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 possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts—­the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—­has passed, leaving one trace only:  the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.  But the vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English—­the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of many another—­and it was not able to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France.  It was the chief immorality destroyed by the French novel.

THE POINT OF HONOUR

Not without significance is the Spanish nationality of Velasquez.  In Spain was the Point put upon Honour; and Velasquez was the first Impressionist.  As an Impressionist he claimed, implicitly if not explicitly, a whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness; he made an appeal to the confidence of his peers; he relied on his own candour, and asked that the candid should rely upon him; he kept the chastity of art when other masters were content with its honesty, and when others saved artistic conscience he safeguarded the point of honour.  Contemporary masters more or less proved their position, and convinced the world by something of demonstration; the first Impressionist simply asked that his word should be accepted.  To those who would not take his word he offers no bond.  To those who will, he grants the distinction of a share in his responsibility.