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Ruskin, whilst approving in his Art of England of du Maurier's use of black to indicate colour, thought he carried the black and white contrast to chess-board pattern excess.
His "corrobboree" of the Australian wilds reappears in De Maurier's Belgravian ballrooms, with clothes and the smirk of civilization added; Botticelli's "Spring" is the "corrobboree" further idealized, but with fewer clothes and more smirk. And well enough as to intention, but my word! The aboriginal can make a fire by friction. I have tried that.
Henry James sees in du Maurier's ugly people a real specification of type, where we confess that we have felt that his "ferocity" missed the point of resemblance to type through clumsy exaggeration.
Everywhere in du Maurier's life we find the testimony to his sweetness of disposition. He had the great loyalty to friends which is really loyalty to the world at large, made up of possible friends. Friends are not an accident, but they are made by a process of natural selection, which, if we are wise and generous, we do not attempt to superintend.
It certainly is the mark of a great artist to take practically whatever is before him for treatment. The artist with the genius for "interior" subjects seems to be able to re-interpret ugliness itself very often. Du Maurier's weak eyes prevented him from bearing the strain of outdoor work.
And sometimes in the margin there are pencil studies from which figures in the illustration have been re-drawn. And nearly always not altogether rubbed out is a first wording of the legend, repeated in ink in du Maurier's pretty "hand" beneath. In turning over these drawings one finds him doing much more than merely suggesting pattern work in such things as wall-papers.
The publisher also handed over to him the dramatic rights with which he had parted for a small sum like fifty pounds, and thus he became a partner in the dramatic property called Trilby as a "play." Trilby was a name that had long lain perdu somewhere "at the back of du Maurier's head." He traced it to a story by Charles Nodier, in which Trilby was a man.
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.
Speaking of fifteen years of constant companionship in walks upon the Heath, the Canon says no one could have had a better opportunity of tasting the unfailing charm of du Maurier's conversation, the width of his reading and observation, and his inexhaustible fund of anecdote.
One of Du Maurier's great Punch cartoons represented a honeymoon conversation between a husband and wife who had both covered themselves with glory at Cambridge. And the conversation ran along these highly intellectual lines: 'What would Lovey do if Dovey died? 'Oh, Lovey would die too! There is a world of philosophy behind the nonsense.
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