ll they could have been called upon to think of
painting. What a distinction is, after all, theirs! To have created out
of nothing, or next to nothing, something charming, and enduringly
charming; something of a truly classic inspiration without dependence
at bottom on the real and the actual; something as little indebted to
facts and things as a fairy tale, and withal marked by such qualities as
color and cleverness in so eminent a degree.

The Louis Quinze painters may be said, indeed, to have had the romantic
temperament with the classic inspiration. They have audacity rather than
freedom, license modified by strict limitation to the lines within which
it is exercised. But there can be no doubt that this limitation is more
conspicuous in their charmingly irresponsible works than is, essentially
speaking, their irresponsibility itself. They never give their
imagination free play. Sportive and spontaneous as it appears, it is
equally clear that its activities are bounded by conservatory confines.
Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is almost an exception. Temperament
in him seems constantly on the verge of conquering tradition and
environment. Now and then he seems to be on the point of emancipation,
and one expects to come upon some work in which he has expressed himself
and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly disappointed. His
color and his cleverness are always admirable and winning, but his
import is perversely--almost bewitchingly--slight. What was he thinking
of? one asks, before his delightful canvases; and one's conclusion
inevitably is, certainly as near nothing at all as can be consistent
with so much charm and so much real power. As to Watteau, one's last
thought is of what he would have been in a different aesthetic
atmosphere, in an atmosphere that would have stimulated his really
romantic temperament to extra-traditional flights, instead of confining
it within the inexorable boundaries of classic custom; an atmosphere
favorable to the free exercise of his adorable fancy, instead of
rigorously insistent on conforming this, so far as might be, to
customary canons, and, at any rate, restricting its exercise to material
_a la mode_. A little landscape in the La Caze collection in the Louvre,
whose romantic and truly poetic feeling agreeably pierces through its
elegance, is eloquent of such reflections.

V

With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a
sphere of thought a