Ethel. "Isn't it sad, Arthur? There's the drawing-room cleared for a dance, and all the dolls ready to begin, only they've got no partners!"
Arthur. "Well, Ethel! There's the four gentlemen in my Noah's Ark; but they don't look as if they cared very much about dancing, you know!" (February 24, 1872).
Ethel. "And O, Mamma, do you know as we were coming along we saw a horrid woman with a red striped shawl drink something out of a bottle, and then hand it to some men. I'm sure she was tipsy."
Beatrice (who always looks on the best side of things). "Perhaps it was only Castor Oil, after all!"
A whispered appeal. "Mamma! Mamma! don't scold him any more, it makes the room so dark."
It is the poetry of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of childhood. For instance, the large drawing "Farewell to Fair Normandy" (October 2, 1880), extending across two full pages of Punch, in which the children away for their seaside holiday leave the sands for the last time in a mournful procession. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud. Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene. It has been said that "there is only one art," and this seems to be proved on great occasions by those who can command more than one art for the expression of their feelings. It is difficult to say where in this picture the artist in du Maurier gives place to the poet, as difficult as it is to say before a picture of Rossetti.
Illustration for "Wives and Daughters" The Cornhill, 1865.
Sometimes du Maurier even depicted delightful children as the victims of the fashionable crazes that he loved to attack, and thus we are brought to another series of dialogues—as a rule though only involving the "grown-ups"—in which the legend and the type of person depicted, together, form a most valuable document of the times. There is for instance the China mania—in the following in the incipient stage:—
"O Mamma! O! O! N—N—Nurse has given me my C—C—Cod-liver Oil out of a p—p—plain white mug" (December 26, 1874).
Then the inimitable colloquies of the æsthetes—and especially the now famous one about the six-mark tea-pot.
Aesthetic Bridegroom. "It is quite consummate, is it not?"
Intense Bride. "It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!"