still lived, working heroically upon that monument of human inanity, Bouvard et Pecuchet; Maupassant, his disciple, had just published a volume of verse; Manet was regarded as a dangerous charlatan, Monet looked on as a madman; while poor Cezanne was only a bad joke.  The indurated critical judgment of the academic forces pronounced Bonnat a greater portraitist than Velasquez, and Gerome and his mock antiques and mock orientalism far superior to Fromentin and Chasseriau.  It was a glorious epoch for mediocrity.  And Daumier, in whom there was something of Michael Angelo and Courbet, was admired only as a clever caricaturist, the significance of his paintings escaping all except a few.  Corot knew, Daubigny knew, as earlier Delacroix knew; and Balzac had said:  “There is something of the Michael Angelo in this man!”

Baudelaire, whose critical flair never failed him, wrote in his Curiosites Esthetiques:  “Daumier’s distinguishing note as an artist is his certainty.  His drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous improvisation.  His powers of observation are such that in his work we never find a single head that is out of character with the figure beneath it. ...  Here, in these animalised faces, may be seen and read clearly all the meannesses of soul, all the absurdities, all the aberrations of intelligence, all the vices of the heart; yet at the same time all is broadly drawn and accentuated.”  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 could have echoed Flaubert’s famous sentence:  “The ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope.”  Yet what wit, what humour, what humanity in Daumier!  His Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are worth a wilderness of Dores.  And the Good Samaritan or The Drinkers.  The latter is as jovial as Steen or Hals.

A story went the rounds after his death which neatly illustrates his lack of worldliness.  His modesty was proverbial, and once Daubigny, on introducing him to an American picture dealer, warned him not to ask less than five thousand francs for the first picture he sold to the man.  The American went to Daumier’s atelier, and seeing a picture on the easel, asked, “How much?” The artist, remembering Daubigny’s warning, answered, “Five thousand francs.”  The dealer immediately bought it, and on demanding to see something else, Daumier put another canvas on the easel, far superior to the one sold.  The Yankee again asked the price.  The poor artist was perplexed.  He had received no instructions from Daubigny regarding a second sale; so when the question was repeated he hesitated, and his timidity getting the better of him, he replied:  “Five hundred francs.”  “Don’t want