Chapter V: The Illustrations (3)

The machinery of the plot is crude; perhaps this reason as well as the delicate one assigned made Mr. Henry James refuse it. But du Maurier had a curious skill in revealing states of mind of real psychological and pathological interest. The sudden cessation of the power to feel affection, and of the ability to respond emotionally to nature, the curious loss of bloom in mental faculty in the case of Little Billee, in this we have an inquiry into a by no means unusual state of mind carried out with scientific exactness to an artistic end. Mr. Henry James would no doubt have preferred this phenomenon as the basis of a plot to the preposterous mesmerism which forms the plot of _Trilby_, he being one of the few who understand that a dramatic situation is a mental experience. In _Peter Ibbetson_ the "dreaming truly"--the illusion that becomes as great as reality--is the phenomenon the author examines. "Dreaming truly" is like the ecstasy of the saints: it is the "will to believe" in the very act of willing.

Du Maurier was spoilt for romance by his long connection with a comic paper. It had become a habit with him to be on his guard against everything that could be travestied. This was the conventional side of du Maurier in evidence, as it is also in that other flaw in the simple story of _Trilby_--the adulation of worldly success. We find him constantly writing in this strain in the description of character: "He is now one of the greatest artists in the world, and Europeans cross the Atlantic to consult him"; or of another character: "And now that his name is a household word in two hemispheres"; and of another: "Whose pinnacle (of pure unadulterated fame) is now the highest of all," &c.

§3

In all his books the author shows some of that response to old-time associations which gives to authors like Dumas and Scott their freedom from things that only belong to the present moment--precisely the things, by the way, which do not last beyond the present. The consciousness that the experiences of life to be valued are the ones which unite us to those who preceded us in life, and which will in turn give us a share in the future, is in the possession of the Romantic school. But du Maurier seems to have felt himself paid to be funny, and to conceal his sense of romance as Jack Point concealed his love-sickness. His master, Thackeray, less than anyone apologised to his readers for the parade of his own feelings.

There is a note of smugness that spoils _Trilby_; in fact Little Billee, "frock-coated, shirt-collared within an inch of his life, duly scarfed and scarf-pinned, chimney-pot-hatted, most beautifully trousered, and balmorally booted," is the most insufferable picture of a hero of a romance. This person compromises the effect of the charmingly haunting presence of Trilby herself, and of the great-hearted gentleman in Taffy. There is, moreover, the failure to convince us of Little Billee's genius. We are not assisted to belief in the immortality of his works, by the illustrations of the mid-Victorian upholstery in the midst of which they were manufactured. On the other hand, we merely have a vision of the type of art which won popular success a generation ago, encouraged by the Royal Academy at the expense of something better, and keeping a large group of well-dressed painters so much in Society, that, like Little Billee himself, they actually grew tired of the great before the great had time to tire of them--"incredible as it may seem, and against nature."

Du Maurier put portraits of his friends into _Trilby_, softening the outlines, and giving the touches, legitimate in a work of art, which promote variation. He wrote impulsively, and a spirit of generous recognition of the achievements of all his friends almost ruined his book. The "lived happy ever afterwards" sentiment follows up every reference to them. In the famous character of "Joe Sibley" (Whistler)--afterwards altered to Antony, a Swiss, and ruined--a witty, a debonair and careless genius was created. Just such an impression was made upon us by this character as Whistler's own studied butterfly-pose in life seemed intended to make. It was with the greatest regret we missed the fascinating figure from the novel when published in book form, a regret even confessed to by Whistler himself, though he had not been able to refrain from dashing into print over its publication. There was none other of the Bohemians described that so endeared himself to us, or that was so alive--witnessing to the degree to which Whistler's personality affected those with whom he was thrown in contact. Du Maurier represented a character in Sibley with the defects of his qualities, to the greater emphasis of the qualities. To attribute to a man the genius to be king of Bohemia, and to receive from everyone forgiveness for everything, _à cause de ses gentillesses_ to make him witty also, and a most exquisite and original artist--this would have been enough for most men, though it was not enough for Whistler. Joe Sibley, not Little Billee, is the real creation of "an artist" that is in the book.

§ 4

When _Trilby_ was put on the English stage a girl to play the heroine's part had to be found. That was the first problem. And speaking of the fact that a _Trilby_ did appear almost immediately, du Maurier said, "There is a school which believes that wherever Art leads Nature is bound to follow. I ought to belong to it, if there is." A _Trilby_ was heard of; more, du Maurier had often commented upon the beauty of the lady when she was a child living near him at Hampstead Heath. He inquired her name. She was already on the stage, and showing promise as an actress. He still felt sceptical, we are told, and so a photograph was sent. He said, "No acting will be wanted; for here is Trilby." Miss Baird was interviewed. "In face and manner," said du Maurier, telling the story of the interview, "she seemed still more Trilby-like than ever; but Mr. Tree, who was present, was on thoughts of acting-power intent. And when he gravely announced that to be an actress a woman should not be well-born and well-bred, and that if possible she should have had her home in the wings or the gutter, I considered the matter settled. We drove away in silence, and I, at any rate, in gloom. For Miss Baird, refined and gentle, and well-born and well-bred, was still Trilby for me, and I flatly refused to see either of the ladies whom Mr. Tree had in mind. Finally, he thought he would see Miss Baird again, and with her read over a scene or two. He got another cab--returned there and then--in forty-eight hours the engagement was made."

It may be found interesting if we revive here a criticism which throws light on the first reception of the adaption of _Trilby_ for the stage. The play was put on before the _Trilby_ boom had spent itself, but critics would, from the nature of their species, be rather prejudiced against, than carried away in favour of, anything which came in with a "boom" that was not of their own making. There was a criticism written of the play at the time by Mr. Justin Huntly Macarthy which, quoted, will give us the history of the "boom." It was his good fortune to be in the United States "when," he says, "the taste for _Trilby_ became a passion, when the passion grew into a mania and the mania deepened into a madness," and he noted that in England the play and not the novel kindled the passion; though in the criticism of the novel, classed as it had been even in this country with the work of Thackeray, he could only recall one note of dispraise, "so earnest and scornful that, in its loneliness, it seemed to fall like the clatter of a steel glove in a house of prayer." He recalled a friend of his goaded to ferocity by another's exuberance of rapture for some latter-day singers, crying out "Hang your Decadents! Humpty-Dumpty is worth all they ever wrote." "This," he continued, "is a variety of the mood which accepts _Trilby_. In _Trilby_ we get back, as it were, to Humpty-Dumpty--to its simplicity at least, if not to its pitch of art. The strong man and the odd man and the boy man, brothers in Bohemianism, brothers in art, brothers in love for youth and beauty; the girl, the fair, the kind, the for-ever-desirable, pure in impurity, and sacred even in shame; the dingy evil genius who gibbers in Yiddish to the God he denies; the hopeless, devoted musician, whose spirit in a previous existence answered to the name of Bowes; the mother who makes the appeal that so many parents have made on behalf of their sons to fair sinners since the days when Duval the elder interviewed Marguerite Gauthier; all this company of puppets please in their familiarity, their straightforwardness, their undefeated obviousness, very much as a game of bowls on a village green with decent rustics, or a game of romps in a rose-garden with laughing children, might please after a supper with Nana or an evening with the Theosophists."

This seems to us to diagnose the case as far as the success of the play was concerned. But as regards the book at which it was partly aimed, it is wide of the mark. There is something in a work of fiction when it is of sufficient power to make a success simply as fiction which cannot be carried over the footlights. If we only knew Shakespeare through seeing him acted we should rate him much lower than we do. The success of Shakespeare upon the stage rests with certain qualities that can only properly tell upon the stage. But great as these qualities are, in Shakespeare's case they far from represent his whole art; there remains unexpressed the fragrance of field and flower, the secrets of mood, which do not lie with facts that acting can express, and which float like a perfume between us and the pages. All this the dust of stage carpentry destroys, and the unnaturalness of lime-light dispels. The charm in _Trilby_ is overlaid by the obvious, but the charm is there for the reader, just as the obviousness is there for the stage when the charm is gone in the adaptation. The stage is the throne of the obvious. It is possible for art to be obvious and great, as the art of Turner was in painting. His art was theatrical. It is the obvious that is theatrical. For that which is theatrical, as the word implies, must be spectacular. Theatricality before everything else in this world, in any art, achieves wide and popular success, the kind of success that Turner achieves in the pictures for which the English public admire him.

Mr. W.D. Howells, in an article written just after the novelist's death, said:[3]--"It was my good fortune to have the courage to write to du Maurier when _Trilby_ was only half printed, and to tell him how much I liked the gay sad story. In every way it was well that I did not wait for the end, for the last third of it seemed to me so altogether forced in its conclusions that I could not have offered my praises with a whole heart, nor he accept them with any pleasure, if the disgust with its preposterous popularity, which he so frankly, so humorously expressed, had then begun in him."

The American critic describes the fact of du Maurier commencing novelist at sixty and succeeding, as one of the most extraordinary things in the history of literature, and without parallel. Perhaps the parallel has been shown in the case of Mr. de Morgan. Mr. Howells also speaks of du Maurier perfecting an attitude recognisable in Fielding, Sterne, Heine, and Thackeray--the confidential one. Du Maurier's _Trilby_ was a confidence. But he adds, "It wants the last respect for the reader's intelligence--it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very greatest novelists--the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tourgénief, Tolstoy. But short of this supreme truth, it has every grace, every beauty, every charm." The word "Every" here seems to us an American exaggeration. We should ask ourselves whether in spite of all its confidentialness _Trilby_ makes an intimate revelation. The rare quality of intimacy, that is the greatest thing in the very greatest novels.

The "boom" of _Trilby_, we are told, surprised du Maurier immensely, for he had not taken himself _au sérieux_ as a novelist. Indeed it rather distressed him when he reflected that Thackeray never had a "boom."

§5

Although du Maurier had said that his head was full of plots the supply seemed to have run thin by the time he set to work on _The Martian_. The value of this book rests with its autobiographical character. The knot is not tied in the first half and unravelled in the second, after the approved manner in which plots should be woven. The story is chiefly a record of people and places, vivid, and written in a breathless, chatty style. It somewhat resembles the conversation of a boy on returning from his holidays. It reveals a perfectly amazing resource in imparting life to mere description. As a writer, du Maurier seemed immediately to acquire a style unlike that of anyone else. Everything is described with a zest that carries the reader along, and this manner is even extended to things that are not worth describing. But he was always slightly apologetic with pen in hand, never permitting himself the professional air, or giving a full challenge to criticism by disclaiming the privileges of a distinguished amateur.

In _Peter Ibbetson_ the artist told the story of his childhood; in _Trilby_ he recounted the brightest period of his Bohemian youth; in _The Martian_ he records the nature of the shock he received from threatened blindness, and the depression of days before his genius had discovered itself and revealed the prospect of a great career to him. The effect of Pentonville, the grey suburb, and of the absence of worthy companions upon a romantic, highly-strung young man in _Peter Ibbetson_ is quite autobiographical, as is the description of student life in Paris by which afterwards the uninspiring environment is replaced. The continuation of the studentship at Antwerp, the consultation with the specialist at Dusseldorf, completes the story of du Maurier's life until he came to London. There is literally nothing that a biographer could add to it. And du Maurier wrote his autobiography thus, in tales, which are histories too, in their graphic description of the aspect of places and people at a given time. Up to the day when the artist came to London to seek employment from the publishers he seems to have had disheartening times. In the last years of his life, when he went over the ground of these early experiences in his books, it was, as is evident from the style, in the mood of one who had survived danger by flood and field to recount his tales in an atmosphere of peace he had hardly hoped to realise.

_The Cornhill_, 1870.]

It is evident from his books that he had many inward experiences of a dramatic kind; that his life was only uneventful upon the surface, and in appearance. In each of his novels, as we have seen, the rather crude machinery of his plot secures the revelation of a curious, but a not at all uncommon state of mind. He experimented empirically in psychology, interesting himself in the processes of his own mind. No one can doubt that in more than in outward incident his novels were autobiographical; that also he drew upon the resources of his personal history for some of the less usual and partly religious frames of mind in which his "Heroes," each in his own way, outwit the apparently ugly intentions of destiny towards themselves.

§ 6

Du Maurier's literary contributions to _Punch_ were bound up in the volume _A Legend of Camelot, &c._, issued from the _Punch_ office in 1898. Besides the title-piece, a satire of some length upon the mediævalism of the pre-Raphaelites, the book contains shorter pieces--"Flirts in Hades," "Poor Pussy's Nightmare," "The Fool's Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques," "L'Onglay à Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock from some felicitous twist at the end of a line. Thus it is almost impossible to quote from them. The humour rests in each case with the whole of the skit; and in the case of one of the best of the whole series, "A Love-Agony," a poem for a picture by Maudle, given, there must be understanding on the reader's part, of the art "cult" against which it is directed.

"The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts" is du Maurier's first attempt at a work of fiction. It is significant that in style it has the lightness of touch that would be expected from the disciple of Thackeray, and that afterwards won by its "taking" character the hearts of the readers of _Trilby_. It is the story of a painter, his wife and their twin children. It opens with a picture of them at home, Jack Spratt dreaming, even in those days, of Post-Impressionism, showing that du Maurier was a prophet, "dreaming of the ante-pre-Raphaelite school. In the depths of his bliss a feeling of discouragement would steal over him as he thought of those immortal works, showing thereby that he was a true artist, ever striving after the light. He little dreamt in his modesty that, young and inexperienced though he might be, his pictures were even quainter than theirs; for not only could he already draw, colour, compose, and put into perspective quite as badly as they did, but he had over them the advantage of a real lay figure to copy, whereas they had to content themselves with the living model."

"The amusements of this happy pair were the simplest, healthiest, and most delightful kind; they never went to the play, nor to balls or dances, which they thought immodest--(indeed they were not even asked)--nor read such things as novels, magazines, or the newspaper; nor visited exhibitions of modern art, which they held in contempt, as they did all things modern; ... and they were devoted to music, not that of the present day, which they despised, nor that of the future, of which they had never heard; nor English music, which was not old enough." Of their friends, "They were few, but true and trusty, with remarkably fine heads for a painter ... their deportment grave, sad and very strange; for the death of the early Italian masters still weighed on their soul with all the force of some recent domestic bereavement. They looked on themselves and each other and the Jack Spratts, and were looked upon by the Jack Spratts in return as the sole incarnation on this degenerate earth of all such as had still managed to survive there; and so they were always telling each other and everyone else they met. And no wonder, for they were marvellously accomplished; being each of them painter, sculptor, architect, poet, critic and engraver, all in one; and all this without ever having learnt...."

"In their hours of sickness alone the Spratts were as other people, and sent immediately for the nearest medical practitioner (or leech, as they preferred to call him); their only sickness to speak of had arisen from once feasting mediaevally on an old roast peacock, in company with the trusty friends, who had also been taken very bad on that occasion; and they ever afterwards avoided that dish, but at their banquets would have the peacock's head and what was left of its tail tacked on to some more digestible bird...."

"As staunch Radicals, they hated the aristocracy, whose very existence they ignored; shunned the professional class, which they scorned, on account of its scientific and utilitarian tendency; and loathed the middle class, from which they had sprung, because it was Philistine; and although they professed to deeply honour the working man, they very wisely managed to see as little of him as they possibly could."

Owing to the sudden success of a picture--which scandalised his trusty friends--and the beauty of his wife, the model for the picture, Jack woke up one morning and found himself famous. They were lionised. Mrs. Spratt's deep-rooted dislike to the female dress of the present day did not last much longer than her life-long prejudice against the aristocracy; she discarded the mediæval garments she had hitherto worn with such disdain for the eccentricities of modern fashion, and put herself into the hands of the best dressmaker in town. And thus snubbing, and being snubbed, dressing and dancing and feasting and flirting, did she soar higher and higher in her butterfly career. The denouement comes when they are cut out by "Ye rising Minnows"--an American sculptor--one Pygmalion F. Minnow--whose wife was twice as beautiful as Mrs. Spratt.

Another shorter prose skit of du Maurier's which is included in the same book satirises the splendid sort of hero, who conceals beneath a mask of indifference the power to do anything on earth better than anybody else.

These prose skits show the neat irony that _Punch_ was willing to encourage by attaching du Maurier to the literary, as well as to the artistic, staff. But we think it may be said that du Maurier hadn't the heart to go on with a class of writing in which his great tendency to sentimentalise would have been out of place.

§ 7

In 1890 du Maurier contributed two papers to the _Art Journal_ entitled "The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist's Point of View." It was an attempt to write down the ideas that had controlled him in book illustration. The artist begins the article by protesting that of all subjects in the world it is the one upon which he has the least and fewest ideas, and that such ideas as he has consist principally of his admiration for illustrations by others. He separates readers into two classes--those who visualise what they read with the mind's eye so satisfactorily that they want the help of no pictures, and those--the greater number, he thinks--who do not possess this gift, to whom to have the author's conceptions embodied for them in a concrete form is a boon. The little figures in the picture are a mild substitute for the actors at the footlights. The arrested gesture, the expression of face, the character and costume, may be as true to nature and life as the best actor can make them. His test of a good illustrator is that the illustrations continue to haunt the memory when the letterpress is forgotten. He cites Menzel as the highest example of such performance. He next refers to the illustrated volume of Poems by Tennyson in 1860, for which Millais and Rossetti and others designed small woodcuts, the publishing of which, he says, made an epoch in English book illustration, importing a new element to which he finds it difficult to give a name. "I still adore," he says, "the lovely, wild, irresponsible moon-face of Oriana, with a gigantic mailed archer kneeling at her feet in the yew-wood, and stringing his fatal bow; the strange beautiful figure of the Lady of Shalott, when the curse comes over her, and her splendid hair is floating wide, like the magic web; the warm embrace of Amy and her cousin (when their spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips), and the dear little symmetrical wavelets beyond; the queen sucking the poison out of her husband's arm; the exquisite bride at the end of the Talking Oak; the sweet little picture of Emma Morland and Edward Grey, so natural and so modern, with the trousers treated in quite the proper spirit; the chaste Sir Galahad, slaking his thirst with holy water, amid all the mystic surroundings; and the delightfully incomprehensible pictures to the Palace of Art, that gave one a weird sense of comfort, like the word 'Mesopotamia,' without one's knowing why."

_The Cornhill_, 1871.]

In the second paper he makes interesting reflections on Thackeray and Dickens. "When the honour devolved upon me of illustrating _Esmond_," he writes, "what would I not have given to possess sketches, however slight, of Thackeray's own from which to inspire myself--since he was no longer alive to consult. For although he does not, any more than Dickens, very minutely describe the outer aspect of his people, he visualised them very accurately, as these sketches prove."

"I doubt if Dickens did, especially his women--his pretty women--Mrs. Dombey, Florence, Dora, Agnes, Ruth Pinch, Kate Nickleby, little Emily--we know them all through Hablot Browne alone--and none of them present any very marked physical characteristics. They are sweet and graceful, neither tall nor short; they have a pretty droop in their shoulders, and are very ladylike; sometimes they wear ringlets, sometimes not, and each would do very easily for the other."

In 1868 Messrs. Harper published in book form under the title _Social Pictorial Satire_ a series of articles which du Maurier had written in _Harper's Magazine_, and which had originally formed the substance of lectures which he had delivered in the prominent towns of England. He speaks first of his great admiration of Leech in his youth. "To be an apparently hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in some dreary, deserted, dismal little Flemish town, and to receive _Punch's Almanac_ (for 1858, let us say) from some good-natured friend in England--that is a thing not to be forgotten! I little dreamed that I should come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit, and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in _Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well when he was the artist!" Du Maurier draws a pleasant portrait of his friend, sympathetically, and very picturesquely analyses his art, which has, he says, the quality of inevitableness. Of "Words set to Pictures" his long description of Leech's pretty woman is as good as anything that can be read of the kind. Then he sketches the characteristics of Charles Keene's personality and passes on to his art:--"From the pencil of this most lovable man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I cannot recall many lovable characters of either sex or of any age."

But the tribute to the craftsmanship, the skill, the ease and beauty of Keene's line, to his knowledge of effect, to the very great artist is unmeasured. In fulfilment of his contract du Maurier speaks of himself and his "little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink--and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!" He says very little about himself. He concludes with a review of social pictorial satire considered as a fine art. It is evident from the lecture that du Maurier was an illustrator by instinct as well as training. "Now conceive," says he, speaking of Thackeray, "that the marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he cultivated the other, and, finally, that he had exercised it as seriously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in black and white all the art and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has written--what a pictorial record that would be!"

"The career of the future social pictorial satirist is," he continues, "full of splendid possibilities undreamed of yet.... The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling. All we want for my little dream to be realised is that, among these precocious wielders of the pencil, there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope...."

Does not this precisely sum the situation up? Du Maurier could not live to foresee that, for all the expert skill of modern illustration, the "youths who can draw beautifully" lack "a point of view." It was the possession of this that distinguished Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Leech, and du Maurier.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The circumstances in which du Maurier took up novel-writing, and the history of the staging of _Trilby_ in England were related by him to Mr. R.H. Sherard for an "Interview" which appeared in _McClure's Magazine_ 1895. And I have referred to this source for the genealogy of the artist, as given by himself, and particulars of his early life.--AUTHOR.

[3] _English Society_, "Du Maurier." London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co. Introduction: W.D. Howells.

IV

LIFE OF THE ARTIST

§1

To write of the work of an artist who is not a contemporary without reference to the circumstances of his life would be an incomplete performance, and yet criticism and biography are hardly ever happily fused. The gifts of a biographer are of a kind very dissimilar to those employed in criticism. The true biographer loves uncritically every detail that has to do with his subject, as a portrait-painter loves every detail that has to do with the appearance of his sitter. The best portraits, whether in biography--which is nothing if it is not portraiture--or in painting, are those in which the interpreter has been in a wholly receptive mood. This is not the critical attitude, which involuntarily takes arms against first one thing and then another in the subject before it; and this sensitiveness is in proportion to the critic's interest in his subject.

Du Maurier told us the story of himself completely in his novels. It was said of de Quincey that in his writings he could tell the story of his own life and no other. This might be said of du Maurier too.

The story of his childhood, as we read it through his books, gives us the picture of an extremely sensitive and romantic child possessed of a great power of responding affectionately to the scenes in which he grew up, as well as to the people who surrounded him. It is this sentiment for place as well as for people that sometimes gives us in his books a remarkable poetic strain--a strain like music in its caressing revival of old associations. And we really get a very accurate idea of the inward story of the artist when we contrast this temperamental sensitiveness with the kind of work upon which he employed his skill during the chief part of his career.

Everywhere in du Maurier's life we find the testimony to his sweetness of disposition. He had the great loyalty to friends which is really loyalty to the world at large, made up of possible friends. Friends are not an accident, but they are made by a process of natural selection, which, if we are wise and generous, we do not attempt to superintend.

Proxy

"As you're going to say your Prayers, Maud, _please_ mention I'm so
dreadfully tired I can't say mine to-night, but I'll be sure to
remember to-morrow!"

_Punch's Almanack_, 1874.]

Du Maurier was optimistic, he had the genius for keeping tragedy at bay; for enduring, for instance, such a dark cloud constantly threatening as blindness without claiming pity. It is easy for such people to impart charm in whatever art they practise. And it is not true, as modern novelists and playwrights seem to imagine, that "depth" always implies what is sinister, and that only the surface of life is charming. Let us once again believe in fragrance in art. Summer is as great as winter. Within a sweet-smelling blossom is the whole profound history of a tree struggling to survive the vengeance of frost and gales. It is the fragrant things of life that contain all that has been conserved through unkind weather.

One of the chief influences in du Maurier's life was his admiration of Thackeray. This revealed sympathy with greatness. Thackeray was one who was greater in life than in his art, as are all the greatest artists. He was great as a man of the world. In a short life his presence made itself prevail everywhere in London. It requires, too, considerable genius to live only in precisely the street and the house in London you want to. This Thackeray managed to do; and to know only the people you want to, as Thackeray did. This is real sovereignty.

There was a reserve about du Maurier in manner when he encountered complete strangers. He retained the detached and distant manner with slight acquaintances which his role of an observer in Society had taught him. Like all those who have an exceptionally loyal friendship to give, he could not pretend to give it to every person introduced to him. In this he was, of course, no true Bohemian. In Bohemian circles it is the fashion to make extravagant use of terms of endearment and to fall upon the neck at first meetings, and men like du Maurier reserve the display of affection for the home.

Art-critics and secretaries of Art Galleries, frame-makers and all those whose business throws them into constant contact with living artists and their art, know how exactly like their pictures artists always are, their work being immediately expressive of their own fibre, coarse or refined. Du Maurier's art reveals a marked preference for certain kinds of people. In life too he was selective; knowing well whom he liked, and in whom he wished to inspire regard.

The artist's family was of the small nobility of France. The name Palmella was given him in remembrance of the great friendship between his father's sister and the Duchess de Palmella, who was the wife of the Portuguese Ambassador to France. The real family name was Busson; the "du Maurier" came from the Château le Maurier, built in the fifteenth century, and still standing in Anjou or Maine. It belonged to du Maurier's cousins, the Auberys, and in the seventeenth century it was the Auberys who wore the title of du Maurier; and an Aubery du Maurier, who distinguished himself in that century, was Louis of that name, French Ambassador to Holland. The Auberys and the Bussons married and intermarried, the Bussons assuming the territorial name of du Maurier.

George du Maurier's grandfather's name was Robert Mathurin Busson du Maurier, _Gentilhomme verrier_--gentleman glass-blower. Until the Revolution glass-blowing was a monopoly of the _gentilshommes_, no commoner might engage in the industry, at that time considered an art. The Busson genealogy dates from the twelfth century. The novelist made use of many of the names which occur in papers relating to his family history, in _Peter Ibbetson_.

Du Maurier's father was a small _rentier_, deriving his income from the family glass-works in Anjou. He was born in England, whither the artist's grandfather had fled to escape the Revolution and the guillotine, returning to France in 1816.

His grandmother was a bourgeoise, by name Bruaire, a descendant of Jean Bart, the admiral. His grandfather was not rich, and while in England mainly depended on the liberality of the British Government, which allowed him a pension of twenty pounds a year for each member of his family. He died a schoolmaster at Tours.

The mother of the artist was an Englishwoman married to his father at the British Embassy in Paris, and the artist was born in Paris on March 6, 1834, in a little house in the Champs Elysées. His parents removed to Belgium in 1863, where they stayed three years. When the child was five they came to London, taking 1 Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone Road--the house which had been formerly occupied by Charles Dickens. Du Maurier remembered riding in the park, on a little pony, escorted by a groom, who led his pony by a strap. One day there cantered past a young woman surrounded by horsemen; at the bidding of his groom he waved his hat, and the lady smiled and kissed her hand to him. It was Queen Victoria with her equerries.

The father grew very poor. He was a man of scientific tastes, and lost his money in inventions which never came to anything. After a year in Devonshire Terrace the family had to wander again, going to Boulogne, where they lived at the top of the Grand Rue. Here the artist said they lived in a beautiful house, and had sunny hours and were happy.

Apropos of du Maurier's early homes, Sir Francis Burnand, in his _Records and Reminiscences_, tells an amusing story, which, whilst of necessity abbreviating, we shall try to give as nearly as possible in his own words. Some members of the _Punch_ staff who, with the proprietors, were visiting Paris during the Exhibition year of 1889, took a drive in the neighbourhood of Passy. Du Maurier, who had not stayed in Paris for some years, pointed out house after house as being his birthplace. He started with the selection of a small but attractive suburban residence, afterwards correcting himself and pointing to a house much more attractive-looking than the first. Soon, however, the puzzled expression which his companions had noticed in him before, returned to his face, and he called a halt for the third time, pointing to a large house in an extensive garden with a fountain. "No," he exclaimed with conviction, "I was wrong. This is where I was born. There's the fountain, there are the green shutters! and in _that_ room!" The party descended again and poured out libations. After the sleepy stage of a long drive had been reached, du Maurier awoke, and, as if soliloquising, muttered, "No, no, I was wrong, absurdly wrong. But I see my mistake." And he aroused his companions to view a fine mansion approached by a drive.

"Yes," he exclaimed, "the other places were mistakes. It is so difficult to remember the exact spot where one was born. But there can be no doubt about this. _Cocher! Arrêtez! s'il vous plaît_," he cried, and he was about to open the door and descend, when William Bradbury, of the party, stopped him.

"No, you don't, Kiki; you've been born in three or four places already, and we've drunk your health in every one of 'em; so we won't do it again till you've quite made up your mind where you _were_ born."

In vain du Maurier protested. "You bring us out for a holiday, you take us about everywhere, and you won't let a chap be born where he likes." But Mr. Bradbury was inexorable; the door was closed, the coachman grinned, cracked his whip, and away they went, the party siding with Mr. Bradbury in objecting to pulling up at every inn to toast the occasion.

Sir Francis speaks of what fun du Maurier was at such times, and of never remembering having seen him so boyish, so "Trilbyish" as on the occasion of the memorable visit.

From Boulogne du Maurier was brought by his family to Paris, to live in an apartment on the first floor of the house No. 80 in the Champs Elysées. In the artist's manhood the ground and first floor were a café, and he said he felt sorry to look up at the windows from which his mother used to watch his return from school, and see waiters bustling about and his home invaded.

§ 2

He went to school at the age of thirteen, in the Pension Froussard, in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. He remembered with affection his master Froussard, who became a deputy after the Revolution of 1848. He owned to being lazy, with no particular bent; but he worked really hard, he confessed, for one year. He made a number of friends, but of his comrades at that school only one distinguished himself in after life, Louis Becque de Fouquière, the writer, whose life has been written by M. Anatole France.

The artist went up for his _bachot_, his baccalaureate degree, at the Sorbonne, and was plucked for his written Latin version. It vexed him and his mother, for they were poor at the time, and it was important that he should do well. His father was then in England. Du Maurier crossed to him before informing him of his failure, miserable with the communication he had to make. They met at the landing at London Bridge, and at the sight of his utterly woebegone face, guessing the truth, his father burst into a roar of laughter, which, said the son afterwards, gave him the greatest pleasure he ever experienced.

His father was scientific, and hated everything that was not science. Du Maurier, with his enthusiasm for Byron, had to meet this attitude as best he could. His father never reproached him for the failure in the _bachot_ examination. He had made up his mind that his son was intended for a scientist, and determined to make him one, putting him as a pupil at the Birkbeck Chemical Laboratory of University College, where he studied chemistry under Dr. Williamson. The son's own ambition at that time was to go in for music and singing. "My father," he said, "possessed the sweetest, most beautiful voice that I have ever heard; and if he had taken up singing as a profession, would most certainly have been the greatest singer of his time. In his youth he had studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, but his family objected to his following the profession, for they were Legitimists and strong Catholics, and held the stage in that contempt that was usual at the beginning of the last century."

The artist himself as a youth was crazy about music, and used to practise his voice wherever and whenever he could. But his father discouraged him. The father died in his arms, singing one of Count de Ségur's songs.

He remained at the Birkbeck Laboratory for two years, leaving there in 1854, when his parent, still convinced of the future before his son in the pursuit of science, set him up on his own account in a chemical laboratory in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, in the City. The house is still standing. "It was," says du Maurier, "a fine laboratory, for my father, being a poor man, naturally fitted it up in the most expensive style." "The only occasion," he continues, "on which the sage of Barge Yard was able to render any real service to humanity was when he was engaged by the directors of a Company for working certain gold mines in Devonshire which were being greatly boomed, and to which the public was subscribing heavily, to go down to Devonshire to assay the ore. I fancy they expected me to send them a report likely to further tempt the public. If this was their expectation, they were mistaken, for after a few experiments I went back to town and told them that there was not a vestige of gold in the ore. The directors were of course very dissatisfied with this statement, and insisted on my returning to Devonshire to make further investigation. I went and had a good time of it down in the country, for the miners were very jolly fellows; but I was unable to satisfy my employers, and sent up a report which showed the public that the whole thing was a swindle, and so saved a good many people from loss."

_Chorus_. "O, Mamma!--_Dear_ Mamma!--_Darling_ Mamma!! _Do_ leave
off!!!"

(Showing that no one is a prophet in his own country.)

_Punch_, November 7, 1874.]

Du Maurier told the story of this business in _Once a Week_ in 1861; it is written in a highly amusing strain.

We have taken relevant extracts, as follows, from the amusing story, partly because it exhibits the artist for the first time as an Author, and partly because it continues the narrative of his life:--

§ 3

"Somebody who took a great interest in me (my father) had just established me in the City as an analytical chemist and mining engineer. Now, if there was one thing in the world for which I was peculiarly, and I may even say extraordinarily, unfit, it was that very useful profession; but it is a well-known fact that the fondest parents are not always the most discriminating in the choice of professions for their sons. So I had spent two years in a school of chemistry, attending lectures and performing analyses, qualitative and quantitative, and various other chemical experiments, which I used to think very droll and amusing, in order to fit myself for my future career, and at length, thanks to my father's kindness, I found myself master of a laboratory which had been arranged in a manner regardless of expense, with water and gas laid on in every possible corner, and bottles, chemical stoves, and scales, &c., of a most ornamental brightness and perfection.

"Here I waited for employment daily, and entertained my friends with sumptuous hospitality at lunch and supper; here also I occasionally astonished my mother and sister by dexterously turning yellow liquids into blue ones, and performing other marvels of science--accomplishments which I have almost entirely forgotten (in my prospectus it was stated that assays of ore and analyses of minerals, &c., would be most carefully conducted, and all business of the kind attended to, with great steadiness and despatch); and pending the advent of work, the scene of my future operations was enlivened by athletic sport and every kind of jollification, which helped me to endure the anxiety of my parents at seeing me start on the serious business of life so young." He goes on to say that, thanks to kindness of friends of his family, employment came: he was given an order for analysing various specimens of soil from a friend's estate. "I conducted these experiments with proper earnestness, and he paid me for them with becoming gravity. I now thank him kindly for the same (it would have been undignified to do so then) and sincerely hope that he has found my scientific research beneficial to his land." Then the gold contagion suddenly broke out and committed great ravages. "I caught it one rainy afternoon near the Exchange; my mother and sister instantly became affected, but my father, who was of a stout habit and robust temperament, and gifted with a very practical turn of mind, fortunately escaped, and devoted himself to our cure. Thanks to his judicious nursing, I was the first to recover." "The gold fever raged worse and worse, and I waited impatiently for it to give me employment; at length it did so, in a few months from the period of its birth: somebody introduced me to somebody else, who introduced me to the chairman of the Victoria Gold and Copper Mine, situated near Moleville, in Blankshire."

Then follows an interview with the directors. "It was necessary that in my interview with the directors next day, I should cram them with every possible technical term that had ever been invented for the purpose."

He manages to squeeze "lodes," "gossans," "costeanings," and other impressive words into almost every sentence. It produces a great effect on the directors.

The offer of a guinea and a half a day to go down the mine inspires a wild impulse to embrace the whole board in the person of the venerable fat old fellow who makes the offer. This is restrained. "I told him I would think of the matter, and return him an answer the following day; and, after bouncing myself first into the office-clerk and then into the fire-place, I eventually succeeded in making an unconcerned exit."

"I pass over my triumphant sensations and the family bliss, only chequered by anxiety lest the Victoria Gold and Copper Mine should come to grief before I got there."

He then travels through enchanting scenery, and is conducted to the mine. "Some five and twenty or thirty shaggy rough-looking men were about. These were the miners. Their appearance was not reassuring, and when the engineer left me alone with them, with a parting injunction that I was to make them feel I had an iron will at once, I confess I felt myself uncomfortably young, and a little bit at a loss.

"We proceeded to business at once, however; and as I met their first little symptoms of insubordination with one or two acts of summary justice (which I will spare the reader, but which, emanating from me, caused me unlimited astonishment), I soon established a proper authority over them, and we thenceforward got on together capitally."

We are then given extracts from a mining diary--significantly left off at a particular stage of the proceedings--used as a sketch-book. An unfavourable report as to the finding of gold is sent in to the board.

"The miners did not believe in the mine, and as they perceived that I did not either, they believed in me to a most flattering extent." He soon got very much attached to the miners, and used to tell stories about foreign lands while they were distilling the pure mercury, or performing other innocent operations suggested by the board, enlightening them on various subjects where he felt their ignorance to be equal to his own. "My letters home contained descriptions and sketches of them, and my mamma became interested in their spiritual welfare." Surrounded by the halo of memory, they afterwards seemed to him primitive gentlemen worthy of King Arthur's Round Table. He describes existence between the hours of work as full of charm owing to the friendship of surrounding farmers and small gentry. In a "Trilby" way he describes how he "rode, and wrestled, and boxed with them! and fell in love with their sisters, and sketched them, and sang Tyrolese melodies to them, ... blessing the lucky stroke of fortune which had made him mining engineer to a gold mine without any gold, and managed by gentlemen who obstinately persisted in ignoring the latter important fact, in spite of his honest endeavours to persuade them of it." "I have," he says, "only to hum a certain 'jodel' chorus, and the whole scene returns to me, surrounded by that peculiar fascination which belongs to past pleasures--a phenomenon far more interesting to me than the most marvellous phenomenon of science."

Every artist is an experimental psychologist, the material for his art is really always some mental experience. He wishes to communicate with his public in the spirit of this experience. With Scott it was the old associations of places, with du Maurier the associations of "old times," of personal memory. This was the frame of mind the interpretation of which absorbed him in his literary art, distinguishing it, except in his early _Cornhill_ work, from his art with the pencil.

There is not much in the remaining part of the gold-mine narrative which can be shown to bear upon the artist's career. The conclusion of the story shows his forfeiture of the regard of the directors by openness of speech to the shareholders as to the proceedings at the mine.

Such was his experience of a mine in Devonshire and of relationship with the miners, who, with the limited experience of the mining classes in those days, had some difficulty in "placing" du Maurier with his, to them, unusual physical delicacy and yet more unusual personal charm.

§ 4

The literary gift in the above narration will, we think, be evident even in our quotations. But during the greater part of his life du Maurier's literary gift remained unknown to the general public, though more than one editor under whom he served on _Punch_ urged him to take a writer's salary and be on the literary as well as on the artistic staff. It was said that he relied with comfort upon this second talent to support him in the event of his sight failing him altogether. There was a space of thirty years between the above contribution to _Once a Week_ and the writing of his first novel, _Peter Ibbetson_. But it is in that novel that he again returns to the story of his career, through boyhood and youth, leading up to the period in which his father started him in the laboratory.