among us, actually at his
work-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous
malady. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliant
one? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes his
judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he
despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an
enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if
Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder,
some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from
his work at the sound of praise--as if such praise could hardly be
altogether sincere.

June 1717.

And at last one has actual sight of his work--what it is. He has
brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in
quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming
Noblesse--can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so
naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or
garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the
landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group
themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should
seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have
around them a veritable architecture--a tree-architecture--to which
those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but
accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find
myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a
wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of
the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate
children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves
will hardly outlast another generation.

July 1717.

There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academy
of Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see.

Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these
persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in
those persons and things themselves, close at hand WE had not seen. He
has enabled us to see it: we are so much the better-off thereby, and I,
for one, the better. The world he sets before us so engagingly has its
care for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what one is to SEE--in the
outsides of things-and there is something, a sign, a memento, at the
least, of what ma