or perhaps simple affirmations
of taste and temper begin to multiply within it. Such things afford a
_point d'appui_; for it is evidently of the essence of caricature to be
reactionary. We hasten to add that its satiric force varies immensely in
kind and in degree according to the race, or to the individual talent,
that takes advantage of it.

I used just now the term pessimism; but that was doubtless in a
great measure because I have been turning over a collection of the
extraordinarily vivid drawings of Honore Daumier. The same impression
would remain with me, no doubt, if I had been consulting an equal
quantity of the work of Gavarni the wittiest, the most literary and most
acutely profane of all chartered mockers with the pencil. The feeling of
disrespect abides in all these things, the expression of the spirit for
which humanity is definable primarily by its weaknesses. For Daumier
these weaknesses are altogether ugly and grotesque, while for Gavarni
they are either basely graceful or touchingly miserable; but the vision
of them in both cases is close and direct. If, on the other hand, we
look through a dozen volumes of the collection of _Punch_ we get an
equal impression of hilarity, but we by no means get an equal impression
of irony. Certainly the pages of _Punch_ do not reek with pessimism;
their "criticism of life" is gentle and forbearing. Leech is positively
optimistic; there is at any rate nothing infinite in his irreverence;
it touches bottom as soon as it approaches the pretty woman or the nice
girl. It is such an apparition as this that really, in Gavarni, awakes
the scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Gavarni, but his sense of
beauty conjures away almost everything save our minor vices. It is
in the exploration of our major ones that Gavarni makes his principal
discoveries of charm or of absurdity of attitude. None the less, of
course, the general inspiration of both artists is the same: the desire
to try the innumerable different ways in which the human subject may
_not_ be taken seriously.

If this view of that subject, in its plastic manifestations, makes
history of a sort, it will not in general be of a kind to convert those
persons who find history sad reading. The writer of the present lines
remained unconverted, lately, on an occasion on which many cheerful
influences were mingled with his impression. They were of a nature to
which he usually does full justice, even overestimating perhaps thei