Brenet, fare as ill at his hands as they deserved to do. He remarks
incidentally that the condition of the bad painter and the bad actor is
worse than that of the bad man of letters: the painter hears with his
own ears the expressions of contempt for his talent, and the hisses of
the audience go straight to the ears of the actor, whereas the author
has the comfort of going to his grave without a suspicion that you have
cried out at every page: "_The fool, the animal, the jackass!_" and have
at length flung his book into a corner. There is nothing to prevent the
worst author, as he sits alone in his library, and reads himself over
and over again, from congratulating himself on being the originator of a
host of rare and felicitous ideas.[38]

[37] xii. 8, 79.

[38] xi. 149.

The one painter whom Diderot never spares is Boucher, who was an idol of
the time, and made an income of fifty thousand livres a year out of his
popularity. He laughs at him as a mere painter of fans, an artist with
no colours on his palette save white and red. He admits the fecundity,
the _fougue_, the ease of Boucher, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds admits
his grace and beauty and good skill in composition.[39] Boucher, says
Diderot, is in painting what Ariosto is in poetry, and he who admires
the one is inconsistent if he is not mad for the other. What is wanting
is disciplined taste, more variety, more severity. Yet he cannot refuse
to concede about one of Boucher's pictures that after all he would be
glad to possess it. Every time you saw it, he says, you would find fault
with it, yet you would go on looking at it.[40] This is perhaps what the
severest modern amateur, as he strolls carelessly through the French
school at his leisure, would not in his heart care to deny.

[39] See Reynolds's Twelfth Discourse, p. 106.

[40] x. 102.

Fragonard, whose picture of Coresus and Callirrhoe made a great
sensation in its day, and still attracts some small share of attention
in the French school, was not a favourite with Diderot. The Callirrhoe
inspired an elaborate but not very felicitous criticism. Then the
painter changed his style in the direction of Boucher, and as far away
as possible from _l'honnete_ and _le beau moral_, and Diderot turned
away from him; at last describing an oval picture representing groups of
children in heaven as "_une belle et grande omelette d'enfants_," heads,
legs, thighs, arms, bodies, all interlaced toget