"MY PRETTY WOMAN."
(Drawn by George du Maurier.)
The admirable setting in which Mr. du Maurier frames his series of jokes is testimony to his genius. He follows Leech's plan of such series ("Servantgalism," "The Rising Generation," etc.), but the quality of the thought and its presentation is as much more elaborate than Leech's as his method of draughtsmanship is more complicated. These series or formulæ, in their chief heads and subtle variations, display the quality of his mind. If you turn to the volumes for 1888 (XCIV. and XCV.) you will find examples of no fewer than nine of them: (1) Things one would rather have left unsaid; (2) Things one would rather have expressed differently; (3) Social Agonies; (4) Feline Amenities; (5) Our Imbeciles; (6) Typical Modern Developments; (7) Studies in Evolution; (8) Nincompoopiana; and (9) What our Artist has to put up with;—the last-named, however, a vein which Keene began to work as early as 1854.
His talent, too, in devising the legends, or "cackle," for the drawings is uniformly happy, unsurpassed by any man who ever wrote for Punch. As Mr. Anstey says, he has brought the art of précis-writing to perfection. His legends are not always so concise as Leech's, but for truth of expression, felicitous colloquialism, and above all, for foreign accent, he is unapproached. I go farther, and say that he is the first man who ever put truthfully upon paper, and properly differentiated, the "broken English" and slangy mispronunciations of German, French, and Semite, to say nothing of his Cockney; indeed, his studies in this direction prove him, besides an admirable physiologist pour rire and a pungent though courteous satirist, an inimitable comparative-"broken"-philologist.
True to his rôle of "Romantic Tenor," Mr. du Maurier has endowed Punch with the greater part of the grace and beauty which have done so much to make the paper what it is. "In his social subjects," says a distinguished critic,[60] "Mr. du Maurier, though somewhat mannered and fond of a single type of face and figure, has carried the ironical genre, received by Leech from Gavarni and Charlet, to the highest point of elegance it has attained." He is too fond of the beautiful, sighs Mr. James; he sees everything en beau, and Mistress and Maid with him are a good deal of Juno and Hebe. No doubt his grace often militates against his fun, but Mr. du Maurier, as has already been suggested, is only by accident a professional funny man. Besides, when he wishes to be merely funny, he passes Beauty by as if he were not the most devoted of her adorers, as you may see in one of the best of all his drawings in Punch, in which a typically selfish master of the house orders up the cook into the breakfast-room, complaining that he cannot eat the bacon which he has just served; his wife's, he says, is the worst he ever saw—and his own is nearly as bad!
Even more than his lovely child (often drawn from his little grandson), his superb youth, and his splendid gentleman, Mr. du Maurier's pretty woman is the pedestal upon which he has erected his reputation—at least, so far as Punch is concerned. His pretty woman, he declares, is the granddaughter of Leech's, and he beseeches the public to love her, paternally at least as he does, "for her grandmother's sake."
PENCIL STUDY FOR "PUNCH" PICTURE.
(By George du Maurier.)