works out his purpose
more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak
at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his
pictures, for the rest so just and true, how [28] Antony would have
managed this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the
thing better--done the impossible.

February 1716.

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and
not for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes
which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of
disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical
pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside
Jean-Baptiste--in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of
being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly;
but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at
last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible
change. With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteau
chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends
in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to
finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement:
he goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to re-produce.
The animals in his pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he knows it.
But he finishes a large number of works, door-heads, clavecin cases,
and the like. His happiest, his most genial moments, [29] he puts,
like savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus
magnum, as he hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising
effects with a certain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and
it must be confessed that he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of
course, should understand at least twice as well as all other
people--with surpassing expression.

March 1716.

Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting labour?
I know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he expresses a
strange apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean surroundings in old
age; reminding me of that childish disposition to hoard, which I
noticed in him of old. And then--inglorious Watteau, as he is!--at
times that steadiness, in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, as
it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, an
inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heaviness lea