"Adieu!"
"No, 'au revoir.' Visits must be returned."
By Cham.
Yet to those whose sympathies were with France during the struggle of 1870-71, there is a distinct pathos in the change that is seen in the later work of Daumier—not a personal pathos, but a pathos due to the changed condition of the country which it reflects. The old dauntless audacity, the trenchant sarcasm, the mocking, light-hearted laughter, is gone. In its place is the haunting bitterness of an old man, under the burden of an impotent wrath—a man who, for all that he dips his pencil in pure vitriol, cannot do justice to the nightmare visions that beset him. There is no better commentary upon the pervading feeling of helpless anger and outraged national pride of this epoch than in these haunting designs of Daumier's. They are the work of a man tremulous with feverish indignation, weird and ghastly conceptions, such as might have emanated from the caldron of Macbeth's witches. The backgrounds are filled in with solid black, like a funeral pall; and from out the darkness the features of Bismarck, of Von Moltke, of William I., leer malevolently, distorted into hideous, ghoulish figures—vampires feasting upon the ruin they have wrought. French liberty, in the guise of a wan, emaciated, despairing figure, the personification of a wronged and outraged womanhood, haunts Daumier's pages. At one time she is standing, bound and gagged, between the gaping muzzles of two cannon marked, respectively, "Paris, 1851," and "Sedan, 1870," and underneath the laconic legend, "Histoire d'un Règne."
Souvenirs and Regrets.
By Aranda.