that his comic force is serious--a very different
thin from the absence of comedy. This essential sign of the caricaturist
may surely be anything it will so long as it is there. Daumier's figures
are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened,
mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of
the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost
tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is
carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series
of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and
scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have
an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier
reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is
the very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolute
bourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without poetic
ironies, to whom a big cracked mirror has been given. His thick, strong,
manly touch stands, in every way, for so much knowledge. He used to make
little images, in clay and in wax (many of them still exist), of
the persons he was in the habit of representing, so that they might
constantly seem to be "sitting" for him. The caricaturist of that day
had not the help of the ubiquitous photograph. Daumier painted actively,
as well, in his habitation, all dedicated to work, on the narrow island
of St. Louis, where the Seine divides and where the monuments of old
Paris stand thick, and the types that were to his purpose pressed close
upon him. He had not far to go to encounter the worthy man, in the
series of "Les Papas," who is reading the evening paper at the cafe
with so amiable and placid a credulity, while his unnatural little boy,
opposite to him, finds sufficient entertainment in the much-satirized
_Constitutionnel_. The bland absorption of the papa, the face of the man
who believes everything he sees in the newspaper, is as near as Daumier
often comes to positive gentleness of humor. Of the same family is the
poor gentleman, in "Actualites," seen, in profile, under a doorway where
he has taken refuge from a torrent of rain, who looks down at his neat
legs with a sort of speculative contrition and says. "To think of
my having just ordered two pairs of white trousers." The _tout petit
bourgeois_ palpitates in both these sketches.

I must repeat that it is absurd to pick h