Sometimes we hear critics discussing whether beauty is or is not the object of Art. As a matter of fact it does not really matter much whether beauty is the object, since it is always the result of true art. Craft is the language of an artist's sympathies—inspiration flagging at the point where sympathy evaporates. 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. 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. We never find in the paintings of Vandyke, Velasquez, Gainsborough, or other great artists, however difficult the period of fashion with which they had to deal, anything preposterous—always something beautiful, however unreasonable in ornamentation and clothes. Sometimes it is said that beauty and simplicity are the same. But we have to remember that complexity remains simple whilst unconsciousness of complexity remains. There were several periods of dress that retained beauty and complexity side by side. We find beauty to-day in the avoidance of complexity, because, being at last really civilised, we are impatient of irrelevance even in dress. Du Maurier was never for a moment conscious that there was in all the rigmarole of Victorian costume and decoration anything redundant. He seemed to take, in decoration for instance, the draped mantelpiece with its bows of ribbons, and pinned fans quite as seriously as Velasquez took the hooped skirt in costume. Artifice is fascinating in those with whom it is natural to be artificial. When du Maurier thought he recognised merely a passing "fashion" and hit out at it, he made far less interesting pictures for posterity than when he took the outward aspect of the age he lived in as being in the natural order of things.
The Victorian age—which invented Punch, the greatest humorous paper the world has ever known—had no sense of humour. It was the age of serious people. The secret of the character of Punch as an organ of satire is that it represents the times, scorning only what the English people scorn. This representative attitude is, I believe, quite puzzling to many editors of foreign publications, who seem to conceive the business of satire to be mockery of everything.
At one happy period of its career Punch set itself a very high artistic standard. The paper intended to avail itself of the services of whatever artistic genius it could attach to itself by attractive emoluments. It then pieced out its satiric business among its distinguished staff, above everything else artists, perhaps not one of them animated with that fervour of attack which is the genius of foreign caricature. These men, by their several temperaments, founded the characteristics and traditions of Punch. They were perfectly friendly, not at all anxious to make themselves unpleasant; and the traditions of Punch remain the same to this day. It would always rather laugh with people than against them.
Du Maurier's novels are a proof of what an illustrator he was by nature; he seemed to conceive matter and illustration together. It would be strange to read either of his novels without their drawings. Probably his tales would have failed of their immediate success but for the wealth of admirable illustration which make them unique among novels. The illustrations increase perceptibly the appeal of the text. The draughtsmanship is so well identified with its purpose, that we think of it always in connection with a "page." In these days, when art editors think that any picture reduced to size will make an "illustration," it is pleasant to take down our old Punches. Qualities of impressionism which are everything in a picture hanging on a wall to be seen across the breakfast table, will seldom be made suitable for book-embellishment simply by process of reduction.
Du Maurier established a more intimate relationship with the public who admired his drawings than any humorous artist has. In America, where for many years the opinion of English Society seems to have been formed from his drawings, the unseen author of them was thought of quite affectionately. The immediate success of his novels there took its rise from this fact. The personal letters which he received from America with the success of Trilby ran into many hundreds. There must have been something to account for all this—some curious flavour in everything he did, just one of those secret influences which so often put the technical rules of criticism out of court in dealing with an artist's work.
He succeeded to Leech in the Society subjects, but he himself has not had a successor in these themes. No one has been able to enter the same field as worthily, for instance, as Mr. Raven-Hill entered a field once worked by Keene. There have been better draughtsmen—from the photographic point of view—than du Maurier attempting to fill his place. But "a place" on a newspaper can only be filled by a personality. It is artistic personality that has been wanting in recent years in Punch on the side of the fashionable satire which Leech and du Maurier successively had made their own.
We have pointed out that his work in Punch was at its best when he was going most into Society. That is characteristic of all artists—that their inspiration flames or dies in proportion to the immediacy of their contact with actuality. Having chosen the world for his theme, he could make nothing of it when he ceased to go out. In his earlier and middle period, living in evening-clothes, he drew with an inexhaustible impulse. When he thought he had his "world" by heart and could reconstruct with the aid of some obliging friends who consented to pose, he gave us pleasant pictures of his friends posing, but the great record he had put together in the sixties, seventies, the early eighties of the London of his time was at an end. Then it was that he repeated his formulæ, his "Things one would have expressed otherwise," and others of like series without introducing any freshness of situation, carrying out the brief dialogues with figures in which there was little variation of character—as little variation as there is in the same model employed on two different days. All this has been touched upon in this book, but we must insist upon it, for the memory of the real du Maurier has nothing so much to fear as our memory of du Maurier when he was, as an artist, not quite himself.
We hope we have performed the funeral of the less deserving side of his work, thereby releasing the immortal part of it to the fuller recognition due to it from connoisseurs.
All du Maurier's drawings in his best period are distinguished by the sharpness of contrast between black and white in them. Ruskin, whilst approving in his Art of England of du Maurier's use of black to indicate colour, thought he carried the black and white contrast to chess-board pattern excess. In later years, submitting to the influence of Keene's method, in which black is always used to secure effects of tone instead of colour, du Maurier's style underwent a transformation which, from the purely artistic point of view, was not to its advantage. Keene's method was justified in his extreme sensitiveness to what painters define as "values"—the relation in tone of one surface to another. This particular kind of sensitiveness was not characteristic of du Maurier's vision, nor was a style so dependent upon subtlety of the kind suited to express his mind. And here it is interesting to emphasise the connection which is so often overlooked between temperament and style. In the observation of human character itself du Maurier always perceived the broad and distinctive features; the broad ones of type rather than the subtle ones of individuals; things for him were either black or white, beautiful or ugly. 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. He doesn't think much of people who, through lack either of physical or moral stature, can enter the drawing-room unperceived. He is not sympathetic to neutral characters. It was because the Victorians cultivated magnificence that his somewhat rhetorical art described them with such reality. His pictures were a mirror to the age. Keene was like Shakespeare—the types he drew might change in costume with the times, but would reappear in every generation. But du Maurier only drew Victorians. And thus his art has that vivid local colour which is the vital characteristic of effective satire.
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. The romance of the Victorians was a last glow in the sky. We might even go as far as to read an occult significance into the art of Turner, the great painter of the sunset. We nowadays go back to du Maurier's pictures, where the after-glow remains, and they seem separated from us by something thicker than time, as if a great wall had been built up between the age of the twopenny tube and that of the carriage-and-pair. And lest there should remain a link between them, over which we might be sentimental, the face of Buckingham Palace is to be despoiled, the long grey outline, characteristic of English monarchy in its reticence and repose, is, we imagine, to give place to something in the image of a prosperous Insurance Office.
Already du Maurier's art is very precious; the environment of the people whom he depicted is everywhere being smashed up. Our curiosity is sharpened for everything that remains to reflect those people to us. Our debt to the mirror of du Maurier's art increases every hour.