the passion for strange raiment and blue
china has during the last few years made ravages in the London world."
Mr. Henry James himself is one of the experts of the London world. There
is almost a hint in the last sentence that he thought du Maurier's
genius helped to nurse the crazes it made fun of.

Since writing this I have been told by one to whom du Maurier related
the incident, that the hero of the aesthetic movement himself, Oscar
Wilde, offered to sit to du Maurier for the chief character in his skit.
Wilde was very young, but already master of that art of
self-advertisement which he received from Byron and Disraeli, perfected,
and, I think, handed on to Mr. Bernard Shaw. But such anxiety for every
kind of celebrity at any cost seems to have lost the youthful genius the
esteem of the great _Punch_ artist once and for all. The representative
of humorous journalism seems the one upon whom the delicate humour of
the proposal was lost.

As far as du Maurier was capable of vindictiveness it was reserved for
Maudle and Postlethwaite. He went out of his way to give a contemptible
appearance to those who took the name of Art in vain. His only spiteful
drawings are those of aesthetes. They are spiteful to the extent of the
great disgust which he, the most amiable of satirists, felt for them.
But still he was careful not to treat a craze which afforded him
inexhaustible variations of subject matter with so much bitterness as
to kill it right out. It was only towards this craze that he showed any
bitterness at all, for the rest he is always amused with Society. He has
none of the bitter Jeremiahlike anger against it of a Swift.

Mr. Henry James defending du Maurier from a charge of being malignant,
brought against him for his ugly representation of queer people,
failures, and grotesques, refused to allow that the taint of "French
ferocity" of which the artist was accused, existed. But Mr. Henry James
sees in du Maurier's ugly people a real specification of type, where we
confess that we have felt that his "ferocity" missed the point of
resemblance to type through clumsy exaggeration. One noticeable
instance, however, to our mind, where the too frequent outrageousness is
replaced by an exquisite study of character, is in the face of the fair
authoress who, when the gallant Colonel, anxious to break the ice, and
full of the fact that he has just been made a proud father, asks if she
takes any interest in very young childr