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To draw from the Antinous one day and the next to press one's Greek outline into service for the representation of little dancing girls and happy babies is to effect that union between art and life which makes the first moving and the second beautiful; the union in which Daumier found the source of his prodigious strength. In his early years Larsson was anything but a realist.
Nevertheless one must not look at too many of these caricatures. At first the Rabelaisian side of the man appeals; presently his bitterness becomes too acrid. Humanity is silly, repulsive; it is goat, pig, snake, monkey, and tiger; but there is something else. Daumier would see several sides. His pessimism, like Flaubert's, is deadly, but at times reaches the pitch of the heroic.
He had a quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his superiors.
Honoré Daumier was born at Marseilles February 26th, 1808; he died on the 11th of the same month, 1879. His main activity, however, was confined to the earlier portion of a career of almost exactly seventy-one years, and I find it affirmed in Vapereau's Dictionnaire des Contemporains that he became completely blind between 1850 and 1860.
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.
"If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it; he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel, he would say with a sigh, 'That is my fault." If you could show Raphael a croquis by Constantin Guys he would probably look the other way, but Degas would certainly admire and buy the drawing.
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