George William Russell Du Maurier

“ 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. ”

“ He did not exhibit the most unpleasant of the traits of a talented person—the overstrung condition of nerves which makes a man unpleasant to a household; he preserved the serenity that pertains to greater genius still. His house was always an open one, and the life in it must have been highly typical of that English family life of which he was the pre-eminent poet in his drawings.
Du Maurier was elected a member of the Athenæum Club under Rule 2. He showed his appreciation of this Club by not making use of any other, though he was such a highly sociable man. ”

“ It is an attitude which I find swaggering in Fielding, insincere in Sterne, mocking in Heine, and inartistic in Thackeray; but Du Maurier made it lovable. His whole story was a confidence; whatever illusion there was resided in that fact; you had to grant it in the beginning, and he made you grant it gladly. A trick? Yes; but none of your vulgar ones; a species of legerdemain, exquisite as that of the Eastern juggler who plants his ladder on the ground, climbs it, and pulls it up after him into the empty air. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He steeled and stiffened himself like a man who knew that the divine Julias of this world were for his betters—not for him! Nevertheless, as he went to bed, and thought of the melting gaze that had met his, he was deeply stirred; and actually, though the north was in him, he forgot, for the first time in all that twelvemonth, for the first time since that terrible night in Malines, to say his prayers to Martia—and next morning he found a letter by his bedside in pencil‐written blaze of his own handwriting:
"Barty my Beloved,—A crisis has come in your affairs, which are mine ”

“ Nobody of Nowhere! be at least a man; let no one ever call you the basest thing an able‐bodied man can become, a fortune‐hunting adventurer!"
Then a bell rang, and the smoke of the coming train was visible—ten minutes late. The tickets were taken, and it slowed into the station and stopped. Ida's head and face were seen peering through one of the second‐class windows, on the lookout, and Barty opened the door and there was a warm and affectionate greeting between them; the meeting was joy to both.
Then he was warmly greeted by Mrs. Gibson, who introduced him to her mother ”

“ Many a ruined heart my home.
No, there is no comfort, none.
All the dewy tender breath
Idly falls when life is done
On the starless brow of death.
Though the dream of love may tire,
In the ages long agone
There were ruby hearts of fire—
Ah, the daughters of the dawn!
Though I am so feeble now,
I remember when our pride
Could not to the Mighty bow;
We would sweep His stars aside.
Mix thy youth with thoughts like those—
It were but to wither thee,
But to graft the youthful rose
On the old and flowerless tree.
Age is no more near than youth
To the sceptre and the crown. ”

“ All who were his contemporaries remember that dauntless courage, that heroic virtue, that stainless purity of thought and speech, before which all evil things seemed to shrink away abashed. We remember how the outward beauty of body seemed only the visible symbol of a goodness which dwelt within, and how moral and intellectual excellence grew up together, blending into a perfect whole. ”

“ It was from this Spotsylvania home, in 1810, that Richard Maury, heeding the call of the West, set out with his family, by the wagon trail, for the Blue Grass Region of Tennessee, and settled on the Big Harpeth River near Franklin. That tedious journey of more than 500 miles may be more easily imagined than described, but at last it ended on the borderland of the Golden West. They were again domiciled—father, mother, and eight children, all except John Minor, a lad of seventeen, already four years a midshipman in the United States Navy. ”

“ Fortunately for my desire, my good father had great sympathy with me in this; so I was entered as a student at the Laboratory of Chemistry at University College, close by—in October, 1851—and studied there for two years, instead of going at once into my father's business in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, which would have pleased him even more.
At about the same time Barty was presented with a commission in the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and joined immediately.
Nothing could have been more widely apart than the lives we led, or the society we severally frequented. ”

“ I really don't know how Jules and Caillard would have got through the hideous ennui of that idle September without him. Even I, with my mother and sister and the beautiful Miss ——— within such easy reach, found time hang heavily at times. One can't be always reading, even Alexandre Dumas; nor always loafing about, even in Paris, by one's self (Jules and Caillard were not allowed outside the gates without Bonzig) ; and beautiful [Pg 57] English girls of eighteen, like Miss ——— s, don't always want a small boy dangling after them, and show it sometimes ”

“ His strength, his beauty, and his wit are yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into—nirvana, till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers ”

“ Mamma was only too delighted, for next day was Mr. Josselin's day for coming to Riffrath; but he didn't, for I wrote to him to meet me at twelve at a little picture‐gallery I knew of in the Allee Strasse—as I wanted to have a talk with him.
"Uncle James had caught a cold too, so I went with Grissel; and found a chemist who'd been in France, and knew what a loch was and made one for me; and then I went to the gallery, and there was poor Barty sitting on a crimson velvet couch, under a picture of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters (I bought it afterwards, and I've got it now) . ”

“ I'm a celebrated man—"
in imitation of Sergeant Bouncer in Cox and Box.
But in less than a year celebrity had quite palled, and all his money bored him—as mine does me. He had a very small appetite for either the praise or the pudding which were served out to him in such excess all through his life. It was only his fondness for the work itself that kept his nose so constantly to the grindstone.
Within six months of the Sardonyx Barty wrote La quatrième Dimension in French, which was published by Dollfus-Moïs frères, in Paris, with if possible a greater success ”

“ It will not lift the heart above
The sodden clay on which it rests.
Love once had power the gods to bring
All rapt on its wild wandering.
We shiver in the falling dew,
And seek a shelter from the storm:
When man these elder brothers knew
He found the mother nature warm,
A hearth fire blazing through it all,
A home without a circling wall.
We dwindle down beneath the skies,
And from ourselves we pass away:
The paradise of memories
Grows ever fainter day by day.
The shepherd stars have shrunk within,
The world's great night will soon begin. ”

“ The heart of many a vanished race
Sighs as I look on them.
The sun rich face of Egypt glows,
The eyes of Eire brood,
With whom the golden Cyprian shows
In lovely sisterhood.
Your tree put forth these phantom flowers
In ages past away:
They had the love in other hours
I give to you to-day.
One light their eyes have, as may shine
One star on many a sea,
They look that tender love on mine
That lights your glance on me.
They fade in you; their lips are fain
To meet the old caress:
And all their love is mine again
As lip to lip we press. ”

“ I've seen such lots of people do it. I've nursed them, you know—papa and mamma and Jeannot, and Angèle Boisse's mother-in-law, and a poor casseur de pierres, Colin Maigret, who lived in the Impasse des Taupes St. Germain. He'd been run over by an omnibus in the Rue Vaugirard, and had to have both his legs cut off just above the knee. They none of them seemed to mind dying a bit. They weren't a bit afraid! I'm not!
"Poor people don't think much of death. Rich people shouldn't either. They should be taught when they're quite young to laugh at it and despise it, like the Chinese. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His pen and ink were on the table, and on his open writing‐case lay a letter in Blaze—in his own handwriting. The north was strong in him. He called out to Finche Torfs to leave his coffee in the drawing‐room, and read his blaze letter—and this is what he read:
[Pg 255] "My dear Barty,—Don't be in the least alarmed on reading this hasty scrawl, after waking from the sleep you meant to sleep forever. There is no sleep without a live body to sleep in—no such thing as everlasting sleep. Self‐destruction seems a very simple thing—more often a duty than not ”

“ He was the cleverest man I ever knew, and the best—except Taffy and the Laird and your dear son!
"There'll be no hell for any of us—he told me so—except what we make for ourselves and each other down here; and that's bad enough for anything. ”

“ He always favors you more than any other chap in the school. I suppose you dislike him because he hates the English so, and always runs them down before you and me—and says they're all [Pg 43] traitors and sneaks and hypocrites and bullies and cowards and liars and snobs; and we can't answer him, because he's the mathematical master!"
"Ma foi, non!" says Josselin—"c'est pas pour ça!"
"Pourquoi, alors?" says Maurice (that's me) .
"C'est parce qu'il a le pied bourgeois et la jambe canaille!" says Barty. (It's because he's got common legs and vulgar feet.) ”

“ I am the only one, among many thousands of homeless spirits, who has ever been able to influence an earthly human being, or even make him feel the magnetic current that flows through us all, and by which we are able to exist; all the rappings and table‐turnings are mere hysterical imaginations, or worse—the cheapest form of either trickery or self‐deception that can be. Barty, your unborn children are of a moment to me [Pg 293] beyond anything you can realize or imagine, and Julia must be their mother ”

“ To their eternal credit, the house of Harper & Brothers—honorable then as now—in view of the unfortunate situation in which their author had placed himself, voluntarily canceled the first contract and restored Du Maurier to a royalty basis. The fear in the English home then was that this arrangement would come too late to bring in anything. Not only, however, did the book continue to sell, but the play came on, and together the rights afforded George du Maurier a competency that banished further worry from the home. ”

“ I'm a model, you know, and it's just rung twelve—'the rest.' I'm posing for Durien the sculptor, on the next floor. I pose to him for the altogether."
"The altogether?" asked Little Billee.
"Yes—l'ensemble, you know—head, hands, and feet—everything—especially feet. That's my foot," she said, kicking off her big slipper and stretching out the limb. "It's the handsomest foot in all Paris. There's only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is," and she laughed heartily (like a merry peal of bells) , and stuck out the other. ”

“ Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.
THE SILENCE OF LOVE
I could praise you once with beautiful words ere you came
And entered my life with love in a wind of flame.
I could lure with a song from afar my bird to its nest,
But with pinions drooping together silence is best.
In the Land of Beautiful Silence the winds are laid,
And life grows quietly one in the cloudy shade.
I will not waken the passion that sleeps in the heart,
For the winds that blew us together may blow us apart. ”