Posturing Pierrots and smirking skeletons, goggling sphinxes and giggling cocottes, cadaverous surprises and ensanguined startlers, all the parade of nightmare and nastiness, pall upon the mind, as the phantasmagoric effects and sickly scents do upon the senses, of the visitors to the Salon Parisien. Whim and fantasy are all very delightful in their way. But this is not Wonderland, it is the world of drunken delirium and the Witches' Sabbath. A girl with emerald face, purple hair, and vivid vermilion lips, peeping between amber portières, is an inoffensive though purposeless, and not very interesting bizarrerie. But such gratuitous ghastlinesses as "Will o' the Wisp," "_Felo de se_," "_Vive la Mort!_" and particularly the offensively named "_Ecce Homo_," are simply revolting horrors. Somebody has hazarded the statement that they are Edgar-Poe-ish. Pooh! Poe was creepy sometimes, but he was an artist, an idealist, subordinating even occasional horror to the beautiful in his daring dreams. [Illustration: A FORTIORI PHILISTINE FATHER: "Why the dickens don't you paint something like Frith's 'Derby Day'--something everybody can understand, and somebody buy?" YOUNG GENIUS: "_Everybody understand_, indeed! Art is for the few, Father, and the higher the art, of course, the fewer the few. The highest art of all is for _one_. That art is mine. That _one_ is--myself!" FOND MAMMA: "There speaks my own brave boy!"] [Sidenote: _Impartial Satire_] As a rôle _Punch_ was a strong partisan in art; yet on occasion he could hold the balance. I have illustrated the change in his view of Whistler, but it never degenerated into abuse. The dialogue, "Wrestling with Whistler," suggested by the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in the spring of 1892, impartially satirizes Whistlerites, frank Philistines, and the literal and prosaic persons who were puzzled and bewildered by "arrangements," "harmonies," "symphonies" and "nocturnes." These simple souls, unable to recognize the objects depicted, were not helped by the faithful who retorted, "Ah, but it's the way he saw it!" To-day, as thirty years ago, their point of view is faithfully expressed in the unconscious irony of the serious elderly lady: I've no patience with the man. Look at Gustave Doré now. I'm sure _he_ was a beautiful artist if you _like_. Did _he_ go and call his "Leaving the Prætorium" a "Symphony" or a "Harmony," or any nonsense of that kind? Of course not--and yet look at the _difference_! It is true that the artist, like the prophet, is often "not without honour save in his own country and in his own house." The saying happily does not apply to _Punch_ and his contributors. When Richard Doyle died in 1883, more than thirty years had elapsed since he severed his connexion with the paper, but _Punch_ had never forgotten the old comrade who had designed his cover, and had been equally at home among the imps of Elfland and the swells and snobs of society:--