ENGLISH SOCIETY
SKETCHED BY
GEORGE DU MAURIER
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
1897
Copyright, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894,1895, and 1896, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
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 tothe reader already, and that it would be staler yet by the time my wordsreached him. So swiftly does the revolving world carry our sorrow intothe sun, our mirth into the shade, that it is as if the speed of the planethad caught something of the impatience of age, and it were hurried roundupon its axis with the quickened pulses of senility. But perhaps this isa delusion of ours who dwell in the vicissitude of events, and there arestill spots on the earth's whirling surface, lurking-places of quiet, where itseems not to move, and there is time to remember and to regret; whereit is no astonishing thing that a king should be a whole month dead, andyet not forgotten. At any rate, it is in the hope, if not quite the faith, ofthis 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 Maurierwhen Trilby was only half printed, and to tell him how much I likedthe gay, sad story. In every way it was well that I did not wait for theend, for the last third of it seemed to me so altogether forced in its conclusionsthat I could not have offered my praises with a whole heart, norhe 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 theauthor, 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 inthe true-dreaming in Peter Ibbetson; and speaking briefly, most modestlyand fitly, of his commencing novelist at sixty, and his relative misgivingsand surprises.
It was indeed one of the most extraordinary things in the history ofliterature, and without a parallel, at least to my ignorance. He might have commenced and failed; that would have been infinitely less amazingthan his most amazing success; but it was very amazing that he shouldhave commenced at all. It is useless to say that he had commenced longbefore, and in the literary property of his work he had always been anauthor. This theory will not justify itself to any critical judgment; onemight as well say, if some great novelist distinguished for his sense ofcolor took to painting, that he had always been an artist. The wonderof Du Maurier's essay, the astounding spectacle of his success, cannot bediminished by any such explanation of it. He commenced novelist inPeter Ibbetson, and so far as literature was concerned he succeeded ineven greater fulness than he has succeeded since. He had perfect reasonto be surprised; he had attempted an experiment