e. Their successors but follow in their steps.
In their work, says a clever German critic, is to be found no vestige
of the "sour bilious temper of John Bull" that pervaded the pictures
of Hogarth and Rowlandson. Charles Keene (1823-1891) and Du Maurier
(1834-1896), he declares, are not caricaturists or satirists, but
amiable and tenderly grave observers of life, friendly optimists. The
characterization is truer of Keene, perhaps, than of Du Maurier.
Charles Keene's sketches are almost always cheerful; almost without
exception they make you smile or laugh. In many of Du Maurier's, on
the other hand, there is an underlying seriousness. While Keene looks
on at life with easy tolerance, an amused spectator, Du Maurier shows
himself sensitive, emotional, sympathetic, taking infinite delight in
what is pretty and gay and charming, but hurt and offended by the
sordid and the ugly. Thus while Keene takes things dispassionately as
they come, seeing only the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier
ever and anon attacking some new phase of snobbishness or philistinism
or cant. For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is
at times as unrelenting a satirist as Rowlandson. The other _Punch_
artists, whose work is in the same field, resemble Keene in this
respect rather than Du Maurier. Mr Leonard Raven-Hill recalls Charles
Keene not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he
finds his subjects principally in _bourgeois_ life. Mr J. Bernard
Partridge, though, like Du Maurier, he has an eye for physical beauty,
is a spectator rather than a critic of life, yet he has made his mark
as a "cartoonist." Phil May (d. 1903), a modern Touchstone, is less
easily classified. Though he wears the cap and bells, he is alive to
the pity of things; he sees the pathos no less than the humour of his
street-boys and "gutter-snipes." He is, however, a jester primarily:
an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others stand out as masters
of the art of social caricature--Frederick Barnard and Mr J.F.
Sullivan. Barnard's illustrations to Dickens, like his original
sketches, have a lively humour--the humour of irrepressible high
spirits--and endless invention. High spirits and invention are
characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. It is at the British artisan and
petty tradesman--at the grocer given to adulteration and the plumber
who outstays his welcome--that