im a present of a cottage at
Valmondois (Seine-et-Oise), where the illustrator died. He was blind
and lonely at the end. Corot died 1875; Daubigny, his companion, 1878;
Millet, 1875, and Rousseau, with whom he corresponded, died 1867. In
1879 Flaubert still lived, working heroically upon that monument of
human inanity, Bouvard et Pecuchet; Maupassant, his disciple, had just
published a volume of verse; Manet was regarded as a dangerous
charlatan, Monet looked on as a madman; while poor Cezanne was only a
bad joke. The indurated critical judgment of the academic forces
pronounced Bonnat a greater portraitist than Velasquez, and Gerome and
his mock antiques and mock orientalism far superior to Fromentin and
Chasseriau. It was a glorious epoch for mediocrity. And Daumier, in
whom there was something of Michael Angelo and Courbet, was admired
only as a clever caricaturist, the significance of his paintings
escaping all except a few. Corot knew, Daubigny knew, as earlier
Delacroix knew; and Balzac had said: "There is something of the
Michael Angelo in this man!"

Baudelaire, whose critical _flair_ never failed him, wrote in his
Curiosites Esthetiques: "Daumier's distinguishing note as an artist is
his certainty. His drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous
improvisation. His powers of observation are such that in his work we
never find a single head that is out of character with the figure
beneath it. ... Here, in these animalised faces, may be seen and read
clearly all the meannesses of soul, all the absurdities, all the
aberrations of intelligence, all the vices of the heart; yet at the
same time all is broadly drawn and accentuated." Nevertheless one must
not look at too many of these caricatures. At first the Rabelaisian
side of the man appeals; presently his bitterness becomes too acrid.
Humanity is silly, repulsive; it is goat, pig, snake, monkey, and
tiger; but there is something else. Daumier would see several sides.
His pessimism, like Flaubert's, is deadly, but at times reaches the
pitch of the heroic. He could have echoed Flaubert's famous sentence:
"The ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." Yet what wit, what
humour, what humanity in Daumier! His Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are
worth a wilderness of Dores. And the Good Samaritan or The Drinkers.
The latter is as jovial as Steen or Hals.

A story went the rounds after his death which neatly illustrates his
lack of worldliness. His modesty was prover