George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians

by T. Martin Wood

§ 9

During the sixties and seventies the artist illustrated many works of fiction. The most notable instance was Thackeray's Esmond in 1868—a work which he had long wished to be chosen to illustrate.

Du Maurier had all his life an intense admiration for Thackeray. He inherited none of Thackeray's bitterness, but upon every other ground as an author, at least, he descends from Thackeray, notably in the studied colloquialism of his style when writing, and in a general friendliness to the Philistine. And in his drawings in Punch his satire is aimed in the same direction as Thackeray's always was. Like Thackeray, he was most at home on the plane where a social art, a delicate art of life is able to flourish. Of the concealed romanticist in du Maurier we have more than once already spoken. A Romanticist always turns to the past. Thackeray, in his lectures, also in the house he built for himself, and in a proposed but never finished history, went back into the past at least as far as Queen Anne's reign. Esmond, also of Queen Anne's reign, was the expression of a feature of Thackeray's temperament which never makes its full appearance in any other of his fictions. We believe that it was his own favourite among his works. But Thackeray did not succeed in expressing the whole of himself in the romantic vein; perhaps because he did not cultivate it from the start like Scott and Dumas. He was able to put more of himself into Vanity Fair. To think of Thackeray is to think first of Vanity Fair. From the unerring—because instinctive—judgment of the world this book received recognition as his masterpiece.

Du Maurier had not so much of the genuine flair for the eighteenth century as Thackeray. At heart he was much more in sympathy with the pre-Raphaelites and the love of early romance, whatever his pretence to the contrary in his satire, A Legend of Camelot. But there was no illustrator of his time with a greater gift for the romantic novel of any period; and inevitably, he became, in due course, the illustrator of Esmond.

It is impossible to return to the past except by the path of poetry. It was possible to du Maurier in his illustrations to Esmond, because he was a poet. He used the effect of fading light in the sky seen through old leaded windows, and all the resources of poetic effect with a poet's and not an actor-manager's inspiration, wrapping the tale in the glamour in which Thackeray conceived it.

In 1865 du Maurier contributed a full page illustration and two vignettes to Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in parts by Cassell. Other signed illustrations are by G.H. Thomas, John Gilbert, J.D. Watson, A.B. Houghton, W. Small, A. Parquier, R. Barnes, M.E. Edwards, and T. Morten. No book can be imagined which would afford the essential nature of his art less opportunity of showing itself than this one. He was no good at horrors, though his resourcefulness in the manifestation of emotional light and shadow was encouraged by the character of the full-page illustration which he had to supply. A signed full page appears in Part XVI., page 541. It is a scene in which the four martyrs, Bland, Frankesh, Sheterden, and Middleton, condemned by the Bishop of Dover, 25th June 1555, are shown being burned at the stakes. One of the martyrs certainly looks intensely smug with his hands folded as if he were at grace before a favourite dinner. Yes, du Maurier certainly failed to attain quite to the heights of the horror of this book.

Illustration for "The Story of a Feather" 1867.

The following year we have from the artist's pencil illustrations to a book of the heroine of which he was so fond that he named his own daughter after her. That book was Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, "an everyday story," as it is called in its sub-title. For this story du Maurier's art was much more fitted than for any other. In it, certainly, and not in Foxe's book, we should expect his temperament to reveal itself—and we are not disappointed. It is here that du Maurier is at his best. His illustrations have a daintiness in this tale which they have nowhere else. A sign of the presence of fine art is the accommodation of style to theme. The illustrations had been made for this book when it appeared serially in the Cornhill, and were afterwards published in the issue in two volumes. There is a picture at the beginning of the second volume called "The Burning Gorse," in which du Maurier makes an imaginative appeal through landscape almost worthy of Keene.

The artist is again at his best in the work of illustrating fiction in the following year in Douglas Jerrold's Story of a Feather. It is the same refinement of technique that is evident as in Mrs. Gaskell's tale. One of du Maurier's greatest characteristics was charm. One is forced into ringing changes upon the word in the description of his work. But charm it is, more than ever, that characterises his illustrations to The Story of a Feather. The initial letters in this book afford him a succession of opportunities for displaying that inventive genius which is evident wherever he turns to the province of pure fancy. It was not for nothing apparently that he was the son of an inventor.