When it comes to his drawings of children du Maurier is very far away
from the sentimentalist of the Barrie school. He does not attempt to go
through the artifice of pretended possession of the realm of the child's
mind. He was of those who find the curious attractiveness of childhood
in the unreality, and not, as claimed by the later school, the superior
reality of the child's world. His view of the child is the affectionate,
but the "Olympian" one, with its amused appreciation of the _naïveté_
and the charm of childhood's particular 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