gnominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid
prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater
proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or
by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not
sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered
with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain
sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get
convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost
a whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of years ago, in
which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the
invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has
gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and
the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep
at his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine
how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across
the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene
drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity,
ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old
common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one
drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she
is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all
these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was
in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really
fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from
his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is
absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that
there is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they
are not caricatures, and certainly in "Robert," the City waiter of
"Punch." But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all
Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon
her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the
social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for
her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies
and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper
the posses