inly the stream of journalism; for
social and political caricature, as the present century has practised
it, is only journalism made doubly vivid.

The subject indeed is a large one, if we reflect upon it, for many
people would tell us that journalism is the greatest invention of our
age. If this rich affluent has shared the great fortune of the general
torrent, so, on other sides, it touches the fine arts, touches manners,
touches morals. All this helps to account for its inexhaustible
life; journalism is the criticism of the moment _at_ the moment, and
caricature is that criticism at once simplified and intensified by a
plastic form. We know the satiric image as periodical, and above all as
punctual--the characteristics of the printed sheet with which custom has
at last inveterately associated it.

This, by-the-way, makes us wonder considerably at the failure of
caricature to achieve, as yet, a high destiny in America--a failure
which might supply an occasion for much explanatory discourse, much
searching of the relations of things. The newspaper has been taught
to flourish among us as it flourishes nowhere else, and to flourish
moreover on a humorous and irreverent basis; yet it has never taken to
itself this helpful concomitant of an unscrupulous spirit and a quick
periodicity. The explanation is probably that it needs an old society to
produce ripe caricature. The newspaper thrives in the United States, but
journalism languishes; for the lively propagation of news is one thing
and the large interpretation of it is another. A society has to be old
before it becomes critical, and it has to become critical before it can
take pleasure in the reproduction of its incongruities by an instrument
as impertinent as the indefatigable crayon. Irony, scepticism, pessimism
are, in any particular soil, plants of gradual growth, and it is in the
art of caricature that they flower most aggressively. Furthermore they
must be watered by education--I mean by the education of the eye and
hand--all of which things take time. The soil must be rich too, the
incongruities must swarm. It is open to doubt whether a pure democracy
is very liable to make this particular satiric return upon itself; for
which it would seem tha' certain social complications are indispensable.
These complications are supplied from the moment a democracy becomes,
as we may say, impure from its own point of view; from the moment
variations and heresies, deviations