II.
If I venture to say that sentimentality is the dominant of the Du Maurier music, it is because his art has made sentimentality beautiful; I had almost said real, and I am ready to say different from what it was before. It is a very manly sentimentality; we need not be ashamed of sharing it; one should rather be ashamed of disowning its emotions. It is in its sweetness, as well as its manliness, that I find the chief analogy between Du Maurier's literature and his art. In all the long course of his dealing with the life of English society, I can think of but two or three instances of ungentleness. The humor which shone upon every rank, and every variety of character, never abashed the lowly, never insulted women, never betrayed the trust which reposed in its traditions of decency and generosity. If we think of any other caricaturist's art, how bitter it is apt to be, how brutal, how base! The cruelties that often pass for wit, even in the best of our own society satires, never tempted him to their ignoble exploitation; and as for the filthy drolleries of French wit, forever amusing itself with one commandment, how far they all are from him! His pictures are full of the dearest children, lovely young girls, honest young fellows; snobs who are as compassionable as they are despicable, bores who have their reason for being, hypocrites who are not beyond redemption. It is in his tolerance, his final pity of all life, that Du Maurier takes his place with the great talents; and it is in his sympathy for weakness, for the abased and outcast, that he classes himself with the foremost novelists of the age, not one of whom is recreant to the high office of teaching by parable that we may not profitably despise one another. Not even Svengali was beyond the pale of his mercy, and how well within it some other sorts of sinners were, the grief of very respectable people testified.
I will own myself that I like heroes and heroines to be born in wedlock when they conveniently can, and to keep true to it; but if an author wishes to suppose them otherwise I cannot proscribe them except for subsequent misbehavior in his hands. The trouble with Trilby was not that she was what she was imagined, but that finally the world could not imaginably act with regard to her as the author feigned. Such as she are to be forgiven, when they sin no more; not exalted and bowed down to by all manner of elect personages. But I fancy Du Maurier did not mean her to be an example. She had to be done something with, and after all she had suffered, it was not in the heart of poetic justice to deny her a little moriturary triumph.
Du Maurier was not a censor of morals, but of manners, which indeed are or ought to be the flower of morals, but not their root, and his deflections from the straight line in the destiny of his creations must not be too seriously regarded. I take it that the very highest fiction is that which treats itself as fact, and never once allows itself to be otherwise. This is the kind that the reader may well hold to the strictest accountability in all respects. But there is another kind capable of expressing an engaging beauty, and bewitchingly portraying many phases of life, which comes smiling to you or (in vulgar keeping) nudging you, and asking you to a game of make-believe. I do not object to that kind either, but I should not judge it on such high grounds as the other. I think it reached its perfect effect in Du Maurier's hands, and that this novelist, who wrote no fiction till nigh sixty, is the greatest master in that sort who ever lived, and I do not forget either Sterne or Thackeray when I say so.