rticular brand of self-possession. It is
possible that his nursery scenes played some part in promoting the
respect that is given to-day to the impulses of childhood, the
enlightened and beautiful side of which respect after all so far
outweighs the ridiculous and sentimental one. His nursery drawings
contribute much of the fragrance associated with his work in _Punch_. He
takes rank under the best definition of an artist, namely, one who can
put his own values upon the things that come up for representation on
his paper. By his insistence upon certain pleasant things he helped to
establish them in the ideal, which, on the morrow, always tends to
become the real. He was a realist only to the extent of their
possibility. It gave him no pleasure whatever to enumerate, and
represent over again, the many times in which the beautiful intentions
of nature had gone astray. He liked to be upon the side of her
successes. He constantly helped us to believe in, and to will towards
the existence of such a world here on earth, as we have set our heart
upon. He is not an idealist in the vague sense, for he imports no beauty
merely from dreamland. Like the Greeks, he makes _the possible_ his
single ideal. In insisting upon the possibility of beauty and
suppressing every reference to the monstrous story of failure which the
existence of hideousness implies, once more he puts the world in debt to
art after the fashion of the old masters. For after all it seems to have
been left for modern artists to grow wealthy and live comfortably upon
the proceeds of their own relation of the world's despair; if they are
playwrights, to live most snugly upon the box-receipts of an entrapped
audience unnerved for the struggle of life by their ghastly picture of
life's gloom.

However splendid the art in such a case we put it well down below that
art which exerts the same amount of effort in trying to sustain the will
to believe in, and so to bring about the reign of things we really want.

Du Maurier's art was nearer to reality, and not farther away, in the
charming side of it. Realism does not necessarily imply only the
representation of the mean and the defaulting. It is perhaps because
humanity so passionately desires the reign of beauty that it is inclined
to doubt that art which witnesses to the dream of it as already partly
true.

Although du Maurier's art in its tenderness is romantic, in its belief
in the ideal and in its insistence upon ty