To the same:

"I'm on for the 25th at the Albion and much delighted. Is it evening dress? If not, tip us a card. If you do not I shall conclude it is, and appear in full togs, which I will get out for the evening.



"I had really hoped to have got down to Bouverie Street yesterday, but the conviction forced itself on me as the day wore on that I should never get a cab to bring me back. I know I am a back-slider in the matter of the Punch dinner (and all other dinners when I can help it). I can get thro' my work so much better after the frugal home repast, and in bed before 11 P.M. Not that I have been able to indulge in the early couch these holidays, for Hampstead, slow as it is, is a fearful place for juvenile dissipation, and parents have to sit up night after night at Xmas time. I hope you Wandsworthians have more sense."

In an earlier stage of the book we fixed the period at which du Maurier's work in Punch was at the height of its vitality at about 1879—and on into the early "eighties." And the artist himself seems to have had a strong feeling of increasing power at this time. In January 1880 he approached Punch for a revision of the prices at which he was then working. By the courtesy of Mr. W. Laurence Bradbury I am able to quote in part from letters bearing out the inference that it was at this time that du Maurier entered into consciousness of his own worth:

"Jan. 1, 1880.

"DEAR BRADBURY, AGNEW, & Co.,—The time has come when I think I may fairly ask you to make an increase in my salary.

"The quality of my work has greatly improved of late years and my popularity has grown in proportion, and these results have been obtained at great expense of thought and labour, and I find as a rule that the more time I devote to each production, the more favour it meets with from the public.

"It is now a good many years (seven or eight I believe) since you were kind enough at my request to raise the payment of the quarter page....

"Since that period I have gradually become enabled thro' the improvement in my health to give much more of my time to my Punch work—all the drawings selected by you for 'English Society at Home' have been done since then—and whatever other qualities they may possess, they are very careful and elaborate in most instances, and without this care and elaboration they would lose most of their value in the world's eye...."

Then follows details as to the revision of the prices. And then a day or two later he sends the following letter:

"Jan. 4, 1880.

"Mr DEAR BRADBURY,—Many thanks for your kind note. It is really a painful effort to me to 'ask for more,' and I've been putting it off from day to day these six months. The pleasure and enthusiasm with which I have got to do my work for Punch (since I have got better in health and so forth) are such that I should be content to go on so for ever, without any rise, if it weren't for my having such a deuce of a family! but what's a fellow to do!

"You've no idea what it is to go trapesing up and down, hunting for a subject, while all the time the hand remains idle. Punch requires such a lot of thought, you see—and then when the time comes for the hand to do its work, you can see what care and time are taken with the execution....

"I only wish it would suit the convenience of Punch to take all the work I could send on a scale of prices literally fixed by myself! (ye modern Hogarth!! 10,000,000 a year! R.A.—P.R.A.—Sir George!!!)"

At the foot of this letter is a thumb-nail picture of "Chang," du Maurier's huge Newfoundland, leading a blind man, initialled D.M. The dog holds a tin and begs from a passing fine lady, a well-known beauty of Society and the Stage, and the legend "Sic transit Gloria Mundi" describes the situation.



Section 8

The above letters were dated from New Grove House, Hampstead, where the du Mauriers lived for twenty-one years. They had moved into this house from Church Row, where they had gone when they first came to Hampstead, and where their youngest son was born. During the period of their long residence in New Grove House they frequently took a furnished house for the winter season in Town for the convenience of going into Society. It was the inaccessibility of Hampstead before the days of the Hampstead Tube that made du Maurier latterly relinquish many social engagements, and developed the disinclination for theatre-going which I have seen ascribed to an aversion from the drama.

Sir Frederick Wedmore says that it was at Hampstead evening parties that du Maurier found his type of the Adonis up-to-date. Alas, that even by Sir Frederick Wedmore the type should be regarded as salient of du Maurier's pictures. It is further evidence that the artist is only remembered by his later pictures. It is in these the type monotonously appears. But we feel better disposed towards Hampstead when the eminent critic adds that Church Row itself gave du Maurier more than one of the models in whom one recognises his ideal of youthful feminine charm.



Du Maurier's tastes were very quiet. His interests were centred in his home, and he found no companionship more acceptable than that of his own children. He was not at all fond of being alone. He preferred even to work with people round him; writing his novels in the drawing-room standing with the MS. upon the top of the piano, and walking up and down undisturbed by the conversation of his family round him. It caused him no annoyance when members of his family broke into his studio during working hours. His work both as draughtsman and writer was always produced without any of that pathetic travail which for many artists and writers lies between conception and expression. He did not exhibit the most unpleasant of the traits of a talented person—the overstrung condition of nerves which makes a man unpleasant to a household; he preserved the serenity that pertains to greater genius still. His house was always an open one, and the life in it must have been highly typical of that English family life of which he was the pre-eminent poet in his drawings.

Du Maurier was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club under Rule 2. He showed his appreciation of this Club by not making use of any other, though he was such a highly sociable man. He was early a member of the Arts Club, though using it less frequently after its removal to the Dover Street house, of old-world distinction. At the Athenaeum he frequented the billiard-room as a sociable place, though he was not very fond of billiards or card games. He could get on quite well in life upon "conversation" as a recreation, interspersed with music.

After the great Trilby boom, and when he was writing The Martian—in fact, only a year before his death, the artist moved into town to live in Oxford Square. He was partly influenced in this by the expiration of the twenty-one years' lease upon which he held the Hampstead property.

In a paper contributed to the Hampstead Annual for 1897, the issue following the artist's death, Canon Ainger traced various Hampstead spots to be identified as the backgrounds of du Maurier's subjects, and recalls how on Hampstead Heath many subjects for Punch came to be discussed between them in the course of conversation. He describes the way that one of the artist's most famous jests, in the days of Maudle and Postlethwaite, took its final shape one day in Hampstead, and by a singular chance arose out of a University sermon at Cambridge.

A certain well-known humorist of the time had remarked that the objection to Blue China (it was the special craze at the moment) was that it was so difficult to "live up to it." This utterance had been lately taken somewhat over-seriously by a special preacher before the University who, discoursing on the growing extravagances and frivolities of the age, wound up an indignant tirade by an eloquent peroration to the effect that things had come to a sad pass when persons were found to talk of "living up—to a Tea-pot." At this juncture the jest seemed ripe for treatment, and du Maurier thereupon produced his famous drawing of the aesthetic bride and bridegroom comparing notes over the precious piece of crockery in question: "Oh! Algernon! Let us live up to it!"

Speaking of fifteen years of constant companionship in walks upon the Heath, the Canon says no one could have had a better opportunity of tasting the unfailing charm of du Maurier's conversation, the width of his reading and observation, and his inexhaustible fund of anecdote. In these conversations Canon Ainger heard every detail of his companion's school life, his studio-life in Paris, which afterwards found a place in the pages of his three novels.

Referring to the long years of uninterrupted achievement of the artist's life at Hampstead, "only once," says his friend, "in all the years I knew him was he forced to lay his pencil by for a season. His solitary eye had temporarily failed him, but, with spirits unsubdued, he promptly took up the art of lecturer with marked success, although from the first it was against the grain. When, however, after an interval his sight returned to him, and the literary instinct, encouraged doubtless by the success of his lectures, began to quicken, he gained, we all know, though then past fifty years of age, a new public and a new career in writing fiction." "Except," proceeds Canon Ainger, "to his intimate friends and to his colleagues on Punch the display of this gift was an absolute surprise.... He wrote with extraordinary and even dangerous facility. It is fair, however, to add that his best passages were often produced as rapidly as all the rest. For instance, the scene in Trilby when the mother and uncle of Little Billee arrive in Paris, hearing of the engagement, and have their first interview with Taffy, was written straight off one evening between dinner and bed-time." This scene, in the judgment of Ainger, represents du Maurier at his high-water mark as a novelist and as a worthy follower of the great master on whom his style was undoubtedly based.

"Hampstead," continues the Canon, "was a real foster-mother to George du Maurier, not only in what it brought him but in what it saved him from. He was by nature and by practice one of the most generous and hospitable of men. He loved to entertain his friends from town, and to take them afterwards his favourite walks. But he disliked dinners and evening parties in London, not because he was unsociable, but because good dinners and long journeys 'took it out of him' and endangered the task of the following morning. The distance from town and the long hills made late hours inevitable. To listen to some new book read aloud in the studio, which was also the common sitting-room of wife and children, made the chief happiness of his evening."

"We owed it," says his friend, "to Hampstead air with its many sylvan beauties that du Maurier was able for so long, notwithstanding defective sight and health gradually failing, to prosecute his daily work with scarce an interruption."

The link between the place and the work produced in it is in the case of du Maurier, apart from the fact that Hampstead scenes so frequently recur in his pictures, anything but a superficial one. "Hampstead," the artist wrote, "is healthy but dull." It was the very monotony of the place, the even conditions under which it was possible to work there in his day—when it was farther away than it is in the present age of "tubes"—that assisted the building up of the remarkable record in Punch—the indispensable contribution made every week by du Maurier to the journalism which, in the days when the fashionable world counted several influential journals devoted to itself, placed Punch in its unique position among them. Society reserved quite a touching deference for the opinions of Mr. Punch. It gives us some idea of the position into which the paper had worked itself a generation ago when we find Ruskin, the greatest social critic of his day, going straight to it for an authoritative picture of the time. People have not sufficiently remembered how often when they have referred to Punch they were really referring to du Maurier, or what is left now of his tradition—his way of dealing with the foibles of society. The position of the paper in Society was won by appositeness of political criticism, and the delicate edge of its satire. It was du Maurier who put that edge on. Society returned fascinated after every wound to inspect the weapon. Keene's pen brought immense artistic prestige to Punch, but its social prestige it owes to du Maurier more than to anyone; we only become aware that Leech had begun a tradition in its pages by its supreme fulfilment in du Maurier's art.

Section 9

Henry Silver, a member of the Punch staff, who came to the table in 1858, kept a diary of the talk of the table until he retired in 1870. The present writer was the more touched by the honour of being permitted to look into this interesting document from the fact that the pen of the exquisite E.V. Lucas has but lately inspired itself at the same source. This was for a paper of Thackerayana which concluded, after reference to the death of Leech, Thackeray's friend: "On November 7th (1864) Leech's successor, George du Maurier, took his seat at the Table, and so the world goes on."

Thackeray bulks more largely in the diary than even du Maurier, for du Maurier's genius in the table conversation was wholly for asides. We have already mentioned his comparative lack of interest in the debates over the large cartoon. And this Silver himself draws attention to: "Du M. and H.S. generally mute when the 'L.C.' is discussed." The conversation at each meeting is for some time closely confined to the discussion of the cartoon, then it spreads to every imaginable topic. One feels that one assists at the making of history when the Great Cartoon, or Cut, as they called it, is discussed—as, for instance, when the design for the one representing Disraeli on the side of the Angels is decided upon, after his famous speech at Oxford in 1864. The desultory conversation reported in the diary on each occasion after settlement of the cartoon throws a light upon things uppermost in the public mind at the time. It is noted when the Queen comes out of retirement into the world again. And a vivid reflection is to be found of the horror felt at the news of the assassination of Lincoln. Men as closely united as the Punch staff have prejudices as clearly defined as those of an individual. There was great hostility to the Swinburne of the sixties. Du Maurier on one occasion sticks up for Swinburne as "the writer of lovely verses—the weaver of words—the rhymer of rhymes." "Du M. and H.S. agree in thinking Tennyson will live 'chiefly by his songs and minor lays.'"



"Du M. thinks Vanity Fair a little Bible," "Rather an epistle by the Corinthians," says Shirley Brooks.

One night after dinner du Maurier walked home in the wet. "My carriage is waiting for Silver," he said. "My carriage is waiting for gold," answered Shirley Brooks.

Sometimes the discourse at the table is of Religion. "Du M. believes in God, and that whatever we do God will not punish us."

"A comfortable faith," adds Silver.

Once the discussion turned upon suicide. "Du M. says before he married he often felt tempted to suicide."

In heading his diary shortly after du Maurier joined the table, Silver writes "Du M." and then corrects it "(no: DU M.)." And in another place he writes, "Du Maurier says fellows write to him de Maurier: 'give the devil his du.'"

In 1865 the proprietors, getting old, have put their sons in their stead, and taken the Agnews into partnership. The staff talk sentimentally of old times. They drink success to the Firm. Mark Lemon, the Editor, proposes the health of Bradbury & Evans, saying, "men work well together because they are liberally treated. Thought our loss last year (death of Leech) would have seriously affected Punch, but it did not. And no single loss will." Bradbury, replying, speaks of the brotherly affection between the editor and the proprietors. "Says if you want men to serve you well treat them well, and win their sympathy and esteem.... Evans is emphatic on the Brotherhood of the Punch table." Thackeray's "Mahogany Tree" is sung; du Maurier sings a French song, and F.C.B. also singeth a song with no words to speak of, &c. &c. &c. "So we pass a jolly evening, and bear in mind—that Sociality is the secret of the success of Punch."

On another occasion there is the paper's "Silver Wedding." A watch and chain with eleven links—the mystic number of the Punch staff—is handed over to Mark Lemon. In the morning he has received a letter with a hundred guineas. He claims, in replying, "that the Punch Brotherhood is one of the most extraordinary literary brotherhoods the world has seen."

Shirley Brooks hands him letters written by the staff individually, testifying their gladness at the gift proposed. Du Maurier wrote the longest and Charles Keene the shortest.

We have extracted the following items from the diary, quoting exactly, except for the substitution sometimes of the full name for initials:

November 7th—Monday. "S.B., du Maurier (his debut), H.S., J.T., M.L., P.L., F.C.B., H.M., T.T.

"(The initials stand for Shirley Brooks, Henry Silver, John Tenniel, Mark Lemon, Professor Leigh, F.C. Burnand, Horace Mayhew, Tom Taylor.)

"Du Maurier tells of Whistler and Rossetti's rage for old china, and how Rossetti once left his guests at dinner and rushed off to buy a piece before Whistler could forestall him."

May 17, 1865. "Du Maurier was presented with a son and heir on Saturday, so we baptized the infant in a bumper of Champagne."

December 20, 1865. "While the Great Cut is being hatched, Burnand, du Maurier, and Silver all make little cuts of their initials on the Punch table. Henry Silver between William Thackeray and John Leech—Burnand where a Beckett sat and du Maurier where Leech."

"Miss Bateman retired from the stage (at Her Majesty's) on Friday—she has rather proved herself a one-part actress, and so has Sothern, whom Burnand denounces as a practical joker—most unscrupulous in tongue."

"Du M. thinks it harder to write a poem than to paint a picture. But surely there's no comparing them. One mind expresses itself with a pen and another with a brush."

Jan. 17, 1866. "Du Maurier tells of the gas blow-up at his 91 Great Russell Street on Boxing-day. Girl dressing in the shop for Hairdressers' Ball—turned on two burners and lit one and left it burning. Du Maurier and wife dressing on top floor—bang! like a hundred pounder, and then rattle—smash—crash. 'O! the children!' 'D—n it! They're all right!' first time he ever swore before his wife. Sister tried to jump from window, but Armstrong held her back. Baby crowing in his arms at the fun as he came downstairs. The nursemaids had run away of course. Lucky no one on the stairs, or they'd have been killed."

April 4, 1866. "In reference to a Ball on the Haymarket stage—'Would you like to go?' said S.B. to du Maurier. But du Maurier's dancing days are over—only cares for dinners now! Fancy the old fogydom of thirty!"

November 7, 1868. "Du Maurier cut down to five cigarettes a day, resolves to ride daily and live frugally: frightened by his eye this summer!!"

February 24, 1868. "Tenniel has almost given up smoking! Used to smoke an ounce a day. Can eat a better breakfast now. Nearly all our Punch folk smoke less. Tom Taylor has given up cigars and only takes a pipe occasionally. Du Maurier takes cigarettes four a day in lieu of forty. H.S. never smokes at all after dinner. Only Keene and Mark and Shirley stick to their tobacco."

Section 10

Sir Francis Burnand, till recently the distinguished Editor of Punch, 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 confrere, 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 confreres, you will find it in the artistic sketches of the men and women in La Boheme" "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.



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

Section 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.



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.

Section 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 regime 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 aesthetic enthusiasm.

In an earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed "aestheticism" 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 aesthetic 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.



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.

Section 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.



Section 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.

Section 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.

At one happy period of its career Punch set itself a very high artistic standard. The paper intended to avail itself of the services of whatever artistic genius it could attach to itself by attractive emoluments. It then pieced out its satiric business among its distinguished staff, above everything else artists, perhaps not one of them animated with that fervour of attack which is the genius of foreign caricature. These men, by their several temperaments, founded the characteristics and traditions of Punch. They were perfectly friendly, not at all anxious to make themselves unpleasant; and the traditions of Punch remain the same to this day. It would always rather laugh with people than against them.

Section 6

Du Maurier's novels are a proof of what an illustrator he was by nature; he seemed to conceive matter and illustration together. It would be strange to read either of his novels without their drawings. Probably his tales would have failed of their immediate success but for the wealth of admirable illustration which make them unique among novels. The illustrations increase perceptibly the appeal of the text. The draughtsmanship is so well identified with its purpose, that we think of it always in connection with a "page." In these days, when art editors think that any picture reduced to size will make an "illustration," it is pleasant to take down our old Punches. Qualities of impressionism which are everything in a picture hanging on a wall to be seen across the breakfast table, will seldom be made suitable for book-embellishment simply by process of reduction.

Du Maurier established a more intimate relationship with the public who admired his drawings than any humorous artist has. In America, where for many years the opinion of English Society seems to have been formed from his drawings, the unseen author of them was thought of quite affectionately. The immediate success of his novels there took its rise from this fact. The personal letters which he received from America with the success of Trilby ran into many hundreds. There must have been something to account for all this—some curious flavour in everything he did, just one of those secret influences which so often put the technical rules of criticism out of court in dealing with an artist's work.

He succeeded to Leech in the Society subjects, but he himself has not had a successor in these themes. No one has been able to enter the same field as worthily, for instance, as Mr. Raven-Hill entered a field once worked by Keene. There have been better draughtsmen—from the photographic point of view—than du Maurier attempting to fill his place. But "a place" on a newspaper can only be filled by a personality. It is artistic personality that has been wanting in recent years in Punch on the side of the fashionable satire which Leech and du Maurier successively had made their own.

We have pointed out that his work in Punch was at its best when he was going most into Society. That is characteristic of all artists—that their inspiration flames or dies in proportion to the immediacy of their contact with actuality. Having chosen the world for his theme, he could make nothing of it when he ceased to go out. In his earlier and middle period, living in evening-clothes, he drew with an inexhaustible impulse. When he thought he had his "world" by heart and could reconstruct with the aid of some obliging friends who consented to pose, he gave us pleasant pictures of his friends posing, but the great record he had put together in the sixties, seventies, the early eighties of the London of his time was at an end. Then it was that he repeated his formulae, his "Things one would have expressed otherwise," and others of like series without introducing any freshness of situation, carrying out the brief dialogues with figures in which there was little variation of character—as little variation as there is in the same model employed on two different days. All this has been touched upon in this book, but we must insist upon it, for the memory of the real du Maurier has nothing so much to fear as our memory of du Maurier when he was, as an artist, not quite himself.



We hope we have performed the funeral of the less deserving side of his work, thereby releasing the immortal part of it to the fuller recognition due to it from connoisseurs.

All du Maurier's drawings in his best period are distinguished by the sharpness of contrast between black and white in them. Ruskin, whilst approving in his Art of England of du Maurier's use of black to indicate colour, thought he carried the black and white contrast to chess-board pattern excess. In later years, submitting to the influence of Keene's method, in which black is always used to secure effects of tone instead of colour, du Maurier's style underwent a transformation which, from the purely artistic point of view, was not to its advantage. Keene's method was justified in his extreme sensitiveness to what painters define as "values"—the relation in tone of one surface to another. This particular kind of sensitiveness was not characteristic of du Maurier's vision, nor was a style so dependent upon subtlety of the kind suited to express his mind. And here it is interesting to emphasise the connection which is so often overlooked between temperament and style. In the observation of human character itself du Maurier always perceived the broad and distinctive features; the broad ones of type rather than the subtle ones of individuals; things for him were either black or white, beautiful or ugly. The twilight in which beauty and ugliness merge, in which the heroic and the villainous mingle, was unknown to him—a region in which the white figure of a hero is as impossible as the black one of a real villain. He observes subtly enough the airs of those who interest him, but he is not interested in everybody. He doesn't think much of people who, through lack either of physical or moral stature, can enter the drawing-room unperceived. He is not sympathetic to neutral characters. It was because the Victorians cultivated magnificence that his somewhat rhetorical art described them with such reality. His pictures were a mirror to the age. Keene was like Shakespeare—the types he drew might change in costume with the times, but would reappear in every generation. But du Maurier only drew Victorians. And thus his art has that vivid local colour which is the vital characteristic of effective satire.

It is significant that the artist had nursed throughout his youth an enthusiasm for Byron. Until the influence of Mr. Bernard Shaw had chilled the air, England remained under the spell of that romantic poet. The Victorians in everything betrayed the love of glamour. They exalted the unknown Disraeli out of sheer delight at his Byronic ability to irradiate everything with romance. There has never been a moment like the present in which there is a complete absence of pride in tradition, which is pleasure in romance. But the reason is simple. Our traditions belong to the pre-Industrial time. The romance of the Victorians was a last glow in the sky. We might even go as far as to read an occult significance into the art of Turner, the great painter of the sunset. We nowadays go back to du Maurier's pictures, where the after-glow remains, and they seem separated from us by something thicker than time, as if a great wall had been built up between the age of the twopenny tube and that of the carriage-and-pair. And lest there should remain a link between them, over which we might be sentimental, the face of Buckingham Palace is to be despoiled, the long grey outline, characteristic of English monarchy in its reticence and repose, is, we imagine, to give place to something in the image of a prosperous Insurance Office.

Already du Maurier's art is very precious; the environment of the people whom he depicted is everywhere being smashed up. Our curiosity is sharpened for everything that remains to reflect those people to us. Our debt to the mirror of du Maurier's art increases every hour.

THE END