ressions and
resurrections. He subsequently established the _Charivari_ and launched
a publication entitled _L'Association Lithographique Mensuelle_, which
brought to light much of Daumier's early work. The artist passed
rapidly from seeking his way to finding it, and from an ineffectual to a
vigorous form.

In this limited compass and in the case of such a quantity of production
it is almost impossible to specify--difficult to pick dozens of examples
out of thousands. Daumier became more and more the political spirit of
the _Charivari_, or at least the political pencil, for M. Philipon, the
breath of whose nostrils was opposition--one perceives from here the
little bilious, bristling, ingenious, insistent man--is to be credited
with a suggestive share in any enterprise in which he had a hand. This
pencil played over public life, over the sovereign, the ministers,
the deputies, the peers, the judiciary, the men and the measures,
the reputations and scandals of the moment, with a strange, ugly,
extravagant, but none the less sane and manly vigor. Daumier's sign is
strength above all, and in turning over his pages to-day there is no
intensity of force that the careful observer will not concede to him. It
is perhaps another matter to assent to the proposition, put forth by
his greatest admirers among his countrymen, that he is the first of
all caricaturists. To the writer of this imperfect sketch he remains
considerably less interesting than Gavarni; and/or a particular reason,
which it is difficult to express otherwise than by saying that he is too
simple. Simplicity was not Gavarni's fault, and indeed to a large
degree it was Daumier's merit. The single grossly ridiculous or almost
hauntingly characteristic thing which his figures represent is largely
the reason why they still represent life and an unlucky reality years
after the names attached to them have parted with a vivifying power.
Such vagueness has overtaken them, for the most part, and to such a thin
reverberation have they shrunk, the persons and the affairs which
were then so intensely sketchable. Daumier handled them with a want of
ceremony which would have been brutal were it not for the element of
science in his work, making them immense and unmistakable in their
drollery, or at least in their grotesqueness; for the term drollery
suggests gayety, and Daumier is anything but gay. _Un rude peintre de
moeurs_, M. Champfleury calls him; and the phrase expresses