had the further privilege of drawing forth some prodigies of purblind
criticism. Works of this character are a genuine service; after the
short-lived gibes of the profane have subsided, they are found to have
cleared the air. They remind people that the faculty of taking a direct,
independent, unborrowed impression is not altogether lost.

In this very rapid review I have accompanied Mr. Sargent to a very
recent date. If I have said that observers encumbered with a nervous
temperament may at any moment have been anxious about his future, I have
it on my conscience to add that the day has not yet come for a complete
extinction of this anxiety. Mr. Sargent is so young, in spite of the
place allotted to him in these pages, so often a record of long careers
and uncontested triumphs that, in spite also of the admirable works he
has already produced, his future is the most valuable thing he has
to show. We may still ask ourselves what he will do with it, while we
indulge the hope that he will see fit to give successors to the two
pictures which I have spoken of emphatically as his finest. There is
no greater work of art than a great portrait--a truth to be constantly
taken to heart by a painter holding in his hands the weapon that Mr.
Sargent wields. The gift that he possesses he possesses completely--the
immediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside the
question of the subject (and to a great portrait a common sitter will
doubtless not always contribute), the highest result is achieved when
to this element of quick perception a certain faculty of brooding
reflection is added. I use this name for want of a better, and I mean
the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject,
undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not
on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in
short, enlarges and humanizes the technical problem.

HONORE DAUMIER

AS we attempt, at the present day, to write the history of everything,
it would be strange if we had happened to neglect the annals of
caricature; for the very essence of the art of Cruikshank and Gavarni,
of Daumier and Leech, is to be historical; and every one knows how
addicted is this great science to discoursing about itself. Many
industrious seekers, in England and France, have ascended the stream
of time to the source of the modern movement of pictorial satire. The
stream of time is in this case ma