The famous delineator of English society in Punch, and in later years a novelist; born in Paris, March 6, 1834; died in London, Oct. 8, 1896. In his childhood his parents settled in London. He began in 1850 to study art in London, Paris, Antwerp; returning to London, he was employed on the illustrated periodicals, and from 1864 to his death was of the regular staff of Punch. He wrote and illustrated three stories; “Peter Ibbetson” (1891); “Trilby” (1894); “The Martian” (1897).

Personal

  It was here that I first saw Du Maurier, a quiet man of no great stature, who at the first sight of him impresses one as a man who has suffered greatly, haunted by some evil dream or disturbing apprehension. His welcome is gentle and kindly, but he does not smile, even when he is saying a clever and smile-provoking thing. “You must smoke. One smokes here. It is a studio.” Those were amongst the first words that Du Maurier said, and there was hospitality in them and the freemasonry of letters…. He reminds one as to physique, and in certain manifestations of a very nervous temperament, of another giant worker, whose name is Emile Zola. But he is altogether original and himself, a strong and striking individuality, a man altogether deserving of his past and present good fortune.

  That novel [“Trilby”], has been dramatized and played with great success, a son of the author being in the cast. That son recalls some interesting reminiscences of his father. He says: “Father never thought that ‘Trilby’ would be a success as a play when he was first told that it was going to be dramatized. However, he said he didn’t care what was done with it, so long as he was not obliged to see it. He always hated the theater, anyway, and never went unless he had to, for the sake of some one else. But he rather changed his mind later about ‘Trilby.’ That is, he thought it was awfully clever to be able to make a play out of it at all, and was quite pleased at the way in which several of the scenes were reproduced. He went to the dress rehearsal, and several times after that…. He had not the slightest idea of fashion, or what was the correct thing in dress. People supposed that he noticed those things, of course, and girls used to come to call upon my mother and sisters got up beautifully, and expecting that father would want to put them into his drawings, or would at least get some ideas from them. But, dear me, he hadn’t the least notion of what they had on! My sisters looked to it that he got the right things in his pictures. He would come home sometimes and sketch something which had attracted him in a passer-by on the street. Often it would be some impossibly queer arrangement, and my sisters would protest: ‘Why, father, you mustn’t use that in “Punch.” Nobody wears those things now; they’re dreadfully old-fashioned,’ and he would give in immediately to what he recognized as their superior judgment.”

  No artist of du Maurier’s generation was more justly loved by his personal friends or had made a larger circle of unknown friends by the pleasure he had afforded every week for more than thirty years. And it is not unfair to du Maurier’s undeniable literary gift to predict that on his long and remarkable connection with satiric art in the pages of “Punch” his fame will ultimately rest. A recognized lover and follower of Thackeray, he resembled that eminent master more nearly when he used the pencil than when he used the pen.

Peter Ibbetson, 1891

  The romance of “Peter Ibbetson,” despite its one annoying lapse into slang just where the language should have been of the simplest and tersest, despite, too, a certain tendency to wander, is a great work—one that seizes the reader firmly and touches the best in him.

  It is graceful, gentle, enchanting in its unsubstantiality. It is indeed a book to be loved by those who like it at all—a book for the few, therefore, rather than the many—a book to be passed over carelessly by those who do not feel its charm—a book to be treasured by those who have delighted in it.

  Like the work of most amateur authors it is clumsy in its construction, and is in no sense a novel. Had the chapters been written as impressions—mere reminiscences of the artist’s youth—with his own illustrations, they would have been far better in a literary sense. The story is a sort of elegant “Alice in Wonderland,” but it entirely lacks the wit that made the latter a classic, nor has it even the humor the author afterward developed in “Trilby.” One does not wonder that the story was not a marked success, though the illustrations were fully appreciated.

Trilby, 1894

  I read “Trilby” in Harper as it came out. It simply astonished me. Whole pages of it were delicious, the very medulla of the sweeter Thackeray. But one misses the bitter-sweet. Still it is much to give the Thackerayan honey alone; for “Trilby” is a veritable honeysuckle, if ever there was. As a tour-de-force I imagine nothing has been written for many years that comes near it. And weren’t the pictures good? And after “Peter Ibbetson,” with both text and illustrations so disappointing. I see some reviews are calling upon Du Maurier to advance and challenge the higher issues. But surely that is unfair. He has done admirably, and I don’t think he is ever likely to do better. His work is an extraordinary felicitous product, an acme, I should call it, or high-water mark for him. Apparently it has been written with the greatest care. Isn’t that the very condition of its excellence? Let him lash himself for some mighty effort, and ten-to-one we shall see a dismal failure.

  The whole of Mr. du Maurier’s dramatis personæ have taken such a firm hold of the little imagination I possess that it has become a question of my escape, not of theirs. I should have liked to be a kind of Niebuhr to them, from Dudor, Zouzou, and Gecko up to Little Billee and Trilby O’Ferrall, for in some shape or other I have known the counterparts of nearly all, living and breathing in the atmosphere in which they breathed, and in their habit as they lived. As it is, Trilby must come first; for I have known, perhaps, a half-dozen Trilbys, all differing in accidentals from each other and from our heroine, but alike in essentials. It proves to me that Mr. du Maurier went to work in the right way in delineating a human type instead of creating a more or less phenomenal human being. Astonishing though it may seem to those who are not familiar with the inner life of the French artists’ models,—I have no knowledge of the English, and am not aware that they exist as a class,—the susceptibility of a great many of them to hypnotic influence, especially among the female members, is an ascertained fact. What Svengali did in such terrible earnestness and with such terrible results to poor Trilby is done out of sheer fun almost every day by the pupils at the “Beaux Arts,” at private drawing-schools, and the académies libres.

  The book is so untrue to life, its spirit and sentiment are so sentimental and false, that its popularity is a serious comment upon public taste. Such reading unfits one for real life, and leaves one cold in real sympathy.

  Without question, the play that has made of late the most noise, the wheels of whose chariot have raised a dust that threatens to smother all other drama, is “Trilby.” It was my fortune to be in the United States when the taste for “Trilby” became a passion, when the passion grew into a mania, and the mania deepened into a madness. In the maelstrom of Chicago, as in the calm of Philadelphia, men added to their labour or their repose the worship of “Trilby.” The languor of Southern cities quickened, the energy of New England cities intensified with the stimulus of Trilby O’Ferrall’s name. Never in our time has a book been so suddenly exalted into a Bible. It flowed in a ceaseless stream over the counters of every bookshop on the American continent. It was discussed in the dialect of every state in the Union. Clergy of all denominations preached upon it from their pulpits. Impassioned admirers—for the most part women—formed societies, and debated over the moralities and the possibilities of the Altogether. The enthusiasm of the inhabitants of Abdera for the “Eros king of gods and men” of Euripides was but a joke to the enthusiasm of solid America for George du Maurier’s novel. Finally, somebody made a play of it, and fanned an adoration that had not yet begun to flag, higher and higher above the fever line of the human thermometer. The delight of the Republic became a delirium when “Trilby” took incarnation in the body of Miss Virginia Harned…. “Trilby” is a very creditable piece of work of its kind and class.

  His new rôle of popular novelist, or rather of propagator of microbes.

  As to “Trilby,” it is sui generis. Two thirds of the story were charming, but the last third of it was impossible—I mean as to what would probably have grown out of such a character. I do not object to the hypnotism; I like the mystical very much; what I do object to is making church and state and society bow down to Trilby, and making her die in the odor of sanctity! She was simple, honest, and natural, but nothing of that would have happened. Till it came to that “Trilby” was my favorite novel, as “Peter Ibbetson” was before it.

  The intrusion of the supernatural into the commonplace as in modern spiritualism is very bad art. The first part of the story of “Trilby” is admirable, worthy of Thackeray at his best. But the supernatural element, the hypnotic possession of the heroine by an evil nature, which might have harmonized with some tale of mediæval artist life, is entirely out of keeping with the realistic presentation of Paris thirty years ago.

General

  Du Maurier possesses in perfection the genuine artist’s perception of the snobbish. We have said, however, that the morality, so to speak, of his drawings, was a subordinate question; what we wished to insist upon is their completeness, their grace, their beauty, their rare pictorial character. It is an accident that the author of such things should not have been a painter—that he has not been an ornament of the English school. Indeed, with the restrictions to which he has so well accommodated himself, he is such an ornament. No English artistic work in these latter years has, in our opinion, been more exquisite in quality.

  Dying at what is now considered to be but the approach of old age, Mr. du Maurier yet leaves behind him the record of a volume of work, more remarkable perhaps for continuity, good quality, and general serviceableness to the purposes for which it was designed, than for sustained freshness.

  Du Maurier had indeed many sides to his talent, which a too exclusive devotion to the humours of society hindered him from cultivating. Especially may this be said of his real gift for poetry, which he wrote with equal skill in French and English. His ear for the harmonies of English verse had been trained on the best models, as the few specimens scattered through his writings abundantly prove. Although an imitator of no man, his “Vers de Société”—for he did not aim at more ambitious heights—show the mingled grace, humour, and tenderness of Oliver Wendell Holmes.