T. Martin Wood

“ The quality of craft is the barometer of the degree of the artist's response to some aspect of life. Absence of beauty in craftsmanship indicates absence of inspiration, the failure to respond to life.
Though du Maurier fell short of Keene in breadth of inspiration, there were still aspects of life which he represented better than that master, phases of life which he approached with greater eagerness. He expressed perfectly once and for all in art the life of the drawing-room in the great days of the drawing-room, as did Watteau the life of the Court in the great days of a Court. ”

“ In his very style the satirist of the æsthetes stood confessed almost as one of their number, whether he wished this to be seen or not—at least as one of the romantic school from whom they immediately descended. But he was genuine; where Postlethwaite and Maudle posed, his irritation was with the pose, the pretended preoccupation with beauty. He genuinely admired the Florentine revival, and to admire is to be jealous of those who take in vain. He wished to show up the "æsthetes" as the parasites they were, trading socially upon an inspiration too fragrant to be traded with at all. ”

“ To think in line, to see the world as resolving itself into the play of alternating lines, so to habituate thought and vision to that one aspect of everything is not the best preparation in the world for seeing it over again in another art where the element of line is not the chief incident of the impression to be created. Failure in the one art does not mean failure as an artist. ”

“ It is natural for one generation to hate more than anything else in the world the fashions immediately preceding the one affected. Pointed contemporary satire has, from the very shape it must assume, an ephemeral success. It is only when something more than the mere object of the satire is involved by some grace of the satirist's genius—some response on his part to charm in the thing assailed, that the work of satire comes down from its own time with an indestructible ingredient in it.
As a record of feminine fashion du Maurier's drawings in Punch are remarkable. ”

“ In insisting upon the possibility of beauty and suppressing every reference to the monstrous story of failure which the existence of hideousness implies, once more he puts the world in debt to art after the fashion of the old masters. For after all it seems to have been left for modern artists to grow wealthy and live comfortably upon the proceeds of their own relation of the world's despair; if they are playwrights, to live most snugly upon the box-receipts of an entrapped audience unnerved for the struggle of life by their ghastly picture of life's gloom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To write of the work of an artist who is not a contemporary without reference to the circumstances of his life would be an incomplete performance, and yet criticism and biography are hardly ever happily fused. The gifts of a biographer are of a kind very dissimilar to those employed in criticism. The true biographer loves uncritically every detail that has to do with his subject, as a portrait-painter loves every detail that has to do with the appearance of his sitter. ”

“ Men take their rank in art by expressing completely something which others have expressed incidentally.
There is now the glamour of the past upon du Maurier's work in Punch. The farther we are away in distance of time from the date of the execution of a work of art the more legendary and fabulous its tale becomes. In good work forgotten costumes seem bizarre but not preposterous. Whenever in a picture a thing looks preposterous—except in the art of caricature, and du Maurier was not a caricaturist—the representation of it in the picture is a bad one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is significant that the artist had nursed throughout his youth an enthusiasm for Byron. Until the influence of Mr. Bernard Shaw had chilled the air, England remained under the spell of that romantic poet. The Victorians in everything betrayed the love of glamour. They exalted the unknown Disraeli out of sheer delight at his Byronic ability to irradiate everything with romance. There has never been a moment like the present in which there is a complete absence of pride in tradition, which is pleasure in romance. But the reason is simple. Our traditions belong to the pre-Industrial time. ”

“ As for the women, the mask of manner, the pleasantness concealing every shade of uncharitableness, all the arts of the contention for social precedence—in the interpretation of this sort of thing du Maurier is often quite uncanny, but he is never ruthless.
We have noticed that when du Maurier tried to draw ugly people he often only succeeded in turning out a figure of fun. Not to be beautiful and charming is to fail of being human, seems the judgment of his pencil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The number of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling. All we want for my little dream to be realised is that, among these precocious wielders of the pencil, there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope...."
Does not this precisely sum the situation up? Du Maurier could not live to foresee that, for all the expert skill of modern illustration, the "youths who can draw beautifully" lack "a point of view." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Du Maurier was an optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society going swiftly to Gehenna. It is the entire absence of despair, bitterness, or cynicism in his work that gives it its altogether unique place in the history of social satire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It does not seem prepared to accept work in quite another style. But there is no more chance of there ever being another Keene than of there being another Rembrandt, or of there ever being another du Maurier than another Watteau. The next genius to whom it is given to illuminate the pages of the classic journal in a style that will rival the past is not likely to arise from among those who think that there is no other view of life than that which was discovered by their immediate predecessors. ”

“ Photographs, which are driving pen illustrations out of the illustrated papers, are in themselves many of them highly artistic and beautiful, but in another sense familiarity with photographs has damaged the public sense of art and lost us the taste for merry, irresponsible freedom of drawing. There was no poverty in du Maurier's skill in illustration; but one is compelled to believe his resources as an artist never fully revealed themselves for the lack of the encouragement which only a small cultivated public is prepared to give. ”

“ 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 twilight in which beauty and ugliness merge, in which the heroic and the villainous mingle, was unknown to him—a region in which the white figure of a hero is as impossible as the black one of a real villain. He observes subtly enough the airs of those who interest him, but he is not interested in everybody. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though in justice to its author it must be said that he did not wish to be regarded as Keene's critic as well as biographer.
An artist does not argue with himself that he will shun the representation of one particular side of life. He simply leaves it alone because he cannot help it; it does not attract him. He draws just that which interests him most and in the way in which it interests him; and exactly to the measure of his interest does his drawing possess vitality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we may believe du Maurier's art, the note of beauty never entirely disappeared from fashion until the æsthetic women of the eighties seemed to take in hand their own clothes. The æsthetic ladies failed, as the movement to which they attached themselves did, for beauty is something attendant upon life, arriving when it likes, going away very often when everyone is on his knees for it to remain. ”

“ The nouveau artist-craftsman stood less chance than anybody of getting back to the secret of noble things, having forsaken the path of pure utility which, wherever it may go for a time, always leads back again to beauty. The disappearance of beauty for a time need not have been a cause of despair. Beauty will always come back if it is left alone. ”

“ It is curious that while an Englishman's conventions rest upon dislike of what is odd and fantastic—precisely the two most well-known sources of humour—he yet has a sense of humour. The first aim of every Englishman is to acquire a manner of some dignity. It is the breaking down of that dignity in other people that to his eyes places them in a light that is funny.
English humour seems to find its object in physical rather than mental aspects. The very notable feature of du Maurier's work was that it refined upon the characteristics of English humour ”

“ In "Society" the force of individuality now runs beneath the surface of observable varieties of costume, taking a subterranean course with an impulse to avoid everything that would give rise to comment. But the conformity of "Society" in small things is only a mask. Du Maurier's real weakness in satire was that he did not quite perceive this. He was inclined to accept appearances for realities, with the consequence that the record he transmits of late Victorian Society obscures the quite feverish genius of that age. ”

“ It is necessary for an artist to be able to be every character that he would create. And perhaps a satirist never wounds others so much as when he most wounds himself. Thackeray succeeded with snobbery because he had enough of it to go on with himself. We have shown the success of du Maurier with the æsthetes to go upon similar lines. The soul of satire is very often the bitterness of confession. ”

“ English people, Puritan by ancestry and by inclination, are nevertheless driven into frequent subterfuge by their good nature, and having pared their language and gesture of that extravagance in expression which they despise in the foreigner, they are thrown back upon a naturalness that betrays them in delicate situations. The consequence is that it is in Anglo-Saxon Society at its best that the art of delicate fence in conversation has been brought to its highest pitch. ”

“ Never is he more exquisite than when he embraces detail. The need to produce with rapidity, and the effect of later fashions which did not suit his own nature so well, induced him to give up a very deliberate style suited to his quick perception of beauty in everyday incident, for one that sometimes only achieved emptiness in its attempt at breadth. But to have kept his pre-Raphaelite individuality with two such native impressionists as Keene and Whistler for his most intimate friends would have perhaps been more than could be expected of human nature. ”

“ To the extent to which there is a glamour and a beauty in fashion du Maurier is a realist. People who only now and then become sensible of the charm in things are provoked by its strangeness in art, and call it romance, their definition for an untrue thing. ”