George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians Part 10

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 circ.u.mstances where it can expand without loss of bloom through contention with unhappy circ.u.mstances. It shows the human beauty that expands from the conserved force of life when it has not to contend with unfavourable environment. Beauty is perhaps the one certain result of favourable environment. The ideal within "Socialism" which makes even its opponents Socialists is the aspiration that some day everyone will be favourably environed.

--2

It was a long while before the result of always working for a comic paper took effect on du Maurier. Not for some time did the knowledge that everything can be made to appear ridiculous persuade the artist to believe with his editor that everything is ridiculous. The humour of his subjects is still a part and not the whole of those subjects in his art, and this was all to the glory of the great comic paper in which he drew, for the humour of nothing in the world is the whole of that thing. Farce represents it so to be. Du Maurier had no genius for Farce. He responded to actual life; Farce is artificial; it is thus that the beauty and charm as well as the humour of life were involved in his representations.

Humour for humour's sake has brought about the downfall of every comic paper that has tried it. Punch has been saved from it by the wilful seriousness of some of its contributors. Every now and then, with something like "The Song of the Shirt" or, in another vein, a cartoon of Tenniel's, Punch has been brought back to Reality and thus to the only source of humour.

In the drawing "Honour where Honour is Due" the point is made in the legend, but the ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 ent.i.tled "Mutual Admirationists." It really dates itself. It is descriptive of one of the moods of "pa.s.sionate 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 d.u.c.h.ess. 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.

"Sic Transit Gloria Mundi!"

"By the way, d.u.c.h.ess, supposing that we do succeed in getting the House of Lords abolished this Session, won't it be a great blow to the Duke?"

"Yes, if he ever hears of it; but I shan't tell him, you know!"

Punch, March 22, 1884.

The drawing "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 G.o.ds 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 ill.u.s.trations to Trilby.

-- 3

The unpublished sketches which we have been allowed to reproduce from du Maurier's private sketch-book, and which we are using as end pieces, are very interesting. In the strictest artistic sense there is very little of the art of pen-drawing to-day. In the work done with the pen for modern ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sert 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 ill.u.s.tration to Wives and Daughters (facing page 36), which we print with the ill.u.s.tration 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 ma.n.u.script for his French version of Byron's "Sun of the sleepless-melancholy star!" which appeared in the Ill.u.s.trated 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 s.p.a.ce-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 ill.u.s.tration with their purely objective ideal. It is only an educated public that will allow an ill.u.s.trator the spontaneous style of drawing that some of the wittiest French ill.u.s.trators indulge in. In England the demand for what is wrongly inferred to be good draughtsmanship has quenched spontaneity in ill.u.s.tration.

Photographs, which are driving pen ill.u.s.trations out of the ill.u.s.trated 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 ill.u.s.tration; 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.

Post-Prandial Pessimists

SCENE-The smoking-room at the Decadents.

First Decadent (M.A., Oxon.). "After all, Smythe, what would Life be without Coffee?"

Second Decadent (B.A., Camb.). "True, Jeohnes, True! And yet, after all, what is Life with Coffee?"

Punch, October 15, 1892.

--4

Sometimes we hear critics discussing whether beauty is or is not the object of Art. As a matter of fact it does not really matter much whether beauty is the object, since it is always the result of true art. Craft is the language of an artist's sympathies-inspiration flagging at the point where sympathy evaporates. The quality of craft is the barometer of the degree of the artist's response to some aspect of life. Absence of beauty in craftsmanship indicates absence of inspiration, the failure to respond to life.

Though du Maurier fell short of Keene in breadth of inspiration, there were still aspects of life which he represented better than that master, phases of life which he approached with greater eagerness. He expressed perfectly once and for all in art the life of the drawing-room in the great days of the drawing-room, as did Watteau the life of the Court in the great days of a Court. Men take their rank in art by expressing completely something which others have expressed incidentally.

There is now the glamour of the past upon du Maurier's work in Punch. The farther we are away in distance of time from the date of the execution of a work of art the more legendary and fabulous its tale becomes. In good work forgotten costumes seem bizarre but not preposterous. Whenever in a picture a thing looks preposterous-except in the art of caricature, and du Maurier was not a caricaturist-the representation of it in the picture is a bad one. We never find in the paintings of Vand.y.k.e, 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 pa.s.sing "fashion" and hit out at it, he made far less interesting pictures for posterity than when he took the outward aspect of the age he lived in as being in the natural order of things.

--5

The Victorian age-which invented Punch, the greatest humorous paper the world has ever known-had no sense of humour. It was the age of serious people. The secret of the character of Punch as an organ of satire is that it represents the times, scorning only what the English people scorn. This representative att.i.tude 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.

--6

Du Maurier's novels are a proof of what an ill.u.s.trator he was by nature; he seemed to conceive matter and ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.tration which make them unique among novels. The ill.u.s.trations 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 "ill.u.s.tration," 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.

Things One Would Rather have Expressed Differently

Fair Hostess. "Good-night, Major Jones. We're supposed to breakfast at nine; but we're not very punctual people. Indeed, the later you appear to-morrow morning, the better pleased we shall all be!"

May 13, 1893.

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.