To those who have not yet grasped the fact (cried aloud in the wilderness by Mr. Kipling) that our age is as romantic as any other if we only know how to regard matters, the fact will probably come as something of a surprise that the last decade of the nineteenth century has as surely its crop of “suppressed plates,” as have those ages which were, we choose to flatter ourselves, more brutal than our own. Less unmannerly in some respects doubtless we tend to become, and that perhaps is the very reason (paradoxical though it may sound) why we do not have to search in vain for “modern instances.” For now that Mrs. Grundy is sharper-eyed than she was (not­with­stand­ing her age), and the libel laws are more closely knit by precedents, slips which would have been treated as passing peccadilloes by our less squeamish forebears rise to the dignity of “copy” for the pressman, and form staple conversation for the insatiate tea-table.

And when we mention the late most five-o’clock and kind-hearted of artists, Mr. du Maurier, and {163} the still living most dainty limner of hoops and patches, Mr. Hugh Thomson, as the providers of century-end “cancelled illus­tra­tions,” we may be sure that the details will not be very scandalous, nor the outrages very shocking.

Not but that I was forced to go somewhat warily when originally recording the famous incident of du Maurier and the peccant illus­tra­tion of the “Two Apprentices” in Trilby, for was I not thereby involving myself with another, and greater, artist (very much alive indeed!), whose pen was only not mightier than his pencil because the latter was unsurpassable, but who might in turn pillory me in his gallery of artfully constructed Enemies?

It was indeed a topsy-turvy world which found the “Butterfly,” which is popularly supposed to end its life wriggling upon the pin of the “soaring human boy,” revenging itself upon humanity with epigrams that “stick for ever.”

Sad to relate, Whistler could never be brought to see du Maurier’s rather caustic “retaliation,” particulars of which are given below, in its proper proportions. Indeed, when I asked him to allow me to reproduce, as a pictorial curiosity, the {164} suppressed print of the “Two Apprentices,” which only the owners of Trilby, as it appeared in serial form, are now destined to possess, he informed me in the politest manner possible that my doing so would involve me in an expensive and uncomfortable correspondence with his solicitors. And what could not be done then cannot be done now, for reasons into which I need not enter. Nevertheless, to treat seriously a hyperbolical and exaggerated caricature as anything more than a legitimate response to a not altogether kindly sarcasm on the part of Mr. Whistler himself, appears to me now, as it appeared to me then, well-nigh incredible. No one looked upon “Joe Sibley” as a true likeness, either pictorially or verbally. It was written and read as a joke, part true, but mostly false, and so would have stood had it not been given undue importance by the correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette. As a result, in book form “Joe Sibley” is wanting in that delightful gallery which contains “Durier,” Pygmalion to Trilby’s Galatea—a Galatea whose marble heart would never beat for him; “Vincent,” the great American oculist, “whose daughters are {165} so beautiful and accomplished that they spend their autumn holiday in refusing the matrimonial offers of the British aristocracy”; “The Greek,” who was christened Poluphoisboiospaleapologos Petrilopetrolicoconose “because his real name was thought much too long”; “Carnegie,” who “is now only a rural dean, and speaks the worst French I know, and speaks it wherever and whenever he can”; “Antony, the Swiss” (substituted for “Joe Sibley”); “Lorrimer,” who was so thoroughgoing in his worship of the immortals, Veronese, Tintoret and Co., and was “so persistent in voicing it, that he made them quite unpopular in the Place St. Anatole des Arts”; not to speak of “Dodor” and “l’Zouzou,” who were dis­tin­guished for being “les plus mauvais garniments of their respective regiments,” and the rest of Trilby’s delightful adorers. Why, it seems to me that to have obtained a niche in that pillory (forgive the mixing of metaphors), and to see the fun of a little exaggerated banter, and perchance learn a little lesson from it, would not be so very bad a fate after all. But I suppose it all depends on the point of view. {166}

As I say, I have by me a delightfully ironic missive from the late president of the Society of the Butterfly himself, acknowledging “the exceedingly amiable and flattering form of the playful request” contained in my letter, with a hint at the end that lawyers might look upon any re­pro­duc­tion of the forbidden matter as less than tolerable.

Alas! that it is so, and all I can do is to refer my readers to the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette for May 15 and 25, 1894, in which appeared Whistler’s two letters, and quote here the interview with du Maurier upon the matter. They form a curious commentary upon the “Gentle Art of Losing—Friends.”

Extract from Pall Mall Gazette, May 19, 1894.[*]

MR. WHISTLER AND MR. DU MAURIER THE “PUNCH” ARTIST’S ATTITUDE

Mr. George du Maurier, “hidden in Hampstead” as Mr. Whist­ler put it in his let­ter to us a day or two ago, was dis­covered by a Pall Mall Gazette reporter without the aid of any ex­ploring party yes­ter­day, when that rep­re­sen­ta­tive called to see what the famous Punch artist had to say in reply to Mr. Whistler. Mr. du Maurier was not disposed at first to vouchsafe any answer. “If a bargee insults one {167} in the street,” he said, “one can only pass on. One cannot stop and argue it out.” But on second thoughts Mr. du Maurier added a few words. “I should,” he said, “have avoided all reference to Mr. Whistler, or anything which could have been construed into reference to him, if I had imagined it would have pained him. I should have written privately to him to say so, if his letter had been less violent and less brutal. Certainly, in the character of Sibley, in my serial story Trilby I have drawn certain lines with Mr. Whistler in my mind. I thought that the reference to those matters would have recalled some of the good times we used to have in Paris in the old days. I thought that both with Mr. Whistler and with other ac­quain­tances I have similarly treated, pleasurable re­col­lec­tions would have been awakened. But he has taken the matter so terribly seriously. It is so unlike him.

[*] By kind permission of the Proprietor.

“You know of no reason why he should not have taken it all good-naturedly?”—“No. I thought it might have drawn from him something funny, something droll, to which I could have replied in kind. But, of course, a letter like his puts a reply out of the question. I think he must have been quite out of sorts to have allowed himself to get so angered.” “I believe Mr. Whistler has himself said things which the objects of them have not particularly relished!” “Why, he has gone about all his life in England making unkind remarks and publishing them. Here is a little book of his, The Gentle Art of making Enemies, and I am one of his victims. It is not very terrible what he says. It is rather droll. Listen! ‘Mr. du Maurier and Mr. Wilde, happening to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was {168} holding his first exhibition of Venice jottings, the latter brought the two face to face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?”’ The obvious retort to that on my part would have been that if he did not take care I would invent him, but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out. This is really too small a matter to refer to; but the explanation of this bit of drollery of Mr. Whistler’s is that it suggested that I was unknown until I began to draw Postlethwaite, the æsthetic character, out of whom I got some fun. Postlethwaite was said to be Mr. Oscar Wilde, but the character was founded, not on one person at all, but a whole school. As a matter of fact, I had been drawing for Punch twenty years before the invention of Postlethwaite. However, that was Mr. Whistler’s little joke, and one would have thought that if he made jokes about me, he might have expected me to play the same game upon him without anticipating that I should hurt his feelings. Then Mr. Whistler implies that I am a foul friend, stating that I have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy. I am neither his friend nor his enemy. I am a great admirer of his genius and his wit; but I cannot say that I could call myself his friend for thirty years past. We were intimate in the old days, but that is all. No, his whole letter is incomprehensible to me. Of course, he has been embittered through life, by reason of his genius not being recognised at its full value by the wide public, and it certainly has not. This cir­cum­stance, and possibly illness, may account for the leave he has taken of good manners. He talks of my pent-up envy and malice. I must ask you to believe that I am not {169} such a beast as that. I have no occasion either for malice or for envy, and, as I say, I should never have written even what I have, had I imagined it would give Mr. Whistler pain.”

“Do you contemplate deleting the character of Sibley when you publish in volume form?” “If I had a word or sign of regret from Mr. Whistler for the savage things he says in his letter I might consider that. I did what I did in a playful spirit of retaliation for this little gibe about me in his book. A man so sensitive as Mr. Whistler now seems to be should beware how he goes about joking of others. I had no idea of taking any notice of Mr. Whistler’s letter, but since you have come and asked me I say that if I had known it would have given pain and brought such a torrent of abuse upon me, I should have denied myself the little luxury of the playful retaliation in which I indulged.”[30]

Let me then here put it on record that Trilby in book form is not only innocent of “Joe Sibley” and the “cut” of the “Two Apprentices” but is in other respects far inferior to its serial issue. The illus­tra­tions have been greatly reduced, and in the process have lost much of their charm. There was, however, a large-paper edition of the novel published in 1895, containing the same number of {170} illus­tra­tions as the small-paper, together with “facsimiles of the pencil studies.” This is the most desirable edition outside Harper’s. The ideal form is, of course, the serial issue extracted from the Magazine and bound up, “Joe Sibley,” the suppressed “cut” and all.

This, then, is all that must be said about the “suppressed plate,” which is so rigidly put under hatches that it must not even be paraded, on this occasion only, with its fellows. “When the sleeper wakes,” perchance, and copyright is out, a cheap edition of this present volume, with the suppressed block inserted, will be published, and our children’s children will marvel.[31]