if it has been a dream, how could I have
learned to hum that tune out of _Dinorah?_ Ah, is it that tune, or
myself that I am humming? If it was a dream how comes this yellow NOTICE
DES TABLEAUX DU MUSEE D'AMSTERDAM AVEC FASCIMILE DES MONOGRAMMES before
me, and this signature of the gallant

Bartholomeus van der Helst fecit A; 1648.

Yes, indeed, it was a delightful little holiday; it lasted a whole
week.

_Roundabout Papers_ (London, 1863).

L'EMBARQUEMENT POUR L'ILE DE CYTHERE

(_WATTEAU_)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT

Watteau is the great poet of the Eighteenth Century. A creation, a whole
creation of poetry and dreams, emanated from his brain and filled his
work with the elegance of a supernatural life. From the fantasies of his
brain, from the caprice of his art, from his perfectly original genius,
not one but a thousand fairies took their flight. From the enchanted
visions of his imagination, the painter has drawn an ideal world, and,
superior to his own time, he has created one of those Shakespearian
realms, one of those countries of love and light, one of those paradises
of gallantry that Polyphile built upon the cloud of dreams for the
delicate joy of poetic mortals.

Watteau revived grace. Grace with Watteau is not the antique grace--a
rigid and solid charm, the perfection of the marble of a Galatea, the
entirely plastic and the material glory of a Venus. Grace with Watteau
is grace. It is that nothing that invests a woman with an attraction, a
coquetry, a more than physical beauty. It is that subtile quality which
seems the smile of a line, the soul of form, the spiritual physiognomy
of matter.

[Illustration: L'EMBARQUEMENT POUR L'ILE DE CYTHERE.
_Watteau._]

All the fascinations of a woman in repose: languor, idleness, abandon,
leaning back, reclining at full length, nonchalance, the cadences of
pose, the pretty air of profiles bending over the scales of love
(_gammes d'amour_), the receding curves of the bosom, the serpentine
lines and undulations, the suppleness of the female body, the play of
slender fingers on the handle of a fan and the indiscretions of high
heels beyond the skirts, and the happy fortune of deportment, and the
coquetry of actions, and the management of the shoulders, and all that
knowledge that was taught to women by the mirrors of the last
century,--the mimicry of grace!--lives in Watteau with its blossom and
its accent, immortal and fixed in a more