, and he has
done ample justice to lawn-tennis, just as he did it, years ago, to the
charming, dawdling, “spooning” tedium of croquet, which he depicted as
played only by the most adorable young women, with the most diminutive
feet); but he introduces us more particularly to indoors
entertainments--to the London dinner-party in all those variations which
cover such a general sameness; to the afternoon tea, to the fashionable
“squash,” to the late and suffocating “small and early,” to the
scientific _conversazione_, to the evening with a little music. His
musical parties are numerous and admirable--he has exposed in perfection
the weak points of those entertainments: the infatuated tenor, bawling
into the void of the public indifference; the air of lassitude that
pervades the company; the woe-begone look of certain faces; the false
and overacted attention of certain others; the young lady who is wishing
to sing, and whose mamma is glaring at the young lady who _is_ singing;
the bristling heads of foreigners of the professional class, which stand
out against the sleekness of British respectability.
Du Maurier understands the foreigner as no caricaturist has done
hitherto; and we hasten to add that his portraits of continental types
are never caricatures. They are serious studies, in which the
idiosyncrasies of the race in question are vividly presented. His
Germans would be the best if his French folk were not better still; but
he has rendered most happily the aspect--and indeed the very
temperament--of the German pianist. He has not often attempted the
American; and the American reader who turns over the back volumes of
_Punch_ and encounters the cartoons, born under an evil star, in which,
during the long weary years of the War, the obedient pencil of Mr.
Tenniel contributed at the expense of the American physiognomy to the
gaiety of nations, will not perhaps regret that Du Maurier should have
avoided this particular field of portraiture. It is not, however, that
he has not occasionally been inspired by the American girl, whom he
endows with due prettiness, as in the case of the two transatlantic
young ladies who, in the presence of a fine Alpine view, exclaim to a
British admirer: “My! ain’t it rustic?” As for the French, he knows them
intimately, as he has a right to do. He thinks better of the English of
course; but his Frenchman is a very different affair from the Frenchman
of Leech--the Frenchman who is sea-sick (as if it were the appanage of
his race alone!) on the Channel steamer. In such a matter as this Du
Maurier is really psychological; he is versed in the qualities which
illustrate the difference of race. He accentuates first of course the
physical variation; he contrasts--with a subtlety which may not at first
receive all the credit it deserves--the long, fair English body,
inclined to the bony, the lean, the angular, with the short, plump
French personality, in which the neck is rarely a feature, in which the
stomach is too much of one, in which the calves of the legs grow fat, in
which in the women several of the joints, the wrists, the shape of the
hand, are apt to be charming. Some of his happiest drawings are
reminiscences of a midsummer sojourn at a French watering-place. We have
long been in the habit of looking for _Punch_ with peculiar impatience
at this season of the year. When the artist goes to France he takes his
big dog with him, and he has more than once commemorated the effect of
this impressive member of a quiet English family upon the Norman and
Breton populations. There have appeared at this time certain anecdotic
pictures of English travellers in French towns--in shops, markets,
tramcars--in which some of the deeper disparities of the two peoples
have been (under the guise of its being all a joke) very sufficiently
exposed. Du Maurier on the whole does justice to the French; his
English figures, in these international tableaux, by no means always
come off best. When the English family of many persons troops into the
_charcutier_’s or the perfumer’s and stands planted there--mute,
inexpressive, perpendicular--the demonstrations, the professions, the
abundant speech of the neat, plump, insinuating _boutiquière_ are a
well-intended tribute to the high civilisation of her country. Du
Maurier has done the “low” foreigner of the London (or of his native)
streets--the foreigner whose unspeakable baseness prompts the
Anglo-Saxon observer to breathe the Pharisee’s vow of thanks that he is
not as these people are; but, as we have seen, he has done the low
Englishman quite as well--the ’Arry of the London music-halls, the
companion of ’Andsome ’Arriet and Mr. Belville. Du Maurier’s rendering
of ’Arry’s countenance, with its bloated purple bloom, of ’Arry’s
figure, carriage and costume--of his deportment at the fancy fair, where
the professional beauties solicit his custom--is a triumph of
exactitude. One of the most poignant of the drawings that illustrate his
ravages in our civilisation is the large design which a year or two ago
represented the narrow canal beneath the Bridge of Sighs. The hour is
evening, and the period is the detested date at which the penny-steamer
was launched upon the winding water-ways of the loveliest city in the
world. The odious little vessel, belching forth a torrent of black
smoke, passes under the covered arch which connects the ducal palace
with the ducal prison. ’Andsome ’Arriet and Mr. Belville (personally
conducted) are of course on board, and ’Arriet remarks that the Bridge
of Sighs isn’t much of a size after all. To which her companion rejoins
that it has been immortalised by Byron, any way--“’im as wrote ‘Our
Boys,’ you know.” This fragment of dialogue expresses concisely the
arguments both for and against the importation of the cheap and nasty
into Venetian waters.
Returning for a moment to Du Maurier’s sketches of the French, we must
recall the really interesting design in which, at a child’s party at the
Casino of a _station balnéaire_, a number of little natives are inviting
a group of English children to dance. The French children have much the
better manners; they make their little bows with a smile, they click
their heels together and crook their little arms as they offer them to
their partners. The sturdy British infants are dumb, mistrustful,
vaguely bewildered. Presently you perceive that in the very smart attire
of the gracious little Gauls _everything is wrong_--their high heels,
their poor little legs, at once too bare and too much covered, their
superfluous sashes and scarfs. The small English are invested in plain
Jerseys and knickerbockers. The whole thing is a pearl of observation,
of reflection. Let us recall also the rebuke administered to M. Dubois,
the distinguished young man of science who, just arrived from Paris and
invited to dine by the Duke of Stilton, mentions this latter fact in
apology for being late to a gentleman to whose house he goes on leaving
the Duke’s. This gentleman, assisted by Mr. Grigsby (both of them
specimens of the snob-philistine whom Du Maurier has brought to such
perfection), reprehends him in a superior manner for his rashness,
reminds him that in England it is “not usual for a professional man” to
allude in that promiscuous manner to having dined with a duke--a
privilege which Grigsby characterises “the perfection of consummate
achievement.” The advantage is here with poor M. Dubois, who is a
natural and sympathetic figure, a very _gentil_ little Frenchman. The
advantage is doubtless also with Mlle. Serrurier and her mother, though
Mademoiselle is not very pretty, in a scene in which, just after the
young lady has been singing at Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns’s, the clever
Mrs. Ponsonby plays her off on the Duchess (as an inducement to come to
another party) and then plays the Duchess off on the little vocalist and
her mother, who, in order to secure the patronage of the Duchess,
promise to come to the entertainment in question. The clever Mrs.
Ponsonby thus gets both the Duchess and the vocalist for nothing. The
broad-faced French girl, with small, salient eyes, her countenance
treated in the simplest and surest manner, is a capital specimen of Du
Maurier’s skill in race-portraiture; and though they may be a knowing
couple in their way, we are sure that she and her mamma are incapable of
the machinations of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns.
This lady is a real creation. She is an incident of one of the later
phases of Du Maurier’s activity--a child of the age which has also
produced Mrs. Cimabue Brown and Messrs. Maudle and Postlethwaite. 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 lookout, 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
always 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 manœuvres 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, pushes, gently
but firmly--always pushes. At last she arrives. It is true that she had
only the other day, on 29th June 1882, a considerable failure; we refer
the reader to the little incident of Madame Gaminot, in the _Punch_ for
that date. But she will recover from it; she has already recovered from
it. She is not even afraid of Sir Gorgius Midas--of the dreadful Midas
junior. She pretends to think Lady Midas the most elegant of women; when
it is necessary to flatter, she lays it on as with a trowel. She
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. We may be sure that Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns has an array
of fragile disks attached to her walls, and that she can put in a word
about Botticelli at the right moment. She is far, however, from being a
representative of æstheticism, for her hair is very neatly arranged,
and her dress looks French and superficial.
In Mrs. Cimabue Brown we see the priestess of the æsthetic cult, and
this lady is on the whole a different sort of person. She knows less
about duchesses, but she knows more about dados. Du Maurier’s
good-natured “chaff” of the eccentricities of the plastic sense so newly
and so strangely awakened in England has perhaps been the most brilliant
episode of his long connection with _Punch_. He has invented Mrs.
Cimabue Brown--he has invented Maudle and Postlethwaite. These
remarkable people have had great success in America, and have
contributed not a little to the curiosity felt in that country on the
subject of the English Renascence. Strange rumours and legends in
relation to this great movement had made their way across the Atlantic;
the sayings and doings of a mysterious body of people, devotees of the
lovely and the precious, living in goodly houses and walking in gracious
garments, were repeated and studied in our simpler civilisation. There
has not been as yet an American Renascence, in spite of the taste for
“sincere” sideboards and fragments of crockery. American interiors are
perhaps to-day as “gracious” as English; but the movement in the United
States has stopped at household furniture, has not yet set its mark upon
speech and costume--much less upon the human physiognomy. Du Maurier of
course has lent a good deal of his own fame to the vagaries he depicts;
but it is certain that the new æsthetic life has had a good deal of
reality. A great many people have discovered themselves to be fitted for
it both by nature and by grace; so that noses and chins, facial angles
of every sort shaped according to this higher rule have become frequent
in London society. This reaction of taste upon nature is really a
marvel, and the miracle has not been repeated in America, nor so far as
we know upon the continent of Europe. The love of Botticelli has
actually remoulded the features of several persons. London, for many
seasons, was full of Botticelli women, with wan cheeks and weary eyes,
enveloped in mystical, crumpled robes. Their language was apt to
correspond with their faces; they talked in strange accents, with
melancholy murmurs and cadences. They announced a gospel of joy, but
their expression, their manners, were joyless. These peculiarities did
not cross the ocean; for somehow the soil of the western world was not
as yet prepared for them. American ladies were even heard to declare
that there was something in their constitution that would prevent their
ever dressing like that. They had another ideal; they were committed to
the whalebone. But meanwhile, as I say, there was something irritating,
fascinating, mystifying in the light thrown on the subject by _Punch_.
It seemed to many persons to be desired that we too should have a gospel
of joy; American life was not particularly “gracious,” and if only the
wind could be made to blow from the æsthetic quarter a great many dry
places would be refreshed. These desires perhaps have subsided; for
_Punch_ of late has rather neglected the Renascence. Mrs. Cimabue Brown
is advancing in years, and Messrs. Maudle and Postlethwaite have been
through all their paces. The new æsthetic life, in short, shows signs of
drawing to a close, after having, as many people tell us, effected a
revolution in English taste--having at least, if not peopled the land
with beauty, made certain consecrated forms of ugliness henceforth
impossible.