Writing his mind on the subject of his delightful creation at my own request,[61] he says:—
"I do hope the reader does not dislike her—that is, if he knows her. I am so fond of her myself, or, rather, so fond of what I want her to be. She is my pièce de résistance, and I have often heard her commended, and the praise of her has sounded sweet in mine ears, and gone straight to my heart, for she has become to me as a daughter. She is rather tall, I admit, and a trifle stiff; but English women are tall and stiff just now; and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so difficult, with a mere stroke in black ink, to indicate the enchanting little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth-corners, causing the cheeks to make a smile—and without them the smile is incomplete—merely a grin. And as for height, I have often begun by drawing the dear creature little, and found that by one sweep of the pen (adding a few inches to the bottom of her skirt) I have improved her so much that it has been impossible to resist the temptation—the thing is so easy, and the result so satisfying and immediate."
Nowadays, he has declared, girls are no longer pretty—they are beautiful; and as Mr. Galton, the anthropometrical expert, himself admits, they, even more than the rest of mankind, have certainly grown taller. The artist, as we have seen, invented the tall woman; the Psyches of our fathers' days have become the Venuses and Junos of these; and more than one writer has gravely sought to fix the responsibility, or the credit, on Mr. du Maurier and his pencil. Scientific investigation has taught us that the English girl tops her foreign sisters, though her average weight is two pounds less than that of the fair American; and there is little doubt that if she does not absolutely adapt her height to the artist's sense of beauty and power of inspiration, she has at least to thank him for making it fashionable. The truth of the matter is that Mr. du Maurier has always been a close observer; and just as his drawings have always been in the fashion in point of dress through his careful watching of the changing wardrobe of his wife and daughters, so was he the first to record the increasing stature of English girls, even while Leech was still drawing them as he had known them—short and buxom and "plump little dumplings"—never recognising that they had been deposed by Fashion and improved by Nature. But the race changed, and Punch changed with them. Venus was Venus once more, and Mr. du Maurier was her Prophet.
"And the old ladies!" proceeds Mr. du Maurier; "it is such a pleasure to draw them, and do one's best. To think of all the charming old ladies one has known, and (according to one's letterpress) to select the chin of one, the white curls of another, the mouth and nose of a third, and then to make a subtle arrangement in sweet sympathetic wrinkles—too often to be subtly disarranged by the engraver and the printer!
"Then we get to the male characters, and there it is comparatively plain sailing; and would be pleasant sailing enough but for the hideousness of certain portions of the modern male attire. However new, however good the tailor, however comely the leg beneath, the Trouser is the one heart-breaking object to the conscientious but æsthetically-minded draughtsman on wood! It ignores the knee, and falls on the boot in a shape that has no reference to the ankle whatever—a shape of its own—and yet the ankle is the foundation of everything!
"Next in order of demerit and impossibility comes the chimney-pot hat, which is not lacking in character, but is ugly and ridiculous. Its one redeeming feature is the difficulty it presents to the draughtsman. It is mathematical, geometrical, with every curve known to science, as hard to represent correctly as a boat or a fiddle—more so; and the delight of successful achievement is proportionately great. Linley Sambourne alone, who was originally trained as an engineer, has been able to grapple with the chimney-pot hat; Walker all but succeeded by the sheer force of his heaven-born genius."
But, in spite of all this beauty, surely his misrepresentation of that divinity—the American Girl—is beyond all hope of pardon, beyond contrition, beyond all penance. He does full justice to her refined and splendid loveliness and her magnificent proportions; but he seems to regard her, if one may say so, as a sort of Kensington-Town-Hall-Subscription-Dance young lady, a little more outrée and free and slangy and vulgar. She guesses in the ballroom that English partners don't "bunch" (give bouquets); when invited to go in to supper she avers, not without a sense of inward satisfaction, that she is "pretty crowded already;" she has a deep though entirely a tourist's interest in English institutions, ruins, and celebrities; she has little reverence else for what is in the heavens above or the earth beneath; and she dearly loves a lord—or she would, if by any honourable means she can obtain the chance. His American girls, too, all come from one and the same place; they are all born from one and the same mother; their natural cleverness and unnatural ignorance are compounded in the same proportions, and, altogether, they are the most charming and delightful libels on American young-womanhood that well could be. But is his representation of the American girl any less pleasant than the common, home-made American view of an English gentleman—at least, of an English "swell"? Not at all. On the contrary, she is, as I said before, a divinity.
More than once Mr. du Maurier has broken away from his light comedy rôle and, besides giving vent to his fantastic power in his wonderful "Night-mares," has given us something with serious thought, and, now and again, with tragedy in it—has offered us, indeed, a taste of the deepest poetic quality that he has shown in his novels of "Peter Ibbetson" and "Trilby." You may see a touch of it in Tenniel's great cartoon at the outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany, in which the great Napoleon stands warningly in the path of the infatuated Emperor; that was du Maurier's suggestion. You may see a touch of it in the page drawing of "Old Nickotin Stealing Away the Brains of His Devotees" (1868), in which a circle of strange men, whose own heads are their pipe-bowls, smoke away their brains through long tubes that work well into the composition, while, in the foreground, one of the poor foolish wretches drops, just as a last little curling puff rises from his smoked-out skull. There were more of such compositions before 1880, at the time when Mr. du Maurier was still making full-page drawings in Punch. But, after all, it is not in Punch, but rather in the "Cornhill Magazine" and "Once a Week," in "Esmond," and other works—particularly in the "Illustrated Magazine"—that his full power in serious work must be sought.
Professor Ruskin, after declaring that the "terrific force" of Mr. du Maurier's satire of character in face and figure consists in the absence of caricature, describes as "cruelly true" the design "representing the London mechanic with his family when Mr. Todeson is asked to amuse 'the dear creatures' at Lady Clara's garden tea;" and proclaims the artist more exemplary than either John Leech or John Tenniel ("the real founders of Punch, and by far the greatest of its illustrators both in force of art and range of thought") "in the precision of the use of his means, and the subtle boldness to which he has educated the interpreter of his design."[62] In point of fact, the engraver has had to "interpret" Mr. du Maurier's drawings far less than those of many of his colleagues, for his line is too delicate, sympathetic, and precise to leave room for anything but the strictest possible facsimile. This was quite as true in the old days when he drew upon the block, as in later times, when, yielding to the stern demands of failing eyesight—which, for a period, forced him to suspend work altogether—he drew with the pen upon paper several times larger than the ultimate reduction effected by means of photography. It is curious in tracing his hand through Punch to see how his work gradually strengthened; how his early vigour of subject and activity of mind, expressed in strong black-and-white, gave way to a daintier touch when the grace and prettiness of his dramatis personæ came to demand greater refinement of the drawn line; and how this again constantly widened out into a broader method, under the inspiration of Charles Keene. And yet from first to last, in the smallest sketch as in the most elaborate picture, his hand is unmistakable.
In common with Keene and others, Mr. du Maurier has suffered from time to time from printers' errors. One of the most curious, perhaps, is that in which three little boys are shown in a drawing playing upon a sofa, evidently very much in the way of their elder sister, who is receiving a visit from an admirer. The sister asks her brothers with pardonable point if they will not go and play downstairs. No, the oldest replies, Mamma has sent them up "to play forfeits." The joke, utterly pointless as printed, becomes intelligible when it is explained that "forfeits" is an error for "propriety." Many of the artist's jokes, as already explained, have come from various friends; indeed, in this case, they are probably less often manufactured than in that of others. All the same, it may be of interest to record that the oft-quoted joke of the æsthetic young couple who agreed that they must "live up to" their blue and white tea-pot, was not "made up," but was spoken in downright, imbecile earnest.