alf a dozen at hazard, out of
five thousand; yet a few selections are the only way to call attention
to his strong drawing. This has a virtuosity of its own, for all
its hit-or-miss appearance. Whatever he touches--the nude, in the
swimming-baths on the Seine, the intimations of landscape, when his
_petits rentiers_ go into the suburbs for a Sunday--acquires relief and
character, Docteur Veron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-Philippe,
a Maecenas of the hour, a director of the opera, author of the _Memoires
d'un Bourgeois de Paris_--this temporary "illustration," who appears to
have been almost indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us to-day had
not Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to have
represented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of naked
inconsolable Vitellius. He renders the human body with a cynical
sense of its possible flabbiness and an intimate acquaintance with its
structure. "Une Promenade Conjugale," in the series of "Tout ce qu'on
voudra," portrays a hillside, on a summer afternoon, on which a man has
thrown himself on his back to rest, with his arms locked under his head.
His fat, full-bosomed, middle-aged wife, under her parasol, with a bunch
of field-flowers in her hand, looks down at him patiently and seems to
say, "Come, my dear, get up." There is surely no great point in this;
the only point is life, the glimpse of the little snatch of poetry in
prose. It is a matter of a few broad strokes of the crayon; yet the
pleasant laziness of the man, the idleness of the day, the fragment of
homely, familiar dialogue, the stretch of the field with a couple of
trees merely suggested, have a communicative truth.

I perhaps exaggerate all this, and in insisting upon the merit of
Daumier may appear to make light of the finer accomplishment of several
more modern talents, in England and France, who have greater ingenuity
and subtlety and have carried qualities of execution so, much further.
In looking at this complicated younger work, which has profited so by
experience and comparison, it is inevitable that we should perceive it
to be infinitely more cunning. On the other hand Daumier, moving in his
contracted circle, has an impressive depth. It comes back to his strange
seriousness. He is a draughtsman by race, and if he has not extracted
the same brilliancy from training, or perhaps even from effort and
experiment, as some of his successors, does not his richer satiric and