In the drawing "Honour where Honour is Due" the point is made in the legend, but the illustration illuminates it rather brutally. It is a picture in which we find du Maurier expressing the prejudices of the old régime against the nouveau riche. It illustrates a prejudice rather than a fact. It was not at all true in Victoria's reign that money would carry a man anywhere. In that time the man with money only but without birth wanted better manners than the man with everything else but money to get him into Society. It was less the objectionableness of trade—as du Maurier in such a drawing as this tried to imply—than the advance of it that the old aristocracy really resented.
A drawing characteristic of the artist's work in the eighties—in 1880 to be definite—is that entitled "Mutual Admirationists." It really dates itself. It is descriptive of one of the moods of "passionate Brompton." The satire of the three admiring ladies is perfect. In our own time ladies have gazed like this at genius. Sometimes genius is really there, sometimes it is not—but the profound and undying belief of women in it, often expressed beautifully as well as absurdly, is the rain from heaven enabling it to thrive. In the expressive drawing of the faces and the bearing of the three ladies in this picture we have du Maurier's real humour—its reality in its closeness to life, and his genius in expressing through contour the whole tale of strange æsthetic enthusiasm.
In an earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed "æstheticism" from the inside. He hardly draws any figures so happily as those of bored, poetic youths. In Sic Transit Gloria Mundi he does not depict "The Duke" of the scene half so convincingly as the young gossip talking to the Duchess. No one else in the world could have drawn so well that young man, with his weak, but Oxford voice—it is almost to be heard—and tired but graceful manners.
"Sic Transit Gloria Mundi!"
"By the way, Duchess, supposing that we do succeed in getting the House of Lords abolished this Session, won't it be a great blow to the Duke?"
"Yes, if he ever hears of it; but I shan't tell him, you know!"
Punch, March 22, 1884.
The drawing "Post-Prandial Pessimists" is not so sympathetic—which means that it is not so intimate in touch and full of knowledge. The straight mechanical lines with which the clothes are drawn are rather meaningless. This treatment represents a convention, and a bad one, because it covers the paper without really conveying the elasticity of clothing or the animation of muscle determining its folds. At this stage of his career du Maurier has begun to work rather mechanically and by a recipe; he is less curious of form as it actually is to be observed, and more content with just making a drawing in as neat and as businesslike a way as possible, with the wording of the legend uppermost in his thoughts. The artist is disappearing in the "Punch Artist." The drawing of detail, for instance, inclines to be blotty; it is no longer affectionately done. At least the pre-Raphaelite in du Maurier is now dead. The artist's early drawings, where his native tastes break into expression, are pre-Raphaelite in feeling. He made a bad impressionist, a thoroughly bad imitator of Keene's success with impressionism. He lost what was most his own when he "threw over" his belief in glamour, and took to laughing at his own enthusiasms; when he ceased to confine his mockery to things that he hated, as he hated the æsthetic movement. The gods revenged his satire of the inspiration of the pre-Raphaelites in the Tale of Camelot by taking that inspiration away from himself.
The drawing "Things one would rather have expressed Differently" (reproduced opposite [page 194]) represents du Maurier's final phase at its very best. It has the precision of workmanship of a thing executed to a well-tried recipe. It is dainty as well as precise; and still in the way the dimpling of soft dress fabric is touched in, sympathetic, and characteristic of the earlier du Maurier. It belongs to the Trilby period, but is better than the illustrations to Trilby.
§ 3
The unpublished sketches which we have been allowed to reproduce from du Maurier's private sketch-book, and which we are using as end pieces, are very interesting. In the strictest artistic sense there is very little of the art of pen-drawing to-day. In the work done with the pen for modern illustration the inking-in is too much of an after process of ink upon pencil work. The quality of the drawing is really determined by the pencil, which is the actual medium of work. In going over the pencil work the ink-line follows it in many cases so closely that it cannot assert the characteristics of penmanship. But in making preliminary small studies for a picture with the pen, an artist, feeling less necessity for a certain kind of accuracy, often uses the pen much more freely, sympathetically, and happily because he is actually drawing with it and not merely following over forms determined first in another medium. We have printed the reproductions from the sketch-book about their original size. Many of them express the freer qualities of real pen-drawing—an autographic character in the line-work akin to that secured in original etching. The pen is an instrument that works best on a small scale, in which it can be manipulated flexibly in the fingers; in this it is like the etching-needle itself. The artist working direct with his pen has before him while he draws the actual effect of his ink on paper, instead of having to imagine it in advance while he works out his subject in pencil. The vignette of the man lying back in his chair near the leaded window ([page 147]) has qualities in the shadow of the window that we look to find in vain in du Maurier's professional work. It is a sympathetic pen-drawing; the lines express much more than a formula—they secure a dramatic play of shadow.