Chapter 2

Both du Maurier and Keene knew the _genus_ artist in all its varieties; and it is very interesting to contrast, and note the difference between, the "Artist" whom du Maurier brings into his society scenes and the one of Keene's drawings. In Keene's case the "artist" is generally a slouching Bohemian creature who belongs to a world of his own, and bears the stamp of "stranger" upon him in any other. But the "artist" of du Maurier, putting aside the æsthete coterie, with whom we shall deal presently, wears upon him every outward symbol of peace with the world--_The_ world, Mayfair. He is always an "R.A."--symbol of respectability--whether du Maurier mentions it or not. With this type Art is one of the great recognised professions like The Army or The Bar. We have no curiosity as to what sort of pictures they paint. We know that their art was suitable for the Academy, therefore for the Victorian Drawing-room. We are merely amused at the solemnity of manner with which they assumed that their large-sized Christmas cards had anything to do with art at all--cards which lost the purchasers of them such enormous sums when sold again at Christie's that the shaken confidence of the public as to the worth of modern pictures has not recovered to this day.

All through this state of things, too, the really vital work of the time was left to the encouragement of those whom "Society" would then have called "outsiders," and it was just this failure on the part of the aristocracy to enlist the genius of the period on its own side that betrayed its decrepitude.

§5

The enduring feature of du Maurier's art, that which survives in it better than its sometimes scathing commentary upon a passing "craze," is his close representation of the air with which people seek to foil each other in conversation and conceal their own trepidations. His "Social Agonies" are among the best of this series. If he does not lay stress upon individual character, he still remains the master draughtsman of a state of mind. He succeeds thus in the very field where probably all that is most important in modern art, whether of the novel or of illustration, will be found.

Behind the economy of word and gesture in the conversational method of to-day there lies the history of the long struggle of the race through volubility to refinement of expression. Du Maurier's _Punch_ pictures take their place in the field of psychology in which the modern novel has secured its greatest results, and the best appreciation of his _Punch_ work was written in the eighties by Mr. Henry James, the supreme master in this field; the master of suspenses that are greater than the conversations in which they happen; the explorer of twilights of consciousness in which little passions contend.

The Society du Maurier depicted held its position upon more comfortable terms than any preceding it in history. It did not have, on the one hand, to trim to a court party, or, on the other, to concede anything to the people to keep itself in power. Yet it was as swollen with pride in its position as any society has ever been. The industrial phenomena of the age had suddenly filled its pockets; and it had nothing else in the world to do but to blow itself out with pride. But a Society holding its position without an effort of some kind of its own is bound to lose in character, and the confession of all the best literature of this time was of the baffled search for the soul of the prosperous class.

§6

For the appreciation of the artist's management of dialogue we must move for a page or two in Mrs. de Tomkyns' circle with Miss Lyon Hunter, Sir Gorgius Midas the Plutocrat, Sir Pompey Bedel (of Bedel, Flunke & Co.) the successful professional man, and the rest of the whole set, who understand each other in the freemasonry of a common ambition to get into another set.

_Mamma_. "Enfin, my love! We're well out of this! _What_ a gang!!! Where shall we go next?"

_Daughter_. "To Lady Oscar Talbot's, Mamma."

_Mamma_. "She _snubs_ one so I really can't _bear_ it! Let us go to Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It's just as select (except the Host and Hostess) and quite as amusing."

_Daughter_. "But Mrs. Tomkyns snubs one worse than Lady Oscar, Mamma!"

_Mamma_. "Pooh, my love! who cares for the snubs of a Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns I should like to know, so long as she's clever enough to get the right people."

This is the conversation in the hall between two ladies leaving a party in one of du Maurier's most characteristic drawings. On every side there are footmen and a crowd of guests cloaking and departing. Of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns Mr. Henry James has said: "This lady is a real creation.... She is not one of the heroines of the æsthetic movement, though we may be sure she dabbles in that movement so far as it pays to do so. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns is a little of everything, in so far as anything pays. She is always on the look-out; she never misses an opportunity. She is not a specialist, for that cuts off too many opportunities, and the æsthetic 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 everything; she would invite Mr. Bradlaugh to dinner if she thought the Duchess 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 manoeuvres quite transcend him. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns always succeeds. She is never at fault; she is as quick as the instinct of self-preservation. She is the little London lady who is determined to be a greater one--she pushes, gently but firmly--always pushes. At last she arrives."

We have quoted this delightful picture almost in its entirety from the essay upon du Maurier written by Mr. Henry James in the eighties to which we have referred. It describes the type of woman revealed in Mrs. de Tomkyns when we have followed her adventures up a little way in the back numbers of _Punch_. But, if we may be permitted the slang, the type itself is anything but "a back number." Du Maurier's work bids fair to live in the enjoyment of many generations, from the fact that its chaff, for the most part, is directed against vanities that recur in human nature. Mr. James tells us that the lady of whom we write "hesitates at nothing; she is very modern. If she doesn't take the æsthetic line more than is necessary, she finds it necessary to take it a little; for if we are to believe du Maurier, the passion for strange raiment and blue china has during the last few years made ravages in the London world." Mr. Henry James himself is one of the experts of the London world. There is almost a hint in the last sentence that he thought du Maurier's genius helped to nurse the crazes it made fun of.

Since writing this I have been told by one to whom du Maurier related the incident, that the hero of the æsthetic movement himself, Oscar Wilde, offered to sit to du Maurier for the chief character in his skit. Wilde was very young, but already master of that art of self-advertisement which he received from Byron and Disraeli, perfected, and, I think, handed on to Mr. Bernard Shaw. But such anxiety for every kind of celebrity at any cost seems to have lost the youthful genius the esteem of the great _Punch_ artist once and for all. The representative of humorous journalism seems the one upon whom the delicate humour of the proposal was lost.

As far as du Maurier was capable of vindictiveness it was reserved for Maudle and Postlethwaite. He went out of his way to give a contemptible appearance to those who took the name of Art in vain. His only spiteful drawings are those of æsthetes. They are spiteful to the extent of the great disgust which he, the most amiable of satirists, felt for them. But still he was careful not to treat a craze which afforded him inexhaustible variations of subject matter with so much bitterness as to kill it right out. It was only towards this craze that he showed any bitterness at all, for the rest he is always amused with Society. He has none of the bitter Jeremiahlike anger against it of a Swift.

Mr. Henry James defending du Maurier from a charge of being malignant, brought against him for his ugly representation of queer people, failures, and grotesques, refused to allow that the taint of "French ferocity" of which the artist was accused, existed. But Mr. Henry James sees in du Maurier's ugly people a real specification of type, where we confess that we have felt that his "ferocity" missed the point of resemblance to type through clumsy exaggeration. One noticeable instance, however, to our mind, where the too frequent outrageousness is replaced by an exquisite study of character, is in the face of the fair authoress who, when the gallant Colonel, anxious to break the ice, and full of the fact that he has just been made a proud father, asks if she takes any interest in very young children, replies, "I loathe _all_ children!" (January 13, 1880).

§7

The story of children's conversation has perhaps never been told quite so charmingly as du Maurier tells it. We could quote endlessly from the admirably constructed nursery dialogues in which he does not attempt to make a joke, and in which he very carefully refrains from giving a fantastic precocity to his little characters--dialogues in which he is quite content to rely upon our sympathetic knowledge of children's way of putting things, while he rests the appeal of the drawing and legend entirely upon a _naïve_ literalness to their remarks. The charming atmosphere of the well-ordered nursery must be felt by readers, and then we can quote from the text of some of his drawings of the kind; this we shall do somewhat at random and as they come to mind.

"Are you asleep, dearest? Yes, Mamma, and the Doctor particularly said that I wasn't to be waked to take my medicine" (_July_ 10, 1880).

"Oh, Auntie! There's your tiresome cook's been and filled my egg too full" (_April_ 22, 1882).

Already we are seized with misgivings as to whether, with the reader very much on the look-out for the jokes, we shall be successful in making our point in claiming for du Maurier that, as much as any author who has ever written upon children, he captures "the note" of children's speeches. But anyhow we will try.

For an instance there is the delightful picture of a child clasping its mother round the knees, whilst the mother, shawled for an evening concert, bends affectionately down--

"Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma! I like you to go out, because if you didn't you'd never come home again, you know."

The artist perhaps invented this pretty speech, but the "Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma" is of the very spirit of the redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"--_The Tale of the House_ it might be called--when he affords us realistic glimpses of nursery conversation.

_Mamma_. "What is Baby crying for, Maggie?"

_Maggie_. "I don't know."

_Mamma_. "And what are you looking so indignant about?"

_Maggie_. "That nasty, greedy dog's been and took and eaten my punge-take!"

_Mamma_. "Why, I saw you eating a sponge-cake a minute ago!"

_Maggie_. "O--that was Baby's."

We need hardly labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of the reconstruction.

_Ethel_. "Isn't it sad, Arthur? There's the drawing-room cleared for a dance, and all the dolls ready to begin, only they've got no partners!"

_Arthur_. "Well, Ethel! There's the four gentlemen in my Noah's Ark; but they don't look as if they cared very much about _dancing_, you know!" (_February_ 24, 1872).

_Ethel_. "And O, Mamma, do you know as we were coming along we saw a horrid woman with a red striped shawl drink something out of a bottle, and then hand it to some men. I'm sure she was tipsy."

_Beatrice_ (who always looks on the best side of things). "Perhaps it was only Castor Oil, after all!"

_A whispered appeal_. "Mamma! Mamma! don't scold him any more, it makes the room so dark."

It is the _poetry_ of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of childhood. For instance, the large drawing "Farewell to Fair Normandy" (October 2, 1880), extending across two full pages of _Punch_, in which the children away for their seaside holiday leave the sands for the last time in a mournful procession. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud. Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene. It has been said that "there is only one art," and this seems to be proved on great occasions by those who can command more than one art for the expression of their feelings. It is difficult to say where in this picture the artist in du Maurier gives place to the poet, as difficult as it is to say before a picture of Rossetti.

Sometimes du Maurier even depicted delightful children as the victims of the fashionable crazes that he loved to attack, and thus we are brought to another series of dialogues--as a rule though only involving the "grown-ups"--in which the legend and the type of person depicted, together, form a most valuable document of the times. There is for instance the China mania--in the following in the incipient stage:--

"O Mamma! O! O! N--N--Nurse has given me my C--C--Cod-liver Oil out of a p--p--plain white mug" (_December_ 26, 1874).

Then the inimitable colloquies of the æsthetes--and especially the now famous one about the six-mark tea-pot.

_Aesthetic Bridegroom_. "It is quite consummate, is it not?"

_Intense Bride_. "It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!"

Also the direction, to the architect about the country house:

_Fair Client_. "I want it to be nice and baronial, Queen Anne and Elizabethan, and all that; kind of quaint and Nuremburgy you know--regular Old English, with French windows opening to the lawn, and Venetian blinds, and sort of Swiss balconies, and a loggia. But I'm sure _you_ know what I mean!" (_November_ 29, 1890).

And farther on in the _Punch_ volumes:--

"O, Mr. Robinson, does not it ever strike you, in listening to sweet music, that the Rudiment of Potential Infinite Pain is subtly woven into the tissue of our keenest joy" (_December_ 2, 1891).

But perhaps before closing this chapter we should give some examples of drawing-room conversation pure and simple, without reference to any sort of craze, as specimens of their author's skill. Familiarity with the artist's characters will enable the reader to appreciate the note of a shy man's agony in some, and of feminine spite in others.

Among the "Speeches to be lived down, if possible," there are these:

_She_. "Let me introduce you to a very charming lady, to take down to supper."

_He_. "A--thanks--no. I never eat supper."

"By George! I am so hungry I can't talk."

_Fair Hostess_ (on hospitable thoughts intent). "Oh, I'm so glad!"

"Things one would rather have left unsaid":

_Amiable Hostess_. "What! must you go already? Really, Professor, it's too bad of this sweet young wife of yours to carry you off so early! She always does!"

_Professor_. "No, no, not _always_, Mrs. Bright. At _most_ houses I positively have to drag her away!"

"Truths that might have been left unspoken":

_Hostess_. "What? haven't you brought your sisters, Mr. Jones?"

_Mr. Jones_. "No, they couldn't come, Mrs. Smith. The fact is, they're saving themselves for Mrs. Brown's Dance to-morrow, you know!" (_January_ 9, 1886).

Under the heading "Feline Amenities":

_Fair Hostess_ (to Mrs. Masham, who is looking her very best). "How-dy-do, dear? I hope you're not so tired as you look!"

_Sympathetic Lady Guest_. "Don't be unhappy about the rain, dear Mrs. Bounderson--it will soon be over, and your garden will be lovelier than ever."

_Little Mrs. Goldmore Bounderson_ (who is giving her first Garden Party). "Yes; but I'm afraid it will keep my most desirable guests from coming!"

This last duologue is pure du Maurier. It is subtle.

"Feline Amenities" again:

"How kind of you to call--I'm sorry to have kept you waiting!"

"Oh, don't mention it.--I've not been at all bored! I've been trying to imagine what I should do to make this room look comfortable if it were mine!" (_November_ 22, 1892).

The "Things one would rather have expressed otherwise" is a good series too:

_The Professor_ (to Hostess). "Thank you so much for a most delightful evening! I shall indeed go to bed with pleasant recollections--and _you_ will be the very _last_ person I shall think of!"

And again, of the same series:

_Fair Hostess_. "Good-night, Major Jones. We're supposed to breakfast at nine, but we're not very punctual people. Indeed the later you appear to-morrow morning, the better pleased we shall all be" (_May_ 13, 1893).

"Things one would rather have left unsaid":

_He_. "Yes, I know Bootle slightly, and confess I don't think much of him!"

_She_. "I know him a little too. He took me in to dinner a little while ago!"

_He_. "Ah, that's just about all he's fit for!"

_The Hostess_. "Dear Miss Linnet! would you--would you sing one of those charming ballads, while I go and see if supper's ready?"

_The Companion_. "O, don't ask me--I feel nervous. There are so many people."

_The Hostess_. "O, they won't listen, bless you! not one of them! _Now_ DO!!!"

And here is a conversation that betrays the presence of one of the currents of public feeling below the smooth surface of well-bred twaddle:

_In the Metropolitan Railway_. "I beg your pardon, but I think I had the pleasure of meeting you in Rome last year?"

"No, I've never been nearer to Rome than St. Alban's."

"St. Alban's? Where is that?"

"Holborn."

Some rather amusing speeches of a different character in which du Maurier assails the more obvious forms of snobbery of a class below those with whom his art was generally concerned may be given:

_Among the Philistines_. _Grigsby_. "Do you _know_ the Joneses, Mrs. Brown?"

"No, we--er--don't care to know _Business_ people as a rule, although my husband's in business; but then he's in the _Coffee_ Business and they're all _gentlemen_ in the _Coffee_ Business, you know!"

_Grigsby_ (who always suits himself to his company). "_Really_ now! Why, that's more than can be said of the Army, the Navy, the Church, the Bar, or even the _House of Lords_! I don't _wonder_ at your being rather _exclusive_!" (_Punch's Almanac_, 1882).

"I see your servants wear cockades now, Miss Shoddson!"

"Yes, Pa's just become a member of the Army and Navy Stores."

When du Maurier confined himself to observing and to recording he never failed for subjects. But we suppose as a concession to a section of the public he felt a leaven of mere jokes was demanded from him every year. The scene of his struggle to invent those "jokes" is one to be veiled. It is safe to say that it is his distinction to have contributed at once the best satire and the worst jokes that _Punch_ has ever published. A black and white artist has told the writer that the _Art_-Editors of papers look first at the joke. The drawing is accepted or rejected on the joke. We can only be glad that this was not entirely the editorial practice on _Punch_ in du Maurier's time. Perhaps the subjoined "joke" of du Maurier's from _Punch_ is the worst in the world:

"I say, cousin Constance, I've found out why you always call your Mamma 'Mater.'"

"Why, Guy?"

"Because she's always trying to find a mate for you girls."

And yet if the drawing accompanying this joke be looked at _first_, it delights with its charm and distinction. Here then is a psychological fact; the drawing itself seems to the eye a poorer affair once the poor joke has been read. Having suffered in this way several times in following with admiration the pencil of du Maurier through the old volumes of _Punch_, we at last hit upon the plan of always covering the joke and enjoying first the picture for its own sake, only uncovering the legend when this has been thoroughly appreciated lest it should turn out to be merely a feeble joke instead of a happily-invented conversation. There are some of the drawings for jokes which we should very much like to have included with our illustrations, but the human mind being so constituted that it goes direct to the legend of an illustration, feeling "sold" if it isn't there, and the "jokes" in some of these instances being so fatal to the understanding of the atmosphere and charm of the drawing, we have had to abandon the idea of doing so. What the reader has to understand is that circumstances harnessed du Maurier to a certain business; he imported all manner of extraneous graces into it, and thus gave a determination to the character of the art of satire which it will never lose. The pages of _Punch_ were enriched, beautified, and made more delicately human. _Punch_ gained everything through the connection and du Maurier a stimulus in the demand for regular work. But it is not impossible to imagine circumstances which, but for this early connection with _Punch_, would have awakened and developed a different and perhaps profounder side of du Maurier, of which we seem to get a glimpse in the illustrations to Meredith in _The Cornhill Magazine_.

§8