George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians

by T. Martin Wood

Du Maurier's literary contributions to Punch were bound up in the volume A Legend of Camelot, &c., issued from the Punch office in 1898. Besides the title-piece, a satire of some length upon the mediævalism of the pre-Raphaelites, the book contains shorter pieces—"Flirts in Hades," "Poor Pussy's Nightmare," "The Fool's Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques," "L'Onglay à Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock from some felicitous twist at the end of a line. Thus it is almost impossible to quote from them. The humour rests in each case with the whole of the skit; and in the case of one of the best of the whole series, "A Love-Agony," a poem for a picture by Maudle, given, there must be understanding on the reader's part, of the art "cult" against which it is directed.

"The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts" is du Maurier's first attempt at a work of fiction. It is significant that in style it has the lightness of touch that would be expected from the disciple of Thackeray, and that afterwards won by its "taking" character the hearts of the readers of Trilby. It is the story of a painter, his wife and their twin children. It opens with a picture of them at home, Jack Spratt dreaming, even in those days, of Post-Impressionism, showing that du Maurier was a prophet, "dreaming of the ante-pre-Raphaelite school. In the depths of his bliss a feeling of discouragement would steal over him as he thought of those immortal works, showing thereby that he was a true artist, ever striving after the light. He little dreamt in his modesty that, young and inexperienced though he might be, his pictures were even quainter than theirs; for not only could he already draw, colour, compose, and put into perspective quite as badly as they did, but he had over them the advantage of a real lay figure to copy, whereas they had to content themselves with the living model."

"The amusements of this happy pair were the simplest, healthiest, and most delightful kind; they never went to the play, nor to balls or dances, which they thought immodest—(indeed they were not even asked)—nor read such things as novels, magazines, or the newspaper; nor visited exhibitions of modern art, which they held in contempt, as they did all things modern; ... and they were devoted to music, not that of the present day, which they despised, nor that of the future, of which they had never heard; nor English music, which was not old enough." Of their friends, "They were few, but true and trusty, with remarkably fine heads for a painter ... their deportment grave, sad and very strange; for the death of the early Italian masters still weighed on their soul with all the force of some recent domestic bereavement. They looked on themselves and each other and the Jack Spratts, and were looked upon by the Jack Spratts in return as the sole incarnation on this degenerate earth of all such as had still managed to survive there; and so they were always telling each other and everyone else they met. And no wonder, for they were marvellously accomplished; being each of them painter, sculptor, architect, poet, critic and engraver, all in one; and all this without ever having learnt...."

"In their hours of sickness alone the Spratts were as other people, and sent immediately for the nearest medical practitioner (or leech, as they preferred to call him); their only sickness to speak of had arisen from once feasting mediaevally on an old roast peacock, in company with the trusty friends, who had also been taken very bad on that occasion; and they ever afterwards avoided that dish, but at their banquets would have the peacock's head and what was left of its tail tacked on to some more digestible bird...."

"As staunch Radicals, they hated the aristocracy, whose very existence they ignored; shunned the professional class, which they scorned, on account of its scientific and utilitarian tendency; and loathed the middle class, from which they had sprung, because it was Philistine; and although they professed to deeply honour the working man, they very wisely managed to see as little of him as they possibly could."

Owing to the sudden success of a picture—which scandalised his trusty friends—and the beauty of his wife, the model for the picture, Jack woke up one morning and found himself famous. They were lionised. Mrs. Spratt's deep-rooted dislike to the female dress of the present day did not last much longer than her life-long prejudice against the aristocracy; she discarded the mediæval garments she had hitherto worn with such disdain for the eccentricities of modern fashion, and put herself into the hands of the best dressmaker in town. And thus snubbing, and being snubbed, dressing and dancing and feasting and flirting, did she soar higher and higher in her butterfly career. The denouement comes when they are cut out by "Ye rising Minnows"—an American sculptor—one Pygmalion F. Minnow—whose wife was twice as beautiful as Mrs. Spratt.

Another shorter prose skit of du Maurier's which is included in the same book satirises the splendid sort of hero, who conceals beneath a mask of indifference the power to do anything on earth better than anybody else.

These prose skits show the neat irony that Punch was willing to encourage by attaching du Maurier to the literary, as well as to the artistic, staff. But we think it may be said that du Maurier hadn't the heart to go on with a class of writing in which his great tendency to sentimentalise would have been out of place.

§ 7

In 1890 du Maurier contributed two papers to the Art Journal entitled "The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist's Point of View." It was an attempt to write down the ideas that had controlled him in book illustration. The artist begins the article by protesting that of all subjects in the world it is the one upon which he has the least and fewest ideas, and that such ideas as he has consist principally of his admiration for illustrations by others. He separates readers into two classes—those who visualise what they read with the mind's eye so satisfactorily that they want the help of no pictures, and those—the greater number, he thinks—who do not possess this gift, to whom to have the author's conceptions embodied for them in a concrete form is a boon. The little figures in the picture are a mild substitute for the actors at the footlights. The arrested gesture, the expression of face, the character and costume, may be as true to nature and life as the best actor can make them. His test of a good illustrator is that the illustrations continue to haunt the memory when the letterpress is forgotten. He cites Menzel as the highest example of such performance. He next refers to the illustrated volume of Poems by Tennyson in 1860, for which Millais and Rossetti and others designed small woodcuts, the publishing of which, he says, made an epoch in English book illustration, importing a new element to which he finds it difficult to give a name. "I still adore," he says, "the lovely, wild, irresponsible moon-face of Oriana, with a gigantic mailed archer kneeling at her feet in the yew-wood, and stringing his fatal bow; the strange beautiful figure of the Lady of Shalott, when the curse comes over her, and her splendid hair is floating wide, like the magic web; the warm embrace of Amy and her cousin (when their spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips), and the dear little symmetrical wavelets beyond; the queen sucking the poison out of her husband's arm; the exquisite bride at the end of the Talking Oak; the sweet little picture of Emma Morland and Edward Grey, so natural and so modern, with the trousers treated in quite the proper spirit; the chaste Sir Galahad, slaking his thirst with holy water, amid all the mystic surroundings; and the delightfully incomprehensible pictures to the Palace of Art, that gave one a weird sense of comfort, like the word 'Mesopotamia,' without one's knowing why."