nd feeling that the change has been called a "return
to nature"--that "return to nature" of which we hear so much in
histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is
not quite sound. Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to
stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting,
whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of
the classic spirit in the French aesthetic nature than is furnished by
Greuze. The first French painter of _genre_, in the full modern sense of
the term, the first true interpreter of scenes from humble life--of
lowly incident and familiar situations, of broken jars and paternal
curses, and buxom girls and precocious children--he certainly is. There
is certainly nothing _regence_ about him. But the beginning and end of
Greuze's art is convention. He is less imaginative, less romantic, less
real than the painting his replaced. That was at least a mirror of the
ideals, the spirit, the society, of the day. A Louis Quinze fan is a
genuine and spontaneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic impulse
beside one of his stereotyped sentimentalities.

The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly
a natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is
never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this
description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely
of the _litterateur_, but of the extremely conventional _litterateur_.
An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it
doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it
deals. Greuze's _genre_ is really a _genre_ of his own--his own and that
of kindred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached as the art of
Poussin. The forms it embodies merely have more natural, more familiar
associations. But compare one of his compositions with those of the
little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feeling, nature handled
after her own suggestions, instead of within limits and on lines imposed
upon her from without. By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, for example,
one of Greuze's bits of humble life seems like an academic composition,
quite out of touch with its subject, and, except for its art, absolutely
lifeless and insipid.

In a word, his choice of subjects, of _genre_, is really no disguise at
all of his essential classicality. Both ideally and technically, in th