It is impossible, in considering Du Maurier’s work, to avoid comparing it with that of Leech and Keene, the more so that in his little book on Social Pictorial Satire he himself has set forth or suggested the points both of resemblance and of difference. Like Keene, though Keene’s marvellous technique was his despair, Du Maurier was a much more finished draughtsman than John Leech, but in other respects he had less in common with the younger than with the older humorist. He shows himself, in the best sense, a man of feeling in all his work. He is clearly himself in love with “his pretty woman,” as he calls her—every pen-stroke in his presentment of her is a caress. How affectionate, too, are his renderings of his fond young mothers and their big, handsome, simple-minded husbands; his comely children and neat nurserymaids; even his dogs—his elongated dachshunds and magnificent St Bernards! And how he scorns the snobs and philistines—Sir Gorgius Midas and Sir Pompey Bedell, Grigsby and Cadby, Soapley and Toadson! How merciless is his ridicule of the aesthetes of the ’eighties—Maudle and Postlethwaite and Mrs Cimabue Brown! Even to Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, his most conspicuous creation, his satire is scarcely tempered, despite her prettiness. He shows up unsparingly all her unscrupulous little ways, all her cynical, cunning little wiles. Like Leech, he revelled in the lighter aspects of life—the humours of the nursery, the drawing-room, the club, the gaieties of the country house and the seaside—without being blind to the tragic and dramatic. Just as Leech could rise to the height of the famous cartoon “General Février turned Traitor,” so it was Du Maurier who inspired Tenniel in that impressive drawing on the eve of the Franco-German War, in which the shade of the great Napoleon is seen warning back the infatuated emperor from his ill-omened enterprise. In his tender drawings in Once a Week, also, and in his occasional excursions into the grotesque in Punch, such as his picture of “Old Nickotin stealing away the brains of his devotees,” he has given ample proof of his faculty for moving and impressive art. The technique of Du Maurier’s work in the ’eighties and the ’nineties, though to the average man it seems a marvel of finish and dexterity, is considered by artists a falling off from what was displayed in some of his earlier Punch drawings, and especially in his contributions to the Cornhill Magazine and Once a Week. His later work is undoubtedly more mannered, more “finicking,” less simple, less broadly effective. But it is to his fellow-craftsmen only and to experts that this is noticeable.
A quaint tribute has been paid to the literary talent shown in Du Maurier’s inscriptions to his drawings by Mr F. Anstey (Guthrie), author of Vice Versa, and Du Maurier’s colleague on the staff of Punch. “In these lines of letterpress,” says Mr Anstey, “he has brought the art of précis-writing to perfection.” They are indeed singularly concise and to the point. It is the more curious, therefore, to note that in his novels, and even in his critical essays, Du Maurier reveals very different qualities: the précis-writer has become an improvisatore, pouring out his stories and ideas in full flood, his style changing with every mood—by turn humorous, eloquent, tender, gay, sometimes merely “skittish,” sometimes quite solemn, but never for long; sometimes, again, breaking into graceful and haunting verse. He writes with apparent artlessness; but, in his novels at least, on closer examination, it is found that he has in fact exerted all his ingenuity to give them—what such flagrantly untrue tales most require—verisimilitude. It is hard to say which of the three stories is the more impossible: that of Trilby, the tone-deaf artist’s model who becomes a prima donna, that of Barty Josselin and his guardian angel from Mars, or that of the dream-existence of Peter Ibbetson and the duchess of Towers. They are all equally preposterous, and yet plausible. The drawings are cunningly made to serve the purpose of evidence, circumstantial and direct. These books cannot be criticized by the ordinary canons of the art of fiction. They are a genre by themselves, a blend of unfettered day-dream and rose-coloured reminiscence. For the dramatic version of Trilby by Mr Paul Potter Du Maurier would accept no credit. The play was produced in 1895 by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at the Haymarket, with immense popular success.
Some striking examples of Du Maurier’s work for Once a Week and the Cornhill Magazine are included in Gleeson White’s English Illustrators of the Sixties. The following is a list of the chief works which he illustrated: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1865), Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866), Jerrold’s Story of a Feather (1867), Owen Meredith’s Lucile (1868), The Book of Drawing room Plays, by H. Dalton (1868), Sooner or Later, by C. A. G. Brooke (1868), Thackeray’s Esmond (1869 and 1879), and Ballads (1879), Misunderstood, by Florence Montgomery (1874), Round about the Islands, by C. W. Scott (1874), Hurlock Chase, by G. E. Sargent (1876), Songs of many Seasons, by J. Browne (in collaboration) (1876), Pegasus Re-saddled, by H. C. Pennell (1877), Ingoldsby Legends (in collaboration), by R. Barham (1877), Prudence, by L. C. Lillie (1882), As in a Looking-glass by F. C. Phillips (1889), Luke Ashleigh, by A. Elwes (1891), and his own three novels, which appeared serially in Harper’s Magazine: Peter Ibbetson (1892), Trilby (1894), The Martian (1897), and published after his death. In 1897 also there was published, under the title English Society, with an introduction by W. D. Howells, a collection of full page drawings which he had contributed regularly to Harper’s Magazine.
Some of his Punch drawings have been reproduced also in The Collections of Mr Punch (1880), Society Pictures from Punch (1890), A Legend of Camelot (1890). To his Social Pictorial Satire (1890) reference has been made. He contributed two essays upon book illustration to the Magazine of Art (1890). See also the Magazine of Art for 1892, for an article upon his work by W. Delaplaine Scull, with illustrations. Other volumes containing information about his life and work are: The History of Punch by M. H. Spielmann, In Bohemia with Du Maurier, by Felix Moscheles, Henry James’s “Du Maurier and London Society,” Century Magazine (1883), and “Du Maurier,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1897, June 1899). See also Ruskin’s Art of England Lecture 5, Pennell’s Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, and Muther’s Modern Painting vol. ii. (F. W. W.)
DUMBARTON, a royal, municipal and police burgh, seaport, and county town of Dumbartonshire, Scotland, situated on the river Leven, near its confluence with the Clyde, 1512 m. W. by N. of Glasgow by the North British and Caledonian railways. Pop. (1891) 17,625, (1901) 19,985. The Alcluith (“hill of the Clyde”) of the Britons, and Dunbreatan (“fort of the Britons”) of the Celts, it was the capital of the district of Strathclyde. Here, too, the Romans had a naval station which they called Theodosia. Although thus a place of great antiquity, the history of the town practically centres in that of the successive fortresses on the Rock of Dumbarton, a twin peaked mount, 240 ft. high and a mile in circumference at the base. The fortress was often besieged and sometimes taken, the Picts seizing it in 736 and the Northmen in 870, but the most effectual surprise of all was that accomplished, in the interests of the young King James VI., by Thomas Crawford of Jordanhill on March 31, 1571. The castle was held by Queen Mary’s adherents, and as it gave them free communication with France, its capture was deemed essential. Crawford decided to climb the highest point, concluding that, owing to its imagined security, it would be carelessly guarded. Favoured with a dark and foggy night the party of 150 men and a guide reached the first ledge of rock undiscovered. In scaling the second precipice one of the men was seized with an epileptic fit on the ladder. Crawford bound him to the ladder and then turned it over and was thus enabled to ascend to the summit. At this moment the alarm was given, but the sentinel and the sleepy soldiers were slain and the cannon turned on the garrison. Further resistance being useless, the castle was surrendered. During the governorship of Sir John Menteith, William Wallace was in 1305 imprisoned within its walls before he was removed to London. The higher of the two peaks is known as Wallace’s seat, a tower, perhaps the one in which he was incarcerated, being named after him. On the portcullis gateway may still be seen rudely carved heads of Wallace and his betrayer, the latter with his finger in his mouth. Queen Mary, when a child, resided in the castle for a short time. It is an ugly barrack-like structure, defended by a few obsolete guns, although by the Union Treaty it is one of the four fortresses that must be maintained. The rock itself is basalt, with a tendency to columnar formation, and some parts of it have a magnetic quality.
The town arms are the elephant and castle, with the motto Fortitudo et fidelitas. Dumbarton was of old the capital of the
