Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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

§10

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene_, by Charles Somes Layard. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1892.

III

DU MAURIER AS AUTHOR

§1

Queen Victoria was the Queen of Hearts; her reign was the reign of sentiment. The redundancy of tender reference to Prince Albert at Windsor has been known to bore visitors to the town. Life must have been tiring in those days, tossed, as everyone was, if we believe the art of the time, from one wave of sentiment to another. Men went "into the city" to get a little rest, and there framed this code: that there should be no sentiment in business.

So the Victorians put their sentiment into art, into stories and illustrations. They put some of the best of their black-and-white art into a Magazine called _Good Words_. Only the Victorians could have invented such a title for a Magazine, or lived up to it.

The literary tradition of that time, so far as the novel was concerned, expired with du Maurier. He came near to having a style as natural as Thackeray's, and he was quite as sentimental.

Before he began to write novels, he prided himself upon the fact that a store of "plots" for novels lay undeveloped in his mind. It was the offer of a "plot" to Mr. Henry James one evening when they were walking up and down the High Street, Bayswater, that resulted in du Maurier becoming a novelist. Du Maurier told him the plot of _Trilby._ "But you ought to write that story," cried James. "I can't write," he replied; "I have never written. If you like the plot so much you may take it." Mr. James said that it was too valuable a present to take, and that du Maurier must write the story himself.

On reaching home that night he set to work. By the next morning he had written the first two numbers not of _Trilby_ but of _Peter Ibbetson_. "It seemed all to flow from my pen, without effort in a full stream," he said, "but I thought it must be poor stuff, and I determined to look for an omen to learn whether any success would attend this new departure. So I walked out into the garden, and the very first thing that I saw was a large wheelbarrow, and that comforted me and reassured me, for, as you will remember, there is a wheelbarrow in the first chapter of _Peter Ibbetson._"[2]

_Peter Ibbetson_--"The young man, lonely, chivalrous and disquieted by a touch of genius," as the hero has been well described--was written for money, and brought its author a thousand pounds.

_Peter Ibbetson_ was not put above _Trilby_ in the author's lifetime; but we believe it to have much more vitality than the latter work. The actual writing of it was not perhaps taken quite so seriously as that of _Trilby_, and it gains nothing on that account; but it is a book in which there is intensity, in which everything is not spread out thinly as in _Trilby_. Du Maurier himself believed that _Peter Ibbetson_ was the better book. It certainly witnesses to the nobility of the author's mind; it expresses the quick sympathy of the artist temperament--the instinct for finding extenuating circumstances which artists share with women, and which both rightly regard as the same thing as the sense of justice. The tale of _Peter Ibbetson_ breathes a great human sympathy. The simplicity with which it is written adds to its effect. We cross a track of horror in it by the ray of a generous light. It is by this book I like to think that du Maurier will be remembered as a writer. It was characteristic of him that he could touch a theme that in all superficial aspects was sordid without the loss of the bloom of true romance. The real plot of this story, however, does not lie with incident, but with the maintenance of an elevated frame of mind in defiance of circumstances. The author realises that mind triumphs always more easily over matter than over "circumstances." To the damage of the plot he brings his hero the utmost psychic assistance from an inadmissible source, but the picture of the prisoner's soul prevailing in the face of complete temporal disaster is still a true one.

Du Maurier's publishers believed in _Trilby_ from the very first. They began by offering double the _Peter Ibbetson_ terms, while generously urging him to retain his rights in the book by accepting a little less in a lump sum and receiving a royalty. But so little faith did he pin to _Trilby_ that he said "No!"

Within a few weeks the "boom" began. And when Harpers' saw what proportions it was likely to assume, they voluntarily destroyed the agreement, and arranged to allow him a handsome royalty on every copy sold. An admirer of Byron, du Maurier repudiated as cruelly unfair the poet's line, "Now Barabbas was a publisher." The publisher also handed over to him the dramatic rights with which he had parted for a small sum like fifty pounds, and thus he became a partner in the dramatic property called _Trilby_ as a "play."

§ 2

_Trilby_ was a name that had long lain _perdu_ somewhere "at the back of du Maurier's head." He traced it to a story by Charles Nodier, in which Trilby was a man. The name Trilby also appears in a poem by Alfred de Musset. And to this name, and to the story of a woman which was once told to him, du Maurier's _Trilby_ owed her birth. "From the moment the name occurred to me," he said, "I was struck with its value. I at once realised that it was a name of great importance. I think I must have felt as happy as Thackeray did when the title of _Vanity Fair_ suggested itself to him."

_Trilby_ is written with a daintiness that corresponds with the neatness of its illustrations. It has the attractiveness which du Maurier had such skill in giving. But though dealing with Bohemia, the author is conventional; that is, he keeps strictly to the surface of things. And every true sentiment of the book is spoilt by the quickly following laugh in which the author betrays his dread of being thought to take anything seriously.

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.