George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians Part 4

In the early eighties the change was made from drawing on wood to drawing on paper for Punch, the drawing being afterwards photographed on to the wood. Later, metal was made possible as a subst.i.tute for wood, and this enabled ill.u.s.trations and letterpress to be printed together. The modern process of reproduction has introduced its own pleasant qualities into journalism, and because they are different in effect they do not rival the effect of wood engraving.

The modern methods reproduce the black lines of a drawing direct. But the most practised engravers cut out the whites of a drawing with their graver from between the black lines. This undoubtedly allowed the artist a closer and less restricted use of line than modern ill.u.s.tration shows us. If the reader examines du Maurier's ill.u.s.tration for The Adventures of Harry Richmond on page 106, he will be able to see at a glance how, by cutting out the whites in the multiplicity of ivy leaves, detailed drawing has been re-interpreted in the engraving with great economy.

Some of the pleasantness of the effect of lines printed from a woodcut is due to the fact that they print a more clearly cut line. The line eaten in by "process" when examined under a very strong magnifying gla.s.s proves to be a slightly jagged one. But we should rejoice that the art of reproduction for journalistic purposes is free of the laborious method of engraving, and from the sort of work that was put up by over-tired engravers when they fought their last round to lose, against the modern invention of picture reproduction.

There is no rivalry in art. All the rivalry is in the business connected with it. A wood-engraving possesses a charm of its own for those whose sense of quality is delicate enough for its appreciation. The life of this art, apart from the purpose of weekly journalism, is safe. The life of any art is safe while it commands, as wood engraving does, the production of any particular effect in a way that cannot be rivalled.

According to Mr. Joseph Pennell, the first really important modern ill.u.s.trated book in which wood was subst.i.tuted for metal engraving appeared in France in 1830, and this authority a.s.serts that in England, just before the invention of photographing on wood, some of the most marvellous engravings appeared that have ever been done in the country. "It is," he writes, "with the appearance of Frederick Sandys, Rossetti, Walker, Pinwell, A. Boyd, Houghton, Small, du Maurier, Keene, Crane, Leighton, Millais, and Tenniel, with the publication of the Cornhill, Once a Week, Good Words, The Shilling Magazine, and such books as Moxon's Tennyson that the best period of English ill.u.s.tration begins."

"The incessant output of ill.u.s.tration," he continues, "killed not only the artists themselves, but the process. In its stead arose a better, truer method, a more artistic method, which we are even now only developing."

But there is another side to this question. Ill.u.s.tration has lost something by the uniformity of style which the modern method encourages. Keene, whose style was supposed to suffer most at the hands of the engraver, found it more difficult than anyone to accommodate his free methods to the rules that govern the results of the modern process.

It may be noted that it was about the time of the transition from working on wood to work on paper that that slavery to the model began, which, as we have pointed out, has not in the end been without an unhappy effect in the loss of spontaneity to English Ill.u.s.tration.

As for the art of wood engraving itself, we hope it will now have a future like that which the arts of lithography and etching are enjoying. Reproduction by process serves commercial and journalistic purposes far better. The demands of commerce formed for this art, as it once formed for lithography, a chrysalis in which it perfected itself. Reproduction by process serves commercial purposes much better than ever wood-engraving could, but while the commercial demand for it lasted, as in the case of the arts of lithography and etching, it continued to improve; like them, let us hope, destined to find beautiful wings upon its release from the cramping demands of modern printing machines, in its practice by artists for sheer love of the peculiar qualities which are its own. It has been said that wood-engravers killed their own art so far as journalism was concerned by their surrender to commerciality with its frequent demand for the ready-to-hand rather than the superior thing. But his surrender was not the fault of the engravers, but was rendered inevitable by the advent of the middleman, to whom application was made by the Press for blocks, and whose employees all engravers were practically forced into becoming, instead of being able to retain their independence and make their own terms with the Press.

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In the British Museum some of the originals of du Maurier's Punch pictures may be seen. On the margins of these are the pencilled instructions of the Editor as to the scale of the reproduction, and very often pencil notes from Artist to Editor. This sort of thing-"If they have used my page for this week's number, telegraph to me as soon as you get this and I will have Social ready by 12 to-morrow (that is, if it be not too late for me.)" Or what is evidently an invitation to lunch-"Monday at 1 for light usual." The drawing where this particular note appears is of three little girls with their dolls. The legend in the artist's handwriting read as follows:-"My papa's house has got a conservatory! My papa's house has got a billiard-room! My papa's house has got a mortgage!!" This was printed with the much inferior legend: "Dolly taking her degrees (of comparison): 'My doll's wood!' My doll's composition!' 'My doll's wax!'"

Some of these British Museum original drawings still retain in pencil the price du Maurier put upon them for sale. Of the period when the artist was drawing on a large scale with a view to reduction there is one of the "Things one would rather have expressed differently" series priced at twelve guineas. It gives an indication of the profits du Maurier sometimes was able to make from the original drawing. For the sake of comment on the low evening gown the half-dozen figures in this picture are all in back view. It is rather a dull twelve-guineas-worth. And this was evidently felt, as it remained unsold. The original of the very exquisite "Res angusta domi," the beautiful drawing of the nurse by the child's bed in the children's hospital, which appeared in Punch, vol. cviii. p. 102 (1894), is only priced at "Ten guineas."

Turning over the Museum drawings one often sees the liberties with the penknife by which the artist would secure difficult effects of snow, or of light on foliage. And sometimes in the margin there are pencil studies from which figures in the ill.u.s.tration have been re-drawn. And nearly always not altogether rubbed out is a first wording of the legend, repeated in ink in du Maurier's pretty "hand" beneath.

In turning over these drawings one finds him doing much more than merely suggesting pattern work in such things as wall-papers. There is one floral wall-paper in particular that we find him working out which will no doubt prove an invaluable reference another day as to the sort of decoration in which the subjects of Queen Victoria preferred to live, or were forced to by their tradesmen. Photographs of du Maurier's studio which appeared in a Magazine ill.u.s.trating an interview with him at the time of the "Trilby" boom, reveal the squat china jars, the leaf fans, the upholstered "cosy corner" with its row of blue plates, with which all who know their Punch are familiar, and apparently the very wall-paper to which we have just referred. It certainly is the mark of a great artist to take practically whatever is before him for treatment. The artist with the genius for "interior" subjects seems to be able to re-interpret ugliness itself very often. Du Maurier's weak eyes prevented him from bearing the strain of outdoor work. He was practically driven indoors for his subjects; and in taking what was to hand-the very environment of the kind of people his drawings describe-he showed considerable genius. He succeeded in making whole volumes of Punch into a work of criticism on the domestic art of the nineteenth century.

Ill.u.s.tration for "The Story of a Feather" 1867.

Among the useful skits of du Maurier was that upon the conceited young man concealing appalling ignorance with the display of a still more appalling indifference to everything. The drawing among the Print-room series-"It is always well to be well informed"-is a good instance. It reveals a ballroom with couples dancing a quadrille. A lady asks her partner: "Who's my sister's partner, vis-a-vis, with the star and riband?" He: "Oh, he-aw-he's Sir Somebody Something, who went somewhere or othaw to look after some scientific fellaw who was murdered, or something, by someone-!" The word othaw in this legend is itself pictorial. Du Maurier was like our own Max Beerbohm in this-his legends and drawings were inseparable. We find he has actually penned in the side margin of the drawing the words "othaw fellaw," we suppose as a possible variant to "scientific fellow," and in the legend the word "other" has been written over with a thickened termination-"aw." The usual first trial of the speech in pencil remains but partly obliterated by india-rubber at the top of the drawing.

In his series of "Happy Thoughts" du Maurier followed the course of the sort of rapid thought that precedes a tactful reply with real psychological skill. Take, for instance, his drawing of an artist sitting gloomily before his fire, caressed by his wife, who bends over him, saying, "You seem depressed, darling. Have you had a pleasant dinner?" Edwin: "Oh, pretty well; Bosse was in the chair, of course. He praised everybody's work this year except mine." Angelina: "Oh! I'm so glad. At last he is beginning to look upon you as his rival and his only one." The wings of tact are sympathy. This drawing appeared in Punch, vol. xcvi. p. 222 (1889); it is signed with other drawings from 89 Porchester Terrace, April '89. Drawings in the Museum collection are signed from "Stanhope Terrace," "Hampstead," "Drumnadrochit," or apparently from wherever the artist happened to be when executing the work.

--8

Among our ill.u.s.trations there is a portrait of Canon Ainger, representing the artist as a painter. Du Maurier's colour was never such that an injustice is done to it by reproducing it only by half-tone process. The interest of this portrait is in the psychological grasp of character it seems to show. The painter was in the habit of contributing interior genre scenes in water-colour to the Old Water-colour Society, of which he was made an a.s.sociate in 1881. That may be said against his painting, which may be said against the painting of so many eminent black-and-white men who have changed to the art of painting too late in the day. It shows failure to think in paint. An artist is only a great "black-and-white" artist because he thinks in that medium. Possibly, if there were no such thing as a "black-and-white" art, as we have it in journalism to-day, some of the greatest men in it would instead have been great painters. But successful transference to the one art after unusual mastery has been acquired in the other is rarely witnessed. To think in line, to see the world as resolving itself into the play of alternating lines, so to habituate thought and vision to that one aspect of everything is not the best preparation in the world for seeing it over again in another art where the element of line is not the chief incident of the impression to be created. Failure in the one art does not mean failure as an artist. Those artists who have worked in a variety of mediums with apparently equal success in each have always attained the ability to make each medium in turn express the same personal feeling. But nearly always there is in such cases that sacrifice of the inherent qualities of one or other of the mediums employed which a great virtuoso never makes.

Black-and-white men put themselves into an att.i.tude of receptivity towards that aspect of things which suggests representation in line. Their acquired sensitiveness in this respect is expressed in the learned character of their touch in drawing. Painters cultivate a similarly receptive att.i.tude towards nature, but lay themselves open to receive a different impression of it. We might say of du Maurier that by the time he tried to apply himself to painting he had become const.i.tutionally a black-and-white artist. Moreover, his impaired vision compromised the more complex range of effect represented in painting in a way that it never could the simplicity of good black-and-white work. How seriously threatened du Maurier's sight was at times we may know by the reliance he put upon being read to by others. Thus only did he manage to keep his small stock of visual energy in reserve for his artistic work.

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During the sixties and seventies the artist ill.u.s.trated many works of fiction. The most notable instance was Thackeray's Esmond in 1868-a work which he had long wished to be chosen to ill.u.s.trate.

Du Maurier had all his life an intense admiration for Thackeray. He inherited none of Thackeray's bitterness, but upon every other ground as an author, at least, he descends from Thackeray, notably in the studied colloquialism of his style when writing, and in a general friendliness to the Philistine. And in his drawings in Punch his satire is aimed in the same direction as Thackeray's always was. Like Thackeray, he was most at home on the plane where a social art, a delicate art of life is able to flourish. Of the concealed romanticist in du Maurier we have more than once already spoken. A Romanticist always turns to the past. Thackeray, in his lectures, also in the house he built for himself, and in a proposed but never finished history, went back into the past at least as far as Queen Anne's reign. Esmond, also of Queen Anne's reign, was the expression of a feature of Thackeray's temperament which never makes its full appearance in any other of his fictions. We believe that it was his own favourite among his works. But Thackeray did not succeed in expressing the whole of himself in the romantic vein; perhaps because he did not cultivate it from the start like Scott and Dumas. He was able to put more of himself into Vanity Fair. To think of Thackeray is to think first of Vanity Fair. From the unerring-because instinctive-judgment of the world this book received recognition as his masterpiece.

Du Maurier had not so much of the genuine flair for the eighteenth century as Thackeray. At heart he was much more in sympathy with the pre-Raphaelites and the love of early romance, whatever his pretence to the contrary in his satire, A Legend of Camelot. But there was no ill.u.s.trator of his time with a greater gift for the romantic novel of any period; and inevitably, he became, in due course, the ill.u.s.trator of Esmond.

It is impossible to return to the past except by the path of poetry. It was possible to du Maurier in his ill.u.s.trations to Esmond, because he was a poet. He used the effect of fading light in the sky seen through old leaded windows, and all the resources of poetic effect with a poet's and not an actor-manager's inspiration, wrapping the tale in the glamour in which Thackeray conceived it.

In 1865 du Maurier contributed a full page ill.u.s.tration and two vignettes to Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in parts by Ca.s.sell. Other signed ill.u.s.trations are by G.H. Thomas, John Gilbert, J.D. Watson, A.B. Houghton, W. Small, A. Parquier, R. Barnes, M.E. Edwards, and T. Morten. No book can be imagined which would afford the essential nature of his art less opportunity of showing itself than this one. He was no good at horrors, though his resourcefulness in the manifestation of emotional light and shadow was encouraged by the character of the full-page ill.u.s.tration which he had to supply. A signed full page appears in Part XVI., page 541. It is a scene in which the four martyrs, Bland, Frankesh, Sheterden, and Middleton, condemned by the Bishop of Dover, 25th June 1555, are shown being burned at the stakes. One of the martyrs certainly looks intensely smug with his hands folded as if he were at grace before a favourite dinner. Yes, du Maurier certainly failed to attain quite to the heights of the horror of this book.

Ill.u.s.tration for "The Story of a Feather" 1867.

The following year we have from the artist's pencil ill.u.s.trations to a book of the heroine of which he was so fond that he named his own daughter after her. That book was Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, "an everyday story," as it is called in its sub-t.i.tle. For this story du Maurier's art was much more fitted than for any other. In it, certainly, and not in Foxe's book, we should expect his temperament to reveal itself-and we are not disappointed. It is here that du Maurier is at his best. His ill.u.s.trations have a daintiness in this tale which they have nowhere else. A sign of the presence of fine art is the accommodation of style to theme. The ill.u.s.trations had been made for this book when it appeared serially in the Cornhill, and were afterwards published in the issue in two volumes. There is a picture at the beginning of the second volume called "The Burning Gorse," in which du Maurier makes an imaginative appeal through landscape almost worthy of Keene.

The artist is again at his best in the work of ill.u.s.trating fiction in the following year in Douglas Jerrold's Story of a Feather. It is the same refinement of technique that is evident as in Mrs. Gaskell's tale. One of du Maurier's greatest characteristics was charm. One is forced into ringing changes upon the word in the description of his work. But charm it is, more than ever, that characterises his ill.u.s.trations to The Story of a Feather. The initial letters in this book afford him a succession of opportunities for displaying that inventive genius which is evident wherever he turns to the province of pure fancy. It was not for nothing apparently that he was the son of an inventor.

We have already spoken of his power in these days in the emotional use of light and shade. It is perhaps even in this light book-in the ill.u.s.tration reproduced opposite-that we have one of the best examples of this power. But this book is all through a gold-mine of the work of the real du Maurier.

Another work in which his art is to be found at this time is Shirley Brooks's Sooner or Later (1868). The novel does not seem treated with quite the same reverence and enthusiasm which has characterised his work in the books we have just described, but it is among the representative examples of his ill.u.s.tration in the sixties. This story also pa.s.sed as a serial through Cornhill. In the same year, with E.H. Corbould, he provides ill.u.s.trations to The Book of Drawing-room Plays, &c., a manual of indoor recreation by H. Dalton. It is not impossible that these were prepared long in advance of publication, for they are in a very much earlier manner than the ill.u.s.trations we have been speaking of. In them du Maurier has not yet emerged from the influence of Leech-the first influence we encountered when a few years previously he joined himself to the band of those who solicit the publishers for ill.u.s.trative work. From the point of view of our subject the book does not repay much study. In 1876, in ill.u.s.trations to Hurlock Chase, or Among the Suss.e.x Ironworks, by George E. Sargent, published by The Religious Tract Society, we have some pictures of extraordinary power, in which it is to be seen how much his contact with Millais and other great ill.u.s.trators in the sixties inspired him, and developed his resources. His work has a "weight" in this book which was common to the best ill.u.s.tration of the period, a deliberation which shows the influence of Durer over the ill.u.s.trators of the sixties, and also the influence of pre-Raphaelitism in precise elaboration of form. It is in lighter vein we find him again in the same year in Jemmett Browne's Songs of Many Seasons, published by Simpkin, Marshall & Co., and ill.u.s.trated also by Walter Crane and others. Every now and then at this period du Maurier shows us a genius for "still-life" in interior genre which he did not seem to develop afterwards to the extent of the promise shown in these pictures. He gained at this time a very great deal in his art by the pre-Raphaelite influence. Never is he more exquisite than when he embraces detail. The need to produce with rapidity, and the effect of later fashions which did not suit his own nature so well, induced him to give up a very deliberate style suited to his quick perception of beauty in everyday incident, for one that sometimes only achieved emptiness in its attempt at breadth. But to have kept his pre-Raphaelite individuality with two such native impressionists as Keene and Whistler for his most intimate friends would have perhaps been more than could be expected of human nature. But it is true that he seemed to lose where those two artists proved they had everything to gain from a style that pa.s.sed detail swiftly, treating it suggestively. They were by nature impressionable to a different aspect of life, and in self expression they required a different method.

Du Maurier's artistic creed that everything should be drawn from nature-and tables and chairs are "nature" for the artist-forced him to return again and again to accessible properties which could be fitted into his scenes. Notable among those were the big vases and the constantly reappearing ornamental gilt clock. Though drawn in black and white we are sure of its gilt, for it belongs to the Victorian period. It is to be met with in all the surviving drawing-rooms of the period-that is, it is to be met with in "Apartments."

Du Maurier next furnishes a frontispiece and vignettes, which we do not admire, to Clement Scott's Round about the Islands (1874).

In 1882 he is at work in the field he had made his own, ill.u.s.trating the story of a fad that had always amused him, ill.u.s.trating the craze he had helped to create, in Prudence: A Story of Aesthetic London, by Lucy C. Lillie. We hope the reader of this page does not think we should have read this book. We looked at the ill.u.s.trations of a muscular curate-whom we took to be the hero-making an impressive entrance into a gathering of "aesthetes," and farther on leaving the church door with "Prudence"; we read the legend to the final ill.u.s.tration-"It was odd to see how completely Prudence forsook her brief period of aesthetic light"-and we came to our own conclusions. The ill.u.s.trations are made very small in process of printing, but du Maurier's art never lost by reduction. A picture of a Private View day in a Gallery-which at first makes one think of the Royal Academy, but in which the pictures are too well hung for that, and which is probably intended for the Grosvenor Gallery-is one of those admirable drawings of a fashionable crush with which du Maurier always excelled. In reviewing this book, however, we are already away from the most characteristic period of du Maurier's work as an ill.u.s.trator of fiction. That was between 1860 and 1880. His line is altogether less intense in the next book we have to consider-Philips's As in a Looking Gla.s.s (1889). The falling off between this and the book we were reviewing here but a moment ago is the most evident feature of the work before us. We have, we feel, said good-bye to the du Maurier who added so much l.u.s.tre to the ill.u.s.trative work of the period just preceding its publication. But in Punch the vivacity of his art is still sustained; and long afterwards in Trilby he scores successes again. In later years du Maurier allowed in his originals for reduction, and the original cannot be rightly judged until the reduction is made. In the book under notice no reduction appears to have been made, and the drawings are consequently lacking in precision of detail. The book is a large drawing-room table book-in our opinion the most hateful kind of book that was ever made-occupying more s.p.a.ce than any but the rarest works in the world are worth, giving more trouble to hold than it is possible for any but a great masterpiece to compensate for-and generally putting author and publisher in the debt of the reader, which is quite the wrong way round. The curious may see in this book what du Maurier's art was at its worst, and it may help them to estimate his achievement to note how even on this occasion it surpa.s.ses easily all later modern work in the same vein.

There is one other book, published in 1874, which du Maurier ill.u.s.trated at that time which should be mentioned. It had, we believe, a great success of a popular kind. We refer to Misunderstood, by Florence Montgomery. In the light of the ill.u.s.trations, which are in the artist's finest vein, one wonders how much of this success could with justice have been attributed to the ill.u.s.trations. We are inclined to think not a little. These pictures show many of the most interesting qualities of his work. In the portrait of Sir Everard Duncombe, Misunderstood's father, we have a skill in portraying a type that cannot have failed in impressing readers with the reality of the character. The delicacy of du Maurier's psychology in this portrait of a middle-aged man of the period is in marked contrast with the improbability of so many of his renderings of elderly people wherever he went outside of his stock types. It justifies his realism and mistrust of memory drawing. Through his failure to sustain his interest in life always at this pitch his art at the end of his career showed just the lack of this close observation of character. It often then seems too content to rest its claims on accurate drawing, even when what was drawn was not worth accuracy. And this is the fault of all the modern school.

Good drawing does not so much interest us in things as in the drama centred in them. Thus we have actually such things as horror, pa.s.sion, gentleness, and other invisible things conveyed to us in the lines of a drawing. We may indeed know genius from talent by the much more of the invisible which it transfers to visible line. Du Maurier, in drawing children, for instance, secures their prepossessing qualities. Drawing is great when it conveys something which in itself has not an outline-like the "atmosphere" of a Victorian drawing-room.

Caution "Don't keep your Beer-Barrel in the same cellar as your Dust-Bin!"

Punch, February 23, 1867.

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Intensely artistic natures make everything very self-expressive without conscious intention. For this reason an artist's handwriting tends to be more worth looking at than other people's. The draughtsman lavishes some of his skill upon his handwriting. This more particularly applies to the signature, which is written with fuller consciousness than other words. Artists, owing to their intense interest in "appearances," generally start by being a little self-conscious about their signature. But that period pa.s.ses, and the autograph becomes set, to grow fragile with old age and shrink, but not to alter in its real characteristics. The signature at the foot of a picture presents a rather different problem from the signature at the foot of a letter. It must necessarily be a more deliberate and self-conscious affair, but it is no less expressive. German deliberation was never so well expressed as in Albert Durer's signature.

Self-advertisers always give themselves away with their signature. As a rule, the finer the artist the more natural his signature in style. And fine artists like to subscribe to the great tradition of their craft, that the work is everything, the workman only someone in the fair light of its effect; the name is added out of pride but not vain-glory, with that modest air with which a hero turns the conversation from himself. Naturalness and mastery arrive at the same moment; students cannot sign their works naturally. Du Maurier's signature pa.s.sed through many transformations, and there were times, too, when the artist was quite undecided between the plentiful choice of his Christian names-George Louis Palmella Busson. An artist beginning his career at the present day with such a choice of names would most certainly have made use of the "Palmella" in full-an advertis.e.m.e.nt a.s.set. But advertis.e.m.e.nt is vulgar. Du Maurier belonged to the Victorians, who were never vulgar.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]

The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene, by Charles Somes Layard. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1892.

III

DU MAURIER AS AUTHOR