tic ideal that has been their dream.
Assuredly humanity, as this great painter saw it, could not be
beautiful; one asks one's self what maiden in her teens, a pretty face,
would have done in the midst of these good, plain folk, stunted and
elderly, with faces like wrinkled apples. A simple accessory most of
the time, woman is for him merely a termagant or a blue-stocking who has
turned the corner."

When the eternal feminine, for Daumier appears in neither of these
forms he sees it in Madame Chaboulard or Madame Fribochon, the old
snuff-taking, gossiping portress, in a nightcap and shuffling _savates_,
relating or drinking in the wonderful and the intimate. One of his
masterpieces represents three of these dames, lighted by a guttering
candle, holding their heads together to discuss the fearful earthquake
at Bordeaux, the consequence of the government's allowing the surface
of the globe to be unduly dug out in California. The representation of
confidential imbecility could not go further. When a man leaves out so
much of life as Daumier--youth and beauty and the charm of woman and the
loveliness of childhood and the manners of those social groups of
whom it may most be said that they _have_ manners--when he exhibits a
deficiency on this scale it might seem that the question was not to be
so easily disposed of as in the very non-apologetic words I have just
quoted. All the same (and I confess it is singular), we may feel what
Daumier omitted and yet not be in the least shocked by the claim of
predominance made for him. It is impossible to spend a couple of hours
over him without assenting to this claim, even though there may be a
weariness in such a panorama of ugliness and an inevitable reaction
from it. This anomaly, and the challenge to explain it which appears to
proceed from him, render him, to my sense, remarkably interesting. The
artist whose idiosyncrasies, whose limitations, if you will, make
us question and wonder, in the light of his fame, has an element
of fascination not attaching to conciliatory talents. If M. Eugene
Montrosier may say of him without scandalizing us that such and such
of his drawings belong to the very highest art, it is interesting (and
Daumier profits by the interest) to put one's finger on the reason we
are not scandalized.

I think this reason is that, on the whole he is so peculiarly serious.
This may seem an odd ground of praise for a jocose draughtsman, and of
course what I mean is