Chapter V: The Illustrations (4)

Du Maurier had in 1856, when his father died, practically the choice of two arts, painting and singing, in both of which he seemed to have a chance of distinguishing himself. And as the essay of 1861 was so soon afterwards to prove, there was really another alternative, that of authorship, for the gifted analytical chemist. He decided then to forsake the chemistry to which he had been trained, but remained undecided about everything else.

In 1856, at the age of twenty-two, he returned to Paris with his mother, to live in the Rue Paradis-Poissonière, very poor, very dull, and very miserable, as he himself has said; but almost at the entrance of what he describes as the best time of his life--that period in which, deciding to follow art as a profession, he entered the studio of Gleyre. Those were the joyous Quartier Latin days. He has described Gleyre's studio in _Trilby_. The happy life there lasted a year: Whistler and Poynter, as is well known, were his fellow-students.

_Sir Gorgius Midas (who has not been made a Peer_). "Why, it's enough to make a man turn _Radical_, 'anged if it ain't, to think of sich services as mine bein' rewarded with no 'igher title than what's bestowed on a heminent Sawbones, or a Hingerneer, or a Littery Man, or even a successful Hartist!"

_Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns (sympathetically_). "It does seem hard! But you've only to bide your time, Sir Gorgius. No man of _your_ stamp need ever despair of a Peerage!" (And Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns is, as usual, quite right.)

_Punch_, May 15, 1880.]

The studio of Gleyre was inherited from Delaroche, and afterwards handed down to Gerome. Whistler, Poynter, du Maurier, Lamont, and Thomas Armstrong were the group of _Trilby_, Lamont was "the Laird," Aleco Ionides "the Greek," and Rowley is supposed to have been "Taffy."[4]

In 1857 du Maurier went on to the Antwerp Academy, where the masters were De Keyser and Van Lerins. It was in the latter's studio that the disaster of his life occurred. He was drawing from a model, when suddenly the girl's head seemed to him to dwindle to the size of a walnut. He clapped his hand over his left eye, and wondered if he had been mistaken. He could see as well as ever. But when in its turn he covered his right eye he learned what had happened. His left eye had failed him. It might be altogether lost. It grew worse, until the fear of blindness overtook him. In the spring of 1859 he went to a specialist in Dusseldorf, who, while deciding that the left eye was lost, said that with care there was no reason to fear losing the other. Du Maurier was never able to shake off the terror of apprehension. He was apparently a hopeless invalid at Christmas-time in 1859, "in some dreary, deserted, dismal Flemish town," in hospital. Turning over _Punch's Almanack_, the delight the paper afforded him in such unhappy circumstances was "a thing not to be forgotten." It fired him with a new ambitious dream. The astonishing thing was that before another year was over the dream was beginning to come true: he was in England, making friends with Keene, who introduced him to John Leech, whom he was destined to succeed at _Punch's_ table.

The artist left Antwerp in 1860, and for several months he and Whistler lived together in Newman Street. Their studio has been described. Stretched across it was a rope like a clothes-line, from which floated a bit of brocade, their curtain to shut off the corner used as a bedroom. There was hardly even a chair to sit on, and often with the brocade a towel hung from the line.

§ 5

In the autumn of 1860 the artist began to contribute to _Once a Week_. Then followed a contribution to _Punch_ for which he continued to draw as an occasional contributor chiefly of initial letters and the like, until he reached the stage of contributing regular "Pictures" with legends beneath in 1864. It was not until 1865, however, that his full pages in _Punch_ became frequent. In that year he succeeded Leech at the _Punch_ table.

His career practically began with his marriage to Miss Emma Wightwick. Following the example of his master, Thackeray, he courageously married upon "prospects," as soon as ever the promise of regular employment for his pencil seemed to be secure. This was the year in which he illustrated Mrs. Gaskell's _Sylvia's Lovers_. "My life," he once said, "was a very prosperous one from the outset in London; I was married in 1863, and my wife and I never once knew financial troubles. My only trouble has been my fear about my eyes. Apart from that I have been very happy."

Upon marrying, du Maurier moved to Great Russell Street, and, later, to rooms in Earl's Terrace, Kensington, the house where Walter Pater died.

In the days when he was living in Great Russell Street the journalistic world of London was very Bohemian. It is true that Leech had not made a good Bohemian, but it was not until some time after du Maurier's accession to the _Punch_ table that the weekly dinner lost an uproarious gaiety that is recognised as the true Bohemian note. Mr. Punch and his staff all improved their tone, Bohemia is now only a memory. It is the very genius of Mr. Punch that makes him respond to the moment and become the most decorous figure in the world in decorous times.

One cannot help being struck by a resemblance between the coming to town and the almost immediate success there of du Maurier and Thackeray. The comparison has its interest in the fact that as every man has his master, beyond all dispute Thackeray was du Maurier's master. Both quitted Bohemia, but in Society always retained the detachment of artists. It was near to Thackeray's initials that du Maurier was destined to cut his own on the great _Punch_ table. He himself described the glamour Thackeray's name possessed for him, inspiring him as he climbed out of the despair that followed the sudden partial deprivation of his sight. The only time he met his master he was too diffident to accept an invitation to be introduced. Thackeray seemed so great. But all that evening he remained as close to him as possible, greedily listening to his words. Like Thackeray, du Maurier thought that the finest thing in the world was to live without fear and without reproach. It is probable that Thackeray would not at all have minded not being taken for a genius, but he would violently have resented not being accounted a gentleman. For him that implied the great heart and the scrupulous honour which Bohemia does not insist upon if you have great spirits.

§ 6

Of du Maurier's great friendship with Canon Ainger, which commenced in the seventies, light is to be obtained from Edith Sichel's _Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger_.[5]

"For fifteen years," says Miss Sichel, "they always met once, and generally twice a day. Hampstead knew their figures as every afternoon they walked round the pond on the Heath, deep in conversation. Edward Fitzgerald himself never had a closer friendship than had these two men for one another. Their mental climates suited; they were akin, yet had strong differences. Perhaps in the quickness of their mutual attraction Frenchman recognised Frenchman. But Ainger was the French Huguenot and du Maurier the French sceptic. Both had mercurial perceptions, and exercised them on much the same objects. Both were wits and humorists, but Ainger was more of a wit than a humorist, and du Maurier was more of a humorist than a wit. Both were men of fancy rather than of imagination, men of sentiment rather than of passion. Both, too, were fantastics; both loved what was beautiful and graceful rather than what was grand; but du Maurier was more of the pure artist, while to Ainger the moral side of beauty most appealed.... Both men were gifted with an exquisite kindness.... Du Maurier was the keener and clearer thinker of the two; he had the wider outlook and the fewer prejudices." Their closest bond was _Punch_, which was to Ainger a delight from cover to cover.

Portrait in water-colour by du Maurier. In the possession of the artist's widow.]

The artist's love of Whitby is well known; he expressed it himself in his _Punch_ drawings over and over again. He wrote to Ainger in 1891: "It is delightful to get a letter from you at Whitby--the place we all like best in the world." He gives a list of places and things to be especially seen there, among them the cottage of Sylvia Robson of _Sylvia's Lovers_, and No 1 St. Hilda's Terrace, "the humble but singularly charming little house where your friends have dwelt, and would fain dwell again (and two of them end their days there, somewhere towards the middle of the twentieth century)."

It was at Whitby when Ainger and his nieces were there with the du Mauriers that they were once delighted by seeing "Trilby Drops" advertised in a little village sweet-shop. "Such is fame," said du Maurier, but when his daughter went in to ask about the "drops," the girl behind the counter had no idea what "Trilby" meant.

In the summer numbers of past volumes of _Punch_ Whitby has figured in the background of seaside scenes perhaps more than any other watering-place. Du Maurier nearly always drew upon it for seaside pictures and the humour of the summer holidays. He formed his first acquaintance with it in illustrating _Sylvia's Lovers_. The scene of that tale is Whitby under another name. Thus he started his connection with the town in circumstances that seemed to him to give it a glamour. Not only did he confess an immense liking for Mrs. Gaskell's novel, but, as we have seen, he scored in the illustration of it the first of his great successes with the general public. The gift of illustration, after all, is a very rare one. Nothing is to be understood more easily than the value the public began to put upon du Maurier's gift. In a response of that sort the public display true discrimination. The ascendency of du Maurier as a _Punch_ artist was more than anything due to the fact that for his work in that paper he drew upon the sentiment of family life from the resources of his own experience. And nothing that we could write here would so entirely reveal the happy character of his own family life as the reigning atmosphere of the "seaside" and "nursery" pictures which he contributed to _Punch_.

§ 7

Many people remembering du Maurier's satires entertained a little fear of him in Society, and of what he might be thinking about them. An instance of this was shown on one occasion when he was dining alone with Sir John Millais at the latter's splendid residence. "I suppose," said Millais, waving his hand in the direction of the disappearing flunkeys after dinner, "you think all this very _Sir Gorgius Midas-y_? To me it is merely respectable." As a matter of fact there is everything to show that du Maurier entertained the same sort of notions of "respectability" as his host, though he did things on a less magnificent scale. By temperament he was not quite a Bohemian, although he was convivial. It was the convivial side of the weekly _Punch_ dinner that appealed to him. He abstained from these meetings, or came in late, when a tendency prevailed to make them too much, as he thought, the pretext of business. He was regarded as singular in ordering an immense cup of tea to be put before him immediately after dinner. He sat over his cup of tea with a bent back, always with a cigarette, fuming whilst the business part of the proceedings went forward. When that was over he entered into his own, regaling his comrades with droll stories, creating a witty atmosphere at his own corner by his taste for repartee.

(Fragments overheard by Grigsby and the Colonel at one of Prigsby's Afternoon Teas.)

_Young Maudle_ (_to Mrs. Lyon Hunter and her Daughters_). "In the supremest Poetry, Shakespeare's for instance, or Postlethwaite's, or Shelley's one always feels that," &c., &c., &c.

_Young Postlethwaite_ (_to the three Miss Bilderbogies_). "The _greatest_ Painters of ALL, such as Velasquez, or Maudle, or even Titian, invariably suggest to one," &c., &c., &c.

_Punch_, May 22, 1880.]

The difficulties with his sight might well have been expected to poison the artist's well of happiness. But it was noticed of Charles Lamb that the very fact of possessing the little pleasures of everyday life only under a lease, as it were, which Fate at any moment might refuse to renew, caused him to be the very poet of such pleasures, experiencing them with an acuteness that became to him an inspiration. With du Maurier the enjoyment of social life, so manifestly evident in his art at one time, may well have been entered into with something of the fierce delight with which we take our sunshine in a rainy summer. In later years he became home-staying in his habits. One imagines he felt that he had taken from Society all that it had to give him--the knowledge of life necessary to him in his work, and friends in sufficient number. It is from about this time that his art shows evidence that an intimate contact with the social movement was no longer sustained. The tendency to repeat himself, to produce his weekly picture by a sort of formula, becomes noticeable; and the absence of variety in his work becomes oppressive.

Du Maurier was a man of great natural versatility. For some reason or other he was not fond of the theatre, but he was in possession of a considerable genius for monodrama, and often delighted his friends by his impersonations. We have seen that it was once within the bounds of possibility that he would have become a professional singer. His conversational gifts were great. He was a writer of singular picturesqueness. A considerable interest in the progress of science was noted in him to the last. If we look back at the record of the lives of artists to find what manner of men as a rule they were, we shall find that, in contradistinction to poets and musicians, they were pre-eminent as men of the world. Skill in plastic art seems a final gift imparted to men very highly constituted. It steals them entirely away from other aims, but exists side by side with, while yet it transcends the ability to achieve remarkable performances in dissimilar directions. Perhaps it is because, of all men, the true artist regards the material world with the clearest vision, living in no world of dreams, finding reality itself so delightful.

The artist never at any stage of his life lost the rollicking spirit of a boy. It broke out in conversation and in his letters. In narration he reserved the right of every _raconteur_ to make a point by some exaggeration. In letters of his that I have seen the note of high spirits may be said to be the prevailing one.

For instance, to the head of the _Punch_ Firm, after a _Punch_ dinner:

"_Jan._ 14.

"Would you allow one of your retainers to look under the table and
see if I left a golosh there--and if so, tell him to leave it at
Swain's, to be returned by his messenger on Monday? I must have
been tight, and the golosh not tight enough, and I appeared at the
Duchess's with one golosh and my trousers tucked up. H.R.H. was
much concerned about it, and said, 'It's all that ---- _Punch_
dinner!'"

To the same:

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

O
|
/|\
/ | \
O O O

(Attenborough)]

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

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

"_Jan._ 1, 1880.

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

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

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

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

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

"_Jan._ 4, 1880.

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

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

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

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

§ 8

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

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

"Sun of the Sleepless--Melancholy Star!"--BYRON.

Translated into French by George du Maurier.

_The English Illustrated Magazine_, September 13, 1886.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§ 9

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

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

From a photograph.]

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

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

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

"A comfortable faith," adds Silver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_November 7th_--_Monday_. "S.B., du Maurier (his début), H.S.,
J.T., M.L., P.L., F.C.B., H.M., T.T.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§ 10

Sir Francis Burnand, till recently the distinguished Editor of _Punch_, was du Maurier's senior on the paper by a year or two. He has very kindly sent the writer the following impression of the artist: "That he was beloved as a cheery, witty _confrère_, goes without saying. Rarely did he mix himself up with politics in any shape or form. I doubt if he ever gave us any assistance in devising a political cartoon. What his politics were I am unable to say, and I do not think he troubled himself about the matter. In 'the old days' he delighted in chaffing Horace Mayhew, with whom he exchanged 'slang' in French. With the jovial proprietor, William Bradbury, he was always on the best of terms of friendly nonsense, being invariably his left-hand neighbour at 'The Table.' He was a genuine Bohemian of the artistic fraternity (as given in his _Trilby_) with the true polish of an English gentleman, of the kindest disposition, and of the warmest heart. All who knew him well loved him, and none missed him more than his fellow-workers on _Punch_."

"His religion," Sir Francis volunteered in a further note, "as that of the majority of his French _confrères_, you will find it in the artistic sketches of the men and women in _La Bohème_" "His guardian angel, humanly and socially, was his wife."

Everyone who knew du Maurier now speaks of his attractiveness and the simplicity and honesty of his nature. He was not really very fond of "Society" because of its code of insincerity. He was its satirist for the same reason that, much as he liked "to be with people," he was not at-home where manners were affected. The Victorians who survive to this day hold up their hands in horror at present-day manners; they object to our natural, comfortable ways and clothes; they define our naturalness as laziness. But just because it is so constitutional to be lazy, the casual modern manners, so true to the exact shade of our enthusiasm for, or indifference to any particular person or thing, express our virtue. We are too honest to pretend. We look back with amusement to the Victorians, who put all their goods in the shop window, whose very movements were so far without freedom as to be subservient to the maintenance of uncreased clothing. A regard for "appearances" seemed to regulate action. It was an age of _poseurs_--the age of the "professional air." In that age came into use among doctors "the bedside manner." Shop-walkers then distinguished themselves from the rest of the race by their preposterous antics, artists endured the misery of velvet jackets; women tight-laced, men about town invented the crease in the trouser-leg to keep which in order alone demands the fealty of a lifetime. In summer men consented to be roasted alive on the London pavement rather than part with the frock-coat in which their depraved conception of beauty delighted. In those days one imagines people were only comfortable when once safely in bed, and that was never for long at a time; for the sake of appearances the Victorians got up early.

Speed the Parting Guest

(Things one would rather have left unsaid.)

"We've had such a pleasant evening, Mr. Jones! _May_ I beg of you to ask one of your servants to call a Hansom?"

"With _pleasure_, Mrs. Smith!"

_Punch_, March_ 10, 1883.]

The Royal Academy Exhibitions of the time proved that it was impossible for a Victorian to be an artist. The artists of the time did not belong to their own age. We had Rossetti ever seeking to lose himself in the illusion of another time and country, and Whistler trying to find himself in the reality of another place. Chelsea was well outside of Victorian London. Perhaps Hampstead, a place like Chelsea, that belongs to no particular time, was outside of it too. Kensington and Bayswater are Victorian to this day. Rossetti in Kensington is a vision from which imagination recoils, Whistler in Bayswater one which passes the invention of human fancy. Du Maurier liked to come into Victorian London in a carriage from a distance, as a visitor, to be driven away again. He approached its society critically. He acknowledged the distinction of its grave self-consciousness while exposing its ridiculous airs.

* * * * *

Just as Chelsea is a more desirable place to live in because of its "Rossetti" associations, so Hampstead gains from the memory of the witty and generous satirist who made it his home. New Grove House, where du Maurier lived for over twenty years, might have been designed for him; it escapes the suburban style that would have been an affliction to one so romantic.

Nearly all artists who have sustained their powers in a refined field of expression have been glad to count upon monotony in the passage of their days. The adventurous temperament is not the artistic one. The artist values security from interruptions above everything, and interruption is of the essence of adventure. Du Maurier lived a life that was for an artist characteristic. He was at pains to preserve his days from being broken into. It is above the plane where human life is open to crude forms of calamity and the stress of elemental passion, upon a plane where freedom from anxiety is secure that art is able to exert itself in attaining to the expression of the more valuable, because more intimate, experiences of human nature.

Du Maurier died on the 8th October 1896. His grave at Hampstead is singularly happily placed and constructed. It consists of two carved wood crosses, respectively at head and foot, connected by a panel containing, in addition to the name and dates, only the concluding lines of _Trilby_:--

"A little trust that when we die
We reap our sowing! And so--good-bye!"

The grave is close to the pavement, and it is impossible to go that way without seeing it. We can imagine that one who was so entirely the opposite of misanthropic would wish to lie like this within sound of passing conversation.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Pennell's _Life of Whistler_.

[5] Archibald Constable & Co.

V

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

§1

It may be well to touch upon some of the characteristics of our illustrations in detail before closing this book. Many of them are so obviously involved in what has already been said here of the artist's work that we do not propose to mention them again; but others suggest remarks which would not have incorporated easily in the attempt we have made to demonstrate the significance of du Maurier's art in general.

Taken in the order in which they are printed here, the first illustrations show the range of effect and variety of line which the artist was afterwards to narrow into the conventions by which he is now chiefly remembered. But if such an effect as that in the picture _Caution_, for instance, would not have been possible with him in his last period, it was because the nature of the subjects required on the journal which absorbed most of his energies afforded no stimulus for anything so Rembrandtesque. He brought such possibilities of style over from his romantic period in _The Cornhill Magazine_, and it must be admitted that the effect in this drawing seems too powerful for the music-hall comedy it has to carry off.

_The Cornhill_, October, 1883.]

A picture bewitching on account of the grace it contains is that called "Berkeley Square." Du Maurier had quickly perceived that the quality of grace could well survive side by side with any amount of humour. It is interesting to try and imagine what Phil May would have made of the scene. It was intended for a poignant one, but it becomes chiefly a very attractive one in du Maurier's hands, the pathos lying with the wording rather than the picture.

The drawing affords us many characteristics of his work. The lady in white reclining in the vehicle is a very embodiment of elegance, and the discerning drawing that defines the coachman repays observation, as also the "style" with which the white horse is swiftly shaded in. It was once the custom for the carriages of people in fashion to draw up under the trees in Berkeley Square, in summer, for tea brought out from Gunter's. Last summer one of the evening papers asked the question why the custom had lapsed. Du Maurier's drawing of the scene was accompanied by the following lines, which perhaps provide the answer.

BERKELEY SQUARE, 5 P.M.

The weather is warm as I walk in the Square,
And observe her barouche standing tranquilly there,
It is under the trees, it is out of the sun,
In the corner where Gunter retails a plain bun.

How solemn she looks, I have seen a mute merrier--
Plumes a sky-blue, and her pet a sky-terrier--
The scene is majestic, and peaceful, and shady,
Miss Humble sits facing: I pity that lady.

Her footman goes once, and her footman goes twice,
Ay, and each time returning he brings her an ice.
The patient Miss Humble receives, when he comes,
A diminutive bun; let us hope it has plums!

Now is not this vile. When I tickle my chops,
Which I frequently do, I subside into shops:
We do not object to this solemn employment,
But why _afficher_ such material enjoyment?

Some beggars stand by--I extremely regret it--
They wish for a taste. Don't they wish they may get it?
She thus aggravates both the humble and needy,
You'll own she is thoughtless, perhaps she is greedy.

The pictures "Queen Prima Donna" and "Proxy" are two early nursery scenes of the many du Maurier contributed to _Punch_. They show the style, the flowing and painter-like stroke of the pen that revealed such a Rossetti-like sense of material beauty in his earlier drawings--a style worthy of the refinement of the subject in "Proxy," the charm in it of sentiment that humour strengthens rather than displaces. The drawing expresses childhood, in circumstances where it can expand without loss of bloom through contention with unhappy circumstances. It shows the human beauty that expands from the conserved force of life when it has not to contend with unfavourable environment. Beauty is perhaps the one certain result of favourable environment. The ideal within "Socialism" which makes even its opponents Socialists is the aspiration that some day everyone will be favourably environed.

§2

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

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

In the drawing "Honour where Honour is Due" the point is made in the legend, but the illustration illuminates it rather brutally. It is a picture in which we find du Maurier expressing the prejudices of the old régime against the _nouveau riche_. It illustrates a prejudice rather than a fact. It was not at all true in Victoria's reign that money would carry a man anywhere. In that time the man with money only but without birth wanted better manners than the man with everything else but money to get him into Society. It was less the objectionableness of trade--as du Maurier in such a drawing as this tried to imply--than the advance of it that the old aristocracy really resented.

A drawing characteristic of the artist's work in the eighties--in 1880 to be definite--is that entitled "Mutual Admirationists." It really dates itself. It is descriptive of one of the moods of "passionate Brompton." The satire of the three admiring ladies is perfect. In our own time ladies have gazed like this at genius. Sometimes genius is really there, sometimes it is not--but the profound and undying belief of women in it, often expressed beautifully as well as absurdly, is the rain from heaven enabling it to thrive. In the expressive drawing of the faces and the bearing of the three ladies in this picture we have du Maurier's real humour--its reality in its closeness to life, and his genius in expressing through contour the whole tale of strange æsthetic enthusiasm.

In an earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed "æstheticism" from the inside. He hardly draws any figures so happily as those of bored, poetic youths. In _Sic Transit Gloria Mundi_ he does not depict "The Duke" of the scene half so convincingly as the young gossip talking to the Duchess. No one else in the world could have drawn so well that young man, with his weak, but Oxford voice--it is almost to be heard--and tired but graceful manners.

The drawing "Post-Prandial Pessimists" is not so sympathetic--which means that it is not so intimate in touch and full of knowledge. The straight mechanical lines with which the clothes are drawn are rather meaningless. This treatment represents a convention, and a bad one, because it covers the paper without really conveying the elasticity of clothing or the animation of muscle determining its folds. At this stage of his career du Maurier has begun to work rather mechanically and by a recipe; he is less curious of form as it actually is to be observed, and more content with just making a drawing in as neat and as businesslike a way as possible, with the wording of the legend uppermost in his thoughts. The artist is disappearing in the "_Punch_ Artist." The drawing of detail, for instance, inclines to be blotty; it is no longer affectionately done. At least the pre-Raphaelite in du Maurier is now dead. The artist's early drawings, where his native tastes break into expression, are pre-Raphaelite in feeling. He made a bad impressionist, a thoroughly bad imitator of Keene's success with impressionism. He lost what was most his own when he "threw over" his belief in glamour, and took to laughing at his own enthusiasms; when he ceased to confine his mockery to things that he hated, as he hated the æsthetic movement. The gods revenged his satire of the inspiration of the pre-Raphaelites in the _Tale of Camelot_ by taking that inspiration away from himself.

"By the way, Duchess, 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 "Things one would rather have expressed Differently" (reproduced opposite page 194) represents du Maurier's final phase at its very best. It has the precision of workmanship of a thing executed to a well-tried recipe. It is dainty as well as precise; and still in the way the dimpling of soft dress fabric is touched in, sympathetic, and characteristic of the earlier du Maurier. It belongs to the _Trilby_ period, but is better than the illustrations to _Trilby_.

§ 3