Mr. Du Maurier's the Martian

The interest always attaching to a posthumous publication is enhanced in the case of George du Maurier’s Martian by the peculiar circumstances which have attended his brief and brilliant literary career. Suddenly, late in life, an artist of established reputation turns author, and uses the pen with exactly the same ease and distinction with which he had previously used the pencil. He associates the two arts as they have never quite been associated before, illustrating either by the other with equal facility.

Thackeray had done something of the kind, but in Thackeray the literary faculty was so transcendent, and so very superior to the pictorial, that the latter acquired, by comparison, a certain air of burlesque. With Du Maurier the implement seems absolutely indifferent; the characteristic and, to many, irresistibly fascinating style is always the same. It is not invariably true that the style is the man. There is a kind of preoccupation with style, which may have very fine and even exquisite results, but which spoils it as a transcript of character, just as effectually as an over-stately pose or studied expression spoils the likeness in a portrait. In Du Maurier’s case, however, the style was the man. Some happy instinct taught him, what would never have come by observation, how to be himself in his writings ; that he was capable of no better achievement than this, and that this would prove enough for his fame. It came near indeed to proving quite too much. For all the charm of his personality, Du Maurier was not formed by nature to be the idol of the masses ; and the one great popular success which he achieved by a species of fluke obscured his happiness, and unquestionably shortened his life. It is a strange and rather pathetic story.

To the few who perfectly understood him, there has been nothing more novel and moving and altogether delightful in recent literature than that gay and tender tale of a French boyhood with which Peter Ibbetson began. The very polyglot which Mr. du Maurier half unconsciously employed, and which would have been insupportable in anybody else, appeared a natural and graceful form of expression in him, and the twofold nationality of the man, French by affection and tradition, English by habit and conviction, seemed to multiply instead of dividing his sympathies, and gave a wonderful sort of stereoscopic roundness and relief to the subjects of his delineation. The obstinate “ lands intersected by a narrow frith ” had hardly ever found so impartial and persuasive a mutual interpreter.

Even the “ esoteric ” part of Peter Ibbetson — the fantastic theory that the soul may relive, in dreams, its own and the entire life of its race in time, and anticipate both in eternity — appealed to the imagination by the simple fervor with which it was set forth, and melted the heart by a sweet if deceitful glimpse of consoling and compensating possibilities. Peter Ibbetson was the sort of book which one reads and decides to keep, and does not lend to everybody.

And it was followed by — Trilby ! Well, there is happily no need to say much about Trilby. Every possible comment, wise and unwise, fair and unfair, has already been made upon that ubiquitous book by critics competent and incompetent. Those who had become enamored of the author through the medium of his first ingenuous and dreamy tale still saw his chivalric likeness in this transcript of his more purely Bohemian experience, and heard his generous and manly accents ; but the million readers were caught, it is to be feared, by collateral and less legitimate attractions. One excellent use the book may well have, in the way of exposing the more offensive side of hypnotism, which has put on scientific airs and taken a high tone of late, but which is really only a genteel disguise for what was long since tabooed under its uglier though more descriptive name of animal magnetism. A greater novelist than Du Maurier and a complete Frenchman had treated the same risqué theme a generation before his day in a book called Joseph Balsamo, and once was really enough. The universal vogue of Trilby was deeply depressing to its author, than whom no man ever lived more intolerant of essential vulgarity, and one is almost glad that he had passed beyond the sphere of the illustrated newspaper before a Trilby exhibition of young ladies’ feet was organized, to repair the tottering finances of a so-called religious society !

It has been a source of sorrowful pleasure to every sincere Da Maurian to find him returning, in his third and last novel, to the theme which he had treated so delicately in his first, and to discover how far he was from having exhausted its interest and charm. To have been a schoolboy in Paris in the forties ! — there will be a glamour about that thought forevermore, and Tom Brown has a formidable rival in a most unexpected quarter. Du Maurier has done nothing more masterly with the pen which he wielded for so short a time than the descriptions of the Institution F. Brossard in the last days of the citizen-king (whose own sons were not sent to so grand a school !) and of the joyous summer vacation in the Department of La Sarthe. Let us make room for one sunny, racy page of the author’s own, in which he sketches the household of his provincial host M. Laferté : —

“ It was the strangest country household I have ever seen, in France or anywhere else. They were evidently very well off, yet they preferred to eat their midday meal in the kitchen, which was immense ; and so was the midday meal — and of a succulency !

“ An old wolf-hound always lay by the huge log-fire; often with two or three fidgety cats fighting for the soft places on him, and making him growl; five or six other dogs, non-sporting, were always about at meal-time.

“ The servants, three or four peasant women who waited on us, talked all the time, and were tutoyées by the family. Farm laborers came in and discussed agricultural matters, manures, etc., quite informally, squeezing their bonnets de coton in their hands. The postman sat by the fire and drank a glass of cider and smoked his pipe up the chimney while the letters were read — most of them out loud — and were commented upon by everybody in the most friendly spirit. All this made the meal last a long time.

“ M. Laferté always wore his blouse, except in the evening, and then he wore a brown woolen vareuse or jersey ; unless there were guests, when he wore his Sunday morning best. He nearly always spoke like a peasant, although he was really a decently educated man — or should have been.

“ His old mother, who was of good family and eighty years of age, lived in a quite humble cottage, in a small street in La Tremblaye, with two little peasant girls to wait on her ; and the La Tremblayes, with whom M. Laferté was not on speaking terms, were always coming into the village to see her, and bring her fruit and flowers and game. She was a most accomplished old lady, and an excellent musician, and had known Monsieur de Lafayette.”

There, once for all, is the perfect manner for a story-teller; the manner which each one of us knows, theoretically, to be the very best, but which the vast majority are too self-conscious, or too ambitious, or too careful and troubled about effect ever properly to attain. And the Belgian scenes are almost equally good ; especially the picture of life in the high, clerical circle of stately and sleepy old Malines, so simple and immaculate, so graceful in its quiet detachment; so refined and so resigned !

But if the qualities of Du Maurier never shone brighter than in some pages of The Martian, his limitations also are here most clearly and conclusively defined. He could never, by any possibility, have constructed a plot, or developed a character by scientific methods ; and this tale has even less of coherence and plausibility than its predecessors. Barty Josselin, the hero, so engaging in his brilliant boyhood and more or less vagabond youth, becomes a mere abstraction from the moment his being is invaded and his brain utilized by his invisible Egeria. The very list of the books which he wrote under the inspiration of the magnetic lady from Mars fills us with unspeakable ennui, and we rejoice as one who awaketh from a nightmare at the recollection that we can never be constrained to read those books, — not even by the domineering insistence of the most infatuated clique. Something in his own experience of the sudden discovery of an unrealized faculty doubtless led to Du Maurier’s inveterate preoccupation by the weird fancy of exchangeable personalities, and the working within us of a will not our own. It is evident, moreover, that the “ possessed ” Barty Josselin is to be regarded less as a unique individual than as a type of the coming race, and we learn from the descriptions of life at Marsfield what sort of folk Du Maurier hoped that the children of the millennial state might be. First, and most important, they are to average taller, by a foot, than we, their miserable forbears, and to be all supremely handsome. They will have beautiful, though unconventional manners, and talk a kind of glorified slang. They will be wealthy without effort, and witty without spleen : musical and athletic ; healthy, of course, and happy in their home affections, free from social prejudices and all manner of cant and unencumbered by book-learning.

It is not at all a bad ideal; and among the many Utopias which have, of late, been handed in for competition, who would not prefer Du Maurier’s to Bulwer’s or Bellamy’s, or even the amiable and shadowy Nowhere of the late William Morris ? We have already seen this one foreshadowed in the pages of Punch, where the elegant and debonair creatures who lounge under the palms or descend the palace stair are well-nigh impossible, anatomically, just at present, but may not be so in the good time coming. One need not be abnormally clever to perceive that the elements of Du Maurier’s ideal state are derived in about equal proportions from the only two provinces of our manifold modern life, which, to him, were worth inhabiting — from Bohemia and Belgravia. He found his physical types in the latter, and his moral types, to the scandal of all outlying Philistia, chiefly in the former. But his heart embraced the whole ; and in his resolute assertion of the comparative impotence of exact science, and the gross inadequacy to the needs of man of any merely material scheme of things, there was the essence of true religion.

And so we say our ave atque vale to one whose very whims and imperfections endeared him the more to those who cared for him at all ; who did something, while he stayed with us, toward assuaging by sympathy and promise the trouble of the world and our own ; and whose like — take him for all in all — we shall not soon look upon again.