ctive qualities."

Gustave Kahn, the symbolist poet who was introduced to the English
reading world in one of the most eloquent pages of George Moore,
thinks that Legrand is frankly a symbolist. We side with Mauclair in
not trying to pin this etcher down to any particular formula. He is
anything he happens to will at the moment, symbolist, poet, and also
shockingly frank at times. Take the plate with a pun for a title, Le
paing quotidien ("paing" is slang for "poing," a blow from the fist,
and may also mean the daily bread). A masculine brute is with clinched
fist about to give his unfortunate partner her daily drubbing. He is
well dressed. His silk hat is shiny, his mustache curled in the true
Adolphe fashion. His face is vile. The woman cries aloud and protects
herself with her hands. In Marthe Baraquin, by Rosny senior, you will
find the material for this picture, though Legrand found it years ago
in the streets. Unpleasant, truly, yet a more potent sermon on man's
cruelty to woman than may be found in a dozen preachments, fictions,
or the excited outpourings at a feminist congress. Legrand presents
the facts of the case without comment, except the irony--such dismal
irony!--of the title. In this he is the true pupil of Rops.

However, he does not revel long among such dreary slices of life. The
Poe illustrations are grotesque and shuddering, but after all make
believe. The plate of The Black Cat piles horror on horror's head
(literally, for the demon cat perches on the head of the corpse) and
is, all said, pictorial melodrama. The Berenice illustration is, we
confess, a little too much for the nerves, simply because in a
masterly manner Legrand has exposed the most dreadful moment of the
story (untold by Poe, who could be an artist in his tact of omission).
The dental smile of the cataleptic Berenice as her necrophilic cousin
bends over the coffin is a testimony to a needle that in this instance
matches Goya's and Rops's in its evocation of the horrific. We turn
with relief to the ballet-girl series. The impression gained from this
album is that Legrand sympathises with, nay loves, his subject. Degas,
the greater and more objective artist, nevertheless allows to sift
through his lines an inextinguishable hatred of these girls who labour
so long for so little; and Degas did hate them, as he hated all that
was ugly in daily life, though he set forth this ugliness, this
mediocrity, this hatred in terms of beautiful ar