DU MATTRIER.* Me. T. MARTIN WOOD has already written discerning
studies of the work of Whistler and Mr. Sargent. In this book on -du Maurier his materials are curiously exiguous, which was not the ease in the other essays. And we cannot help thinking that he has a more difficult public to deal with in analysing du Maurier's work, because the public (if our own • feelings are commonly shared, and we believe they are) find it impossible to dissociate gentle memories of the personality of du Manlier, and the glamour of the social periods he interpreted from the technical qualities of the artist's work. Those of us who are not yet old can hardly think -of drawing-rooms as we used to see them in the 'seventies -and 'eighties of last century without the mental vision dissolving into a picture from the pages of Punch, with the admirable arrangement of a sea of faces, of which du Meunier had the secret. We see Sir Gorgius Midas with his back to the chimney-piece fulminating against a world that still bad the effrontery to withhold some of its 'favours from blatant success; we see Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns with her perennial aplomb and tact and her hang- dog husband somewhere near by, as usual outshone and quite bewildered; we see Maudle or some other member of the ,mutual- admirationists; we see the aesthetes whose cult required that they should dispense with joints in their bodies ; and we see the professor or artist whom du Meunier loved to give so prominent and dignified a place in his repre- sentations of the social world. Then we remember the "things one would rather have left unsaid," the "things one -would rather have expressed differently," and the whole series ..of cognate studies in social agony which have abided with us, and we confess that the desire to criticize leaves us. We like
• George du Maurier: the Satirist of the Victorians. A Review of his Art and Personality. By T. Martin Wood. London : MAU and Windu.s. [7s. 6d: net.]
du Maurier's foibles and obvious defects too well. We cannot, in brief, separate his art from his personality and his time.
Mr. Wood does not give us any enlightening information about "the world of du Maurier." It was much more various and more crowded, and rather less "Mid-Victorian" than he suggests. The very phrases "Early Victorian" and "Mid. Victorian," or even "Victorian," might be allowed to have a rest, as servants upon whose backs too many burdens have been placed. The word " Victorian" is taken to mean some- thing dowdy and Philistinish, whereas the Victorian era was an epoch of great literature, great scientific advances, great geographical discovery, and great administrative develop- ment. You could not take any decade out of the Victorian era and say honestly that it was like any other of the same era. But if Mr. Wood hardly does justice to du Manrier's "world," we think his criticism of do Maurier's art is just and valuable—always with the proviso that cool-headed criticism of du Maurier is a chilling task, just as a serious dissection of Falstaff's morals would be. Mr. Wood has done well to give us a proportionately large number of illustrations from the early work of du Maurier, for those who remember only the work of the 'seventies and 'eighties have no clue to the variety of du Maurier's talent. The beautiful illustrations to Mrs. Gaskell's Wires and Daughters are in significant respects unlike the social pictures in Punch, and would alone establish any man's reputation not merely as a draughtsman, but as having the sympathy and power of adaptation necessary to the true illustrator. In a still earlier phase of his work du Meunier was a caricaturist of animals. He might have succeeded in several different directions, but it was Mark Lemon who, as editor of Punch, determined du Maurier's particular line. Lemon begged him to use his unfailing knack of gracefulness for social pictures, and thus emerged the du Manlier we remember best—the du Maurier whose subtlety and variety of line had undoubtedly hardened into a convention, and who must be judged technically by what was not the best that was in him. No doubt pictures of the inside of houses were easier than outdoor work for du Maurier, who was sightless in one eye, and thus convenience chimed in with what destiny seemed to have planned for him.
Gracefulness was the feature of du Maurier's work with a vengeance. He hardly 'ever drew a woman or a child who was not beautiful, stately, or dignified. He was nearly as bad (or as good) with the men. His drawing-rooms were peopled with Venus and Adonis repeated a thousand times. Never was there such an impossibly beautiful community as du Maurier's vision of the polite world of his day. If ever he fell away from. graciousness and drew a man or woman as a mark for dis- favour or contempt, he would make him or her conspicuously ugly or conspicuously absurd. He knew no mean. As a satirist he was an obvious and avowed follower of Thackeray, yet he was without the acidity of his great exemplar. As Mr. Wood says, he satirized society, not individuals. Social crazes, such as aestheticism, and pretentiousness, were his favourite quarry. He loathed meanness, vulgarity, and ostentation, but even here his shaft seemed to carry honey as well as poison. Consider, for example, the picture (reproduced in Mr. 'Wood's book) of the lady reclining in supersumptuous ease in a carriage in Berkeley Square, while a female companion sits uncomfortably upright in the seat opposite, and some tattered ragamuffins in the road gape at the footmen and the general effect of luxury and splendour. We know what du Maurier meant us to feel, but the fact is we do not feel it. We ought to feel the poignancy of the con- trast, but we are conscious rather of the prettiness of the picture. We need not look further than this same picture for a proof that du Maurier's satire did not lie in his draughtsmanship. A Continental caricaturist would never be able to understand how such pictures could be published and accepted in a comic journal as a matter of course. Du Maurier did .not begin to be a satirist till the legend at the bottom of his pictures came to the aid of his draughtsmanship. Very often the legend was every- thing, and any one of a hundred drawings by him would have carried the same legend equally well. Nevertheless, the gracefulness of the picture and the independent happiness of the legend often produced in conjunction an unforgettable effect. The legends may be read by themselves for all that. Some of them have passed into the language. Who has not
heard, for instance, the famous aesthetic conversation about the six-mark teapot ?—
"Aesthetic Bridegroom: It is quite consummate, is it not ? Intense Brute: It is, indeed ! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it !"
• In conclusion we cannot resist the pleasure of quoting, as - Mr. Wood does, Mr. Henry James's appreciation of one of ' the characters of du Maurier's invention—Mrs. Ponsonby de Toinkyne
:- "'This lady is a real creation. . . . She is not one of the heroines of the aesthetic movement, though we may be sure she dabbles in that movement so far as it pays to do so. Mrs.
• Ponsonby de Tomky-ns is a little of everything, in so far as any- . thing pays. She is always on the look-out ; she never misses an opportunity. She is uot a specialist, for that cuts off too many opportunities, and the aesthetic people have the tort, as the French : say, to be specialists. No, Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns is—what shall we call her ?—well, she is the modern social spirit. She is prepared for everything; she is ready to take advantage of every- thing ; she would inviteMr. Bradlaugh to dinner if she thought the Duehees would come to meet him. The Duchess is her great • achievement—she never lets go of her Duchess. She is young, very nice-looking, slim, graceful, indefatigable. She tires poor Ponsonby completely out; she can keep going for hours after poor Ponsonby is reduced to stupefaction. This unfortunate husband is indeed almost stupefied. He is not, like his wife, a :person of imagination. She leaves him far behind, though he is - so inconvertible that if she were a less superior person he would . have been a sad encumbrance. He always figures in the corner of the scenes in which she distinguishes herself, separated from her by something like the gulf that separated Caliban from Ariel. .He has his hands in his pockets, his head poked forward; what is going on is quite beyond his comprehension. He vaguely wonders what his wife will do next ; her manceuvres quite transcend him Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns always succeeds. She is never at fault; eho is as quick as the instinct of self-preservation. She is the little London lady who is determined to be a greater one—she .pushee, gently but firmly—always pushes. At last she arrives.'"
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