nsuccessfully try to
remember what they were eminent _for_. And the comparative obscurity
(comparative, I mean, to the talent of the caricaturist) overtakes even
the most justly honored names. M. Berryer was a splendid speaker and a
public servant of real distinction and the highest utility; yet the fact
that to-day his name is on few men's lips seems to be emphasized by this
other fact that we continue to pore over Daumier, in whose plates we
happen to come across him. It reminds one afresh how Art is an embalmer,
a magician, whom we can never speak too fair. People duly impressed with
this truth are sometimes laughed at for their superstitious tone, which
is pronounced, according to the fancy of the critic, mawkish, maudlin or
hysterical. But it is really difficult to see how any reiteration of
the importance of art can overstate the plain facts. It prolongs, it
preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. It conciliates,
charms, bribes posterity; and it murmurs to mortals, as the old French
poet sang to his mistress, "You will be fair only so far as I have said
so." When it whispers even to the great, "You depend upon me, and I can
do more for you, in the long-run, than any one else," it is scarcely too
proud. It puts method and power and the strange, real, mingled air
of things into Daumier's black sketchiness, so full of the technical
_gras_, the "fat" which French critics commend and which we have no
word to express. It puts power above all, and the effect which he
best achieves, that of a certain simplification of the attitude or the
gesture to an almost symbolic generality. His persons represent only one
thing, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of it
abides with us, unaccompanied with timid detail. It may really be said
that they represent only one class--the old and ugly; so that there is
proof enough of a special faculty in his having played such a concert,
lugubrious though it be, on a single chord. It has been made a reproach
to him, says M. Grand-Carteret, that "his work is lacking in two capital
elements--_la jeunesse et la femme_;" and the commentator resents his
being made to suffer for the deficiency--"as if an artist could be at
the same time deep, comic, graceful and pretty; as if all those who have
a real value had not created for themselves a form to which they remain
confined and a type which they reproduce in all its variations, as soon
as they have touched the aesthe