[Illustration: Du Maurier]
Mr. Du Maurier has a brilliant history, but it must be candidly
recognized that it is written or drawn mainly in an English periodical.
It is only during the last two or three years that the most ironical of
the artists of _Punch_ has exerted himself for the entertainment of the
readers of Harper; but I seem to come too late with any commentary on
the nature of his satire or the charm of his execution. When he began to
appear in Harper he was already an old friend, and for myself I confess
I have to go through rather a complicated mental operation to put into
words what I think of him. What does a man think of the language he
has learned to speak? He judges it only while he is learning. Mr. Du
Maurier’s work, in regard to the life it embodies, is not so much a
thing we see as one of the conditions of seeing. He has interpreted for
us for so many years the social life of England that the interpretation
has become the text itself. We have accepted his types, his categories,
his conclusions, his sympathies and his ironies, It is not given to all
the world to thread the mazes of London society, and for the great body
of the disinherited, the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon public. Mr. Du
Maurier’s representation is the thing represented. Is the effect of it
to nip in the bud any remote yearning for personal participation? I feel
tempted to say yes, when I think of the follies, the flatnesses, the
affectations and stupidities that his teeming pencil has made vivid. But
that vision immediately merges itself in another--a panorama of tall,
pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming
gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the
more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic.
This I take to be a sign that Mr. Du Maurier knows how to be general
and has a conception of completeness. The world amuses him, such queer
things go on in it; but the part that amuses him most is certain lines
of our personal structure. That amusement is the brightest; the other
is often sad enough. A sharp critic might accuse Mr. Du Maurier of
lingering too complacently on the lines in question; of having a
certain ideal of “lissome” elongation to which the promiscuous truth is
sometimes sacrificed. But in fact this artist’s P truth never pretends
to be promiscuous; it is avowedly select and specific. What he depicts
is so preponderantly the “tapering” people that the remainder of the
picture, in a notice as brief as the present, may be neglected. If his
_dramatis personæ_ are not all the tenants of drawing-rooms, they are
represented at least in some relation to these. ‘Arry and his friends
at the fancy fair are in society for the time; the point of introducing
them is to show how the contrast intensifies them. Of late years Mr. Du
Maurier has perhaps been a little too docile to the muse of elegance;
the idiosyncrasies of the “masher” and the high girl with elbows have
beguiled him into occasional inattention to the doings of the short and
shabby. But his career has been long and rich, and I allude, in such
words, but to a moment of it.
The moral of it--I refer to the artistic one--seen altogether, is
striking and edifying enough. What Mr. Du Maurier has attempted to do is
to give, in a thousand interrelated drawings, a general satiric picture
of the social life of his time and country. It is easy to see that
through them “an increasing purpose runs;” they all hang together and
refer to each other--complete, confirm, correct, illuminate each other.
Sometimes they are not satiric: satire is not pure charm, and the artist
has allowed himself to “go in” for pure charm. Sometimes he has allowed
himself to go in for pure fantasy, so that satire (which should hold on
to the mane of the real) slides off the other side of the runaway horse.
But he remains, on the whole, pencil in hand, a wonderfully copious and
veracious historian of his age and his civilization.