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In later years, submitting to the influence of Keene's method, in which black is always used to secure effects of tone instead of colour, du Maurier's style underwent a transformation which, from the purely artistic point of view, was not to its advantage. Keene's method was justified in his extreme sensitiveness to what painters define as "values" the relation in tone of one surface to another.
But whether that name was coupled with present felicity or future hopes I do not recollect. But du Maurier's lines describe him and our chumship much better than any words of mine could do. He says: "To BOBTAIL. Oh, fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint All lazy beggars like me "
We have to realise how much more than any one preceding him in graphic satire du Maurier was able to dispense with exaggeration. Nevertheless, the studied avoidance of exaggeration has not had the happiest effect as a precedent in the art of Punch. Without du Maurier's sensitive response to the whole comedy of drawing-room life the tendency has been to lapse into the merely photographic.
And if I were like Du Maurier's dear Peter Ibbetson, I could "dream back," and see at what far distance the builders of Stonehenge got their mysterious syenite, and that one black sandstone so different from the rest. I could dream who were the builders; whether Phoenicians, or mourning Britons of Arthur's day as Geoffrey of Monmouth tells.
The continuation of the studentship at Antwerp, the consultation with the specialist at Dusseldorf, completes the story of du Maurier's life until he came to London. There is literally nothing that a biographer could add to it. And du Maurier wrote his autobiography thus, in tales, which are histories too, in their graphic description of the aspect of places and people at a given time.
Du Maurier's signature passed through many transformations, and there were times, too, when the artist was quite undecided between the plentiful choice of his Christian names George Louis Palmella Busson. An artist beginning his career at the present day with such a choice of names would most certainly have made use of the "Palmella" in full an advertisement asset. But advertisement is vulgar.
And this fact enables us to throw into clearer light the exact nature of du Maurier's work. If we seek for evidence in the old volumes of Punch for the distinction of the early Victorians we shall not find it. We shall merely conceive instead a dislike for the type of gentleman of the time. Leech and his contemporaries did nothing more for their age than to make it look ridiculous for ever.
How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the one-thousandth part of an inch!
It is just this effect which suited the methods of engraving better than those of "process" work. And because it demanded drawing to a smaller scale, with lines closer together, the demands of engraving suited the nature of du Maurier's art better than those of "process" work.
Comparison of this kind would be irrelevant but for the fact that behind all du Maurier's work in Punch there seems to hover an artist of a different kind from the one which it was possible for Mr. Punch to employ. SCENE The smoking-room at the Decadents. "After all, Smythe, what would Life be without Coffee?" "True, Jeohnes, True! And yet, after all, what is Life with Coffee?"
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