Part 24

Du Maurier understands the foreigner as no caricaturist has done hitherto; and we hasten to add that his portraits of continental types are never caricatures. They are serious studies, in which the idiosyncrasies of the race in question are vividly presented. His Germans would be the best if his French folk were not better still; but he has rendered most happily the aspect--and indeed the very temperament--of the German pianist. He has not often attempted the American; and the American reader who turns over the back volumes of _Punch_ and encounters the cartoons, born under an evil star, in which, during the long weary years of the War, the obedient pencil of Mr. Tenniel contributed at the expense of the American physiognomy to the gaiety of nations, will not perhaps regret that Du Maurier should have avoided this particular field of portraiture. It is not, however, that he has not occasionally been inspired by the American girl, whom he endows with due prettiness, as in the case of the two transatlantic young ladies who, in the presence of a fine Alpine view, exclaim to a British admirer: “My! ain’t it rustic?” As for the French, he knows them intimately, as he has a right to do. He thinks better of the English of course; but his Frenchman is a very different affair from the Frenchman of Leech--the Frenchman who is sea-sick (as if it were the appanage of his race alone!) on the Channel steamer. In such a matter as this Du Maurier is really psychological; he is versed in the qualities which illustrate the difference of race. He accentuates first of course the physical variation; he contrasts--with a subtlety which may not at first receive all the credit it deserves--the long, fair English body, inclined to the bony, the lean, the angular, with the short, plump French personality, in which the neck is rarely a feature, in which the stomach is too much of one, in which the calves of the legs grow fat, in which in the women several of the joints, the wrists, the shape of the hand, are apt to be charming. Some of his happiest drawings are reminiscences of a midsummer sojourn at a French watering-place. We have long been in the habit of looking for _Punch_ with peculiar impatience at this season of the year. When the artist goes to France he takes his big dog with him, and he has more than once commemorated the effect of this impressive member of a quiet English family upon the Norman and Breton populations. There have appeared at this time certain anecdotic pictures of English travellers in French towns--in shops, markets, tramcars--in which some of the deeper disparities of the two peoples have been (under the guise of its being all a joke) very sufficiently exposed. Du Maurier on the whole does justice to the French; his English figures, in these international tableaux, by no means always come off best. When the English family of many persons troops into the _charcutier_’s or the perfumer’s and stands planted there--mute, inexpressive, perpendicular--the demonstrations, the professions, the abundant speech of the neat, plump, insinuating _boutiquière_ are a well-intended tribute to the high civilisation of her country. Du Maurier has done the “low” foreigner of the London (or of his native) streets--the foreigner whose unspeakable baseness prompts the Anglo-Saxon observer to breathe the Pharisee’s vow of thanks that he is not as these people are; but, as we have seen, he has done the low Englishman quite as well--the ’Arry of the London music-halls, the companion of ’Andsome ’Arriet and Mr. Belville. Du Maurier’s rendering of ’Arry’s countenance, with its bloated purple bloom, of ’Arry’s figure, carriage and costume--of his deportment at the fancy fair, where the professional beauties solicit his custom--is a triumph of exactitude. One of the most poignant of the drawings that illustrate his ravages in our civilisation is the large design which a year or two ago represented the narrow canal beneath the Bridge of Sighs. The hour is evening, and the period is the detested date at which the penny-steamer was launched upon the winding water-ways of the loveliest city in the world. The odious little vessel, belching forth a torrent of black smoke, passes under the covered arch which connects the ducal palace with the ducal prison. ’Andsome ’Arriet and Mr. Belville (personally conducted) are of course on board, and ’Arriet remarks that the Bridge of Sighs isn’t much of a size after all. To which her companion rejoins that it has been immortalised by Byron, any way--“’im as wrote ‘Our Boys,’ you know.” This fragment of dialogue expresses concisely the arguments both for and against the importation of the cheap and nasty into Venetian waters.

Returning for a moment to Du Maurier’s sketches of the French, we must recall the really interesting design in which, at a child’s party at the Casino of a _station balnéaire_, a number of little natives are inviting a group of English children to dance. The French children have much the better manners; they make their little bows with a smile, they click their heels together and crook their little arms as they offer them to their partners. The sturdy British infants are dumb, mistrustful, vaguely bewildered. Presently you perceive that in the very smart attire of the gracious little Gauls _everything is wrong_--their high heels, their poor little legs, at once too bare and too much covered, their superfluous sashes and scarfs. The small English are invested in plain Jerseys and knickerbockers. The whole thing is a pearl of observation, of reflection. Let us recall also the rebuke administered to M. Dubois, the distinguished young man of science who, just arrived from Paris and invited to dine by the Duke of Stilton, mentions this latter fact in apology for being late to a gentleman to whose house he goes on leaving the Duke’s. This gentleman, assisted by Mr. Grigsby (both of them specimens of the snob-philistine whom Du Maurier has brought to such perfection), reprehends him in a superior manner for his rashness, reminds him that in England it is “not usual for a professional man” to allude in that promiscuous manner to having dined with a duke--a privilege which Grigsby characterises “the perfection of consummate achievement.” The advantage is here with poor M. Dubois, who is a natural and sympathetic figure, a very _gentil_ little Frenchman. The advantage is doubtless also with Mlle. Serrurier and her mother, though Mademoiselle is not very pretty, in a scene in which, just after the young lady has been singing at Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns’s, the clever Mrs. Ponsonby plays her off on the Duchess (as an inducement to come to another party) and then plays the Duchess off on the little vocalist and her mother, who, in order to secure the patronage of the Duchess, promise to come to the entertainment in question. The clever Mrs. Ponsonby thus gets both the Duchess and the vocalist for nothing. The broad-faced French girl, with small, salient eyes, her countenance treated in the simplest and surest manner, is a capital specimen of Du Maurier’s skill in race-portraiture; and though they may be a knowing couple in their way, we are sure that she and her mamma are incapable of the machinations of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns.

This lady is a real creation. She is an incident of one of the later phases of Du Maurier’s activity--a child of the age which has also produced Mrs. Cimabue Brown and Messrs. Maudle and Postlethwaite. 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 lookout, 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 always 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 manœuvres 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, pushes, gently but firmly--always pushes. At last she arrives. It is true that she had only the other day, on 29th June 1882, a considerable failure; we refer the reader to the little incident of Madame Gaminot, in the _Punch_ for that date. But she will recover from it; she has already recovered from it. She is not even afraid of Sir Gorgius Midas--of the dreadful Midas junior. She pretends to think Lady Midas the most elegant of women; when it is necessary to flatter, she lays it on as with a trowel. She 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. We may be sure that Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns has an array of fragile disks attached to her walls, and that she can put in a word about Botticelli at the right moment. She is far, however, from being a representative of æstheticism, for her hair is very neatly arranged, and her dress looks French and superficial.

In Mrs. Cimabue Brown we see the priestess of the æsthetic cult, and this lady is on the whole a different sort of person. She knows less about duchesses, but she knows more about dados. Du Maurier’s good-natured “chaff” of the eccentricities of the plastic sense so newly and so strangely awakened in England has perhaps been the most brilliant episode of his long connection with _Punch_. He has invented Mrs. Cimabue Brown--he has invented Maudle and Postlethwaite. These remarkable people have had great success in America, and have contributed not a little to the curiosity felt in that country on the subject of the English Renascence. Strange rumours and legends in relation to this great movement had made their way across the Atlantic; the sayings and doings of a mysterious body of people, devotees of the lovely and the precious, living in goodly houses and walking in gracious garments, were repeated and studied in our simpler civilisation. There has not been as yet an American Renascence, in spite of the taste for “sincere” sideboards and fragments of crockery. American interiors are perhaps to-day as “gracious” as English; but the movement in the United States has stopped at household furniture, has not yet set its mark upon speech and costume--much less upon the human physiognomy. Du Maurier of course has lent a good deal of his own fame to the vagaries he depicts; but it is certain that the new æsthetic life has had a good deal of reality. A great many people have discovered themselves to be fitted for it both by nature and by grace; so that noses and chins, facial angles of every sort shaped according to this higher rule have become frequent in London society. This reaction of taste upon nature is really a marvel, and the miracle has not been repeated in America, nor so far as we know upon the continent of Europe. The love of Botticelli has actually remoulded the features of several persons. London, for many seasons, was full of Botticelli women, with wan cheeks and weary eyes, enveloped in mystical, crumpled robes. Their language was apt to correspond with their faces; they talked in strange accents, with melancholy murmurs and cadences. They announced a gospel of joy, but their expression, their manners, were joyless. These peculiarities did not cross the ocean; for somehow the soil of the western world was not as yet prepared for them. American ladies were even heard to declare that there was something in their constitution that would prevent their ever dressing like that. They had another ideal; they were committed to the whalebone. But meanwhile, as I say, there was something irritating, fascinating, mystifying in the light thrown on the subject by _Punch_. It seemed to many persons to be desired that we too should have a gospel of joy; American life was not particularly “gracious,” and if only the wind could be made to blow from the æsthetic quarter a great many dry places would be refreshed. These desires perhaps have subsided; for _Punch_ of late has rather neglected the Renascence. Mrs. Cimabue Brown is advancing in years, and Messrs. Maudle and Postlethwaite have been through all their paces. The new æsthetic life, in short, shows signs of drawing to a close, after having, as many people tell us, effected a revolution in English taste--having at least, if not peopled the land with beauty, made certain consecrated forms of ugliness henceforth impossible.

The whole affair has been very curious and, we think, very characteristic of the English mind. The same episode fifty times repeated--a hundred “revolutions of taste,” accompanied with an infinite expenditure of money--would fail to convince certain observant and possibly too sceptical strangers that the English are an æsthetic people. They have not a spontaneous artistic life; their taste is a matter of conscience, reflection, duty, and the writer who in our time has appealed to them most eloquently on behalf of art has rested his plea on moral standards--has talked exclusively of right and wrong. It is impossible to live much among them, to be a spectator of their habits, their manners, their arrangements, without perceiving that the artistic point of view is the last that they naturally take. The sense of manner is not part of their constitution. They arrive at it, as they have arrived at so many things, because they are ambitious, resolute, enlightened, fond of difficulties; but there is always a strange element either of undue apology or of exaggerated defiance in their attempts at the cultivation of beauty. They carry on their huge broad back a nameless mountain of conventions and prejudices, a dusky cloud of inaptitudes and fears, which casts a shadow upon the frank and confident practice of art. The consequence of all this is that their revivals of taste are even stranger than the abuses they are meant to correct. They are violent, voluntary, mechanical; wanting in grace, in tact, in the sense of humour and of proportion. A genuine artist like Du Maurier could not fail to perceive all this, and to perceive also that it gave him a capital opportunity. None of his queer people are so queer as some of these perverted votaries of joy. “Excuse me, it is not a Botticelli--before a Botticelli I am dumb,” one of them says to a poor plain man who shows him a picture which has been attributed to that master. We have said already, and repeated, that Du Maurier has a great deal of irony--the irony of the thorough-going artist and of the observer who has a strain of foreign blood in his veins. There are certain pretensions that such a mind can never take seriously; in the artist there is of necessity, as it appears to us, a touch of the democrat--though, perhaps, he is as unlikely to have more than a certain dose of this disposition as he is to be wholly without it. Some of his drawings seem to us to have for the public he addresses a stinging democratic meaning; like the adventure of M. Dubois (of whom we have spoken), who had had the inconvenience of dining with a duke; or the reply of the young man to whom Miss Midas remarks that he is the first commoner she has ever danced with: “And why is it the commoners have avoided you so?”--or the response of the German _savant_ to Mrs. Lyon Hunter, who invites him to dine, without his wife, though she is on his arm, to meet various great ladies whom she enumerates: “And pray, do you think they would not be respectable company for my wife?” Du Maurier possesses in perfection the independence of the genuine artist in the presence of a hundred worldly superstitions and absurdities. We have said, however, that the morality, so to speak, of his drawings was a subordinate question: what we wished to insist upon is their completeness, their grace, their beauty, their rare pictorial character. It is an accident that the author of such things should not have been a painter--that he has not been an ornament of the English school. Indeed, with the restrictions to which he has so well accommodated himself, he is such an ornament. No English artistic work in these latter years has, in our opinion, been more exquisite in quality.

1883.

XI

THE ART OF FICTION

I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant’s lecture at the Royal Institution--the original form of his pamphlet--appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the art of fiction, and are not indifferent to such remarks, as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling.

It is a proof of life and curiosity--curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call _discutable_. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it--of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that: it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, _naïf_ (if I may help myself out with another French word); and evidently if it be destined to suffer in any way for having lost its _naïveté_ it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation--the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development--are times, possibly even, a little of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising when they are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example in saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it should be published; for his view of the “art,” carried on into an appendix, covers that too. Other labourers in the same field will doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the light of their experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest in the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to be--a serious, active, inquiring interest, under protection of which this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, venture to say a little more what it thinks of itself.