And when he told the superior Steerforth of his innocent enjoyment, he had to listen to the laughing reply:—
"My dear young Davy—you are a very daisy. The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher than you are! I have been at Covent Garden, too, and there never was a more miserable business."
In my own mind I am convinced that if we will we can always, to our great advantage and delight, keep up the enthusiasm of David Copperfield;—that to some of us the theatre, even when we know all about the fret and turmoil of the actor's life together with the tricks of the stage, may from boyhood to old age remain a Palace of Fancy.
And have we not in the heroine of these pages—Ellen Terry—the very embodiment of Fancy,—the true Princess of our Palace, one of the Queens of our little stage world? Other great artists have delighted us with the perfection of their impersonations, but there is in the method or inspiration of Ellen Terry something so ethereal that in many of her characters she stands alone.
If the drama is indeed the Cinderella of the arts, then Ellen Terry must have been touched by the magic wand of a Fairy Godmother so that she might dazzle the Prince's ballroom with her beauty, radiance, and ever fragrant sweetness, and win the admiration of his guests.
But those who thoughtlessly and even contemptuously call the drama "Cinderella" probably do not know the origin of the familiar fairy-tale—how the little kitchen maid is Ushas, the Dawn Maiden of the Aryans, and the Aurora of the Greeks; and how the Prince is the Sun, ever seeking to make the Dawn his bride; and how the envious stepmother and sisters are the Clouds and the Night, which vainly strive to keep the Sun and the Dawn apart. It is pleasant to think of Cinderella as the Dawn Maiden. Poor little lady! She has suffered considerably in her transplantation to English soil.
To me the magic word "Fancy" has ever been associated with the pure art of Ellen Terry, and whenever I see her on the stage the lines of John Keats comes rippling through my mind:—
"Oh! sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Everything is spoilt by use;
Where's the cheek that doth not fade,