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If anybody but George Du Maurier could have written "Trilby," it seems to me it would have been an American rather than a full-blooded Englishman. The keenness of the American appreciation of the book corresponds to elements in the American nature. The Anglo-French blend of Mr. Du Maurier's literary genius finds nearer analogues in American literature than in either English or French.
We have accepted his types, his categories, his conclusions, his sympathies and his ironies, It is not given to all the world to thread the mazes of London society, and for the great body of the disinherited, the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon public. Mr. Du Maurier's representation is the thing represented. Is the effect of it to nip in the bud any remote yearning for personal participation?
Barneveld's Imprisonment Ledenberg's Examination and Death Remonstrance of De Boississe Aerssens admitted to the order of Knights Trial of the Advocate Barneveld's Defence The States proclaim a Public Fast Du Maurier's Speech before the Assembly Barneveld's Sentence Barneveld prepares for Death Goes to Execution.
This undoubtedly allowed the artist a closer and less restricted use of line than modern illustration shows us. If the reader examines du Maurier's illustration for The Adventures of Harry Richmond on page 106, he will be able to see at a glance how, by cutting out the whites in the multiplicity of ivy leaves, detailed drawing has been re-interpreted in the engraving with great economy.
Mamma! don't scold him any more, it makes the room so dark." It is the poetry of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of childhood. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud. Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene.
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.
Du Maurier had quickly perceived that the quality of grace could well survive side by side with any amount of humour. It is interesting to try and imagine what Phil May would have made of the scene. It was intended for a poignant one, but it becomes chiefly a very attractive one in du Maurier's hands, the pathos lying with the wording rather than the picture.
His chivalry gave his satire a very delicate edge. It was infinitely more cutting in showing the misfit of vulgarity with beauty than in showing vulgarity alone. But du Maurier's gentlemanliness narrowed his range. It forced him into putting down something preposterous instead of a true type as soon as he wished to create "a bounder."
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.
In reviewing this book, however, we are already away from the most characteristic period of du Maurier's work as an illustrator of fiction. That was between 1860 and 1880.
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