George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians

by T. Martin Wood

But if his business is not with the causes which contributed to the character of English Society in his time, it is with their effects. No satirist has ever put more highly representative figures on to his stage. They are so highly representative because they conform so strictly to type. He puts a valuation upon everyone whom he introduces on his stage. He shows exactly the regard in which we are to hold them and their profession. And it is interesting, in the light of the favour with which he always treated the typical savant, to hear from his son that he was always as much interested in what was being accomplished in science as in anything else in the world. We must conclude scientists were first in his estimation as men, from the pains he was at to give them the appearance of distinction in his pictures. Then he had much regard for Generals, great Admirals, and other magnificent specimens, the Adonis, for instance, that figures almost as often, and nearly always in company with, his charming woman. This gentleman is difficult to describe. He seems too languid even for the profession of man-about-town, but his clothes are such that one would think their irreproachability could only be maintained by a life of dedication to them. Did he ever exist? Du Maurier is very subtle here. He fully appreciated the great aim of the public-school-trained man in his own time—the elaborate care with which an officer studied to conceal an enthusiasm for the profession of arms, the great air of indolence with which over-work was concealed in the other fashionable professions. As a matter of fact these beautiful priests in the temple of "good form" were splendid stoics. They would lay it down that as long as correctness of attitude was maintained nothing mattered.

The artist seems to share many of the prejudices of the older aristocrats. He makes his Jews too Jewish. He believes that they produce great artists, and as if this wasn't enough, he still holds them at arm's length. We have in his art not only the record of social innovations, but a picture of the aristocrats before the barbarian invasion. As a picture of them then his art has now its value. And yet he was not quite an aristocrat in temperament, which is a little different from being one by birth. He would have been less tolerant of the Philistines if he had been, and more Bohemian too. He made his great excursions into Bohemia, but he reached it always by a journey through the suburbs. His love of glamour and enchantment was aristocratic, but he did not keep it to the end. He loses it in later drawings. His satire, too, grows less pointed after the eighties, with an equivalent decline in the art by which it is conveyed. The poetic vein that once distinguished him from the Society he depicted tended also to disappear, as he succumbed to a process of absorption into a Society which he had once been able to observe with the freshness of a stranger. It is familiarity that blunts our sense of beauty. It is in its last phase in Punch that his drawing loses the poetry that characterised it in the seventies and eighties, and which gave his satire then such a potent stealthy influence over those for whom it was intended.

Illustration for "Recollections of an English Gold-Mine" Once a Week, 1861.

§2

If it were possible to imagine a world without any women or children in it, du Maurier's contemporary, Keene, so far as we can judge from his art, would have got along very well in such a world. He would have missed the voluminous skirt that followed the crinoline, with its glorious opportunity for beautiful spacing of white in a drawing, more than he would have missed its wearer. But du Maurier's art is Romantic; in the background of its chivalric regard for women there is the history of the worship of the Virgin. The source of such an art would have to be sought for in the neighbourhood of Camelot. It is impossible to overlook the chivalry that will not allow him, except with pain, to make a woman ugly. He was first of all a Poet, and though it may be a man's business to put a poem on to paper, it is a woman's to create it. He was a poet put into the business of satire with sufficient wit to sustain himself there. Many a time he has to make the satire rest almost entirely with the legend at the foot of his drawing; by obscuring their legends we find that drawing after drawing has nothing to tell us but of the beauty of those involved in "the joke," and this, as we shall show further on, gives a peculiar salt, or rather sweetness, to satire from his pencil. He is a romancer. His dialogues are romances. It is the novelist and artist running side by side in the legend and the drawing, but almost independently of each other, the wit and the poet in him trying to play each other's game, that provides the contradictoriness—the charm in his pictures. The point of the "joke" seems very often a mere excuse for working off several incidents of beauty that have been perceived.

In dealing with fashion du Maurier scores with posterity. Beauty, when it really is recorded, is the one element in any transitory fashion that survives the challenge of time. It is natural for one generation to hate more than anything else in the world the fashions immediately preceding the one affected. Pointed contemporary satire has, from the very shape it must assume, an ephemeral success. It is only when something more than the mere object of the satire is involved by some grace of the satirist's genius—some response on his part to charm in the thing assailed, that the work of satire comes down from its own time with an indestructible ingredient in it.

As a record of feminine fashion du Maurier's drawings in Punch are remarkable. It must not be imagined that the history of fashion is merely the tale of dressmakers' caprice. The very language of changing ideals is the variation of the toilet. When women were restricted to an oriental extent within convention, when to be "prim" was the aim of life, no feature of dress was lacking that could put "abandonment" of any but a moral kind, out of the question. A shake of the head too quickly and the coiffure was imperilled; the movements that came within the prescribed circle of dignity within the circle of the crinoline were all of a rhythmical order. Women did not take to moving with freedom because the crinoline went out, but the crinoline went out when they took to moving with freedom. It went out simply because it was a confounded nuisance. It was a natural costume only as long as women imagined it was natural to them to be very still in demeanour. Once they began to have opinions about that matter they soon sent the crinoline on its way. The same process goes on with the fashions of wearing the hair. The Blue-stocking, constantly running her nervous fingers up her forehead into her hair, has given to Girton a style of its own, equivalent to none at all. Fashion is more sensible than most things. If it changes with a rapidity that dazzles man, is not that only because man is stupid?

To study hair-dressing in du Maurier's pictures, is to study the growth of the nineteenth-century woman's mind. The head-dress becomes more natural as woman herself becomes more natural. It becomes more Greek when she takes up the Amazon idea, and simple when she discards some of the complications of convention, always to return to elaboration in the winter when it is not easy to live the simple life after the bell goes for dinner.