English Society

George Du Maurier

English Society

GEORGE DU MAURIER

I was thinking, with a pang, just before I put my pen to the paper, that the death of George du Maurier must be a fact of stale interest to the reader already, and that it would be staler yet by the time my words reached him. So swiftly does the revolving world carry our sorrow into the sun, our mirth into the shade, that it is as if the speed of the planet had caught something of the impatience of age, and it were hurried round upon its axis with the quickened pulses of senility. But perhaps this is a delusion of ours who dwell in the vicissitude of events, and there are still spots on the earth's whirling surface, lurking-places of quiet, where it seems not to move, and there is time to remember and to regret; where it is no astonishing thing that a king should be a whole month dead, and yet not forgotten. At any rate, it is in the hope, if not quite the faith, of this that I venture some belated lines concerning a man whom we have lost just when he seemed beginning to reveal himself.

I

It was my good fortune to have the courage to write to Du Maurier when

Trilby

 was only half printed, and to tell him how much I liked the gay, sad story. In every way it was well that I did not wait for the end, for the last third of it seemed to me so altogether forced in its conclusions that I could not have offered my praises with a whole heart, nor he accepted them with any, if the disgust with its preposterous popularity, which he so frankly, so humorously expressed, had then begun in him. But the liking which its readers felt had not yet become loathsome to the author, and he wrote me back a charming note, promising me the mystery, and enough of it, which I had hoped for, because of my pleasure in the true-dreaming in

Peter Ibbetson

; and speaking briefly, most modestly and fitly, of his commencing novelist at sixty, and his relative misgivings and surprises.

It was indeed one of the most extraordinary things in the history of literature, and without a parallel, at least to my ignorance. He might have commenced and failed; that would have been infinitely less amazing than his most amazing success; but it was very amazing that he should have commenced at all. It is useless to say that he had commenced long before, and in the literary property of his work he had always been an author. This theory will not justify itself to any critical judgment; one might as well say, if some great novelist distinguished for his sense of color took to painting, that he had always been an artist. The wonder of Du Maurier's essay, the astounding spectacle of his success, cannot be diminished by any such explanation of it. He commenced novelist in

Peter Ibbetson

, and so far as literature was concerned he succeeded in even greater fulness than he has succeeded since. He had perfect reason to be surprised; he had attempted an experiment, and he had performed a miracle.

As for the nature, or the quality, of his miracle, that is another question. I myself think that in all essentials it was fine. The result was not less gold because there was some dross of the transmuted metals hanging about the precious ingot, and the evidences of the process were present, though the secret was as occult as ever. He won the heart, he kindled the fancy, he bewitched the reason; and no one can say just how he did it. His literary attitude was not altogether new; he perfected an attitude recognizable first in Fielding, next in Ste