IV

Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by contrast with that of Louis

Quatorze, it, too, is essentially classic. It is free enough--no one, I

think, would deny that--but it is very far from individual in any

important sense. It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of

Lesueur or Lebrun. The artist's susceptibility seems to come to the

surface for the first time. Watteau, Fragonard--Fragonard especially,

the exquisite and impudent--are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as

vivacious as Boldini. Boucher's goddesses and cherubs, disporting

themselves in graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined

in cumulus masses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and

independent of prescription as Monticelli's figures. Lancret, Pater,

Nattier, and Van Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a

sportive and abandoned license. But in what a narrow round they move!

How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality! What a

talent, what a genius they have for artificiality. It is the era _par

excellence_ of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than

dilettantism. Their evident feeling--and evidently genuine feeling--is

feeling for the factitious, for the manufactured, for what the French

call the _confectionné_. Their romantic quality is to that of the modern

Fontainebleau group as the exquisite _vers de société_ of Mr. Austin

Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or

Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a

frame. All their material is traditional. They simply handle it as

_enfants terribles_. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a

silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They are as barren of

invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a

sense, the originators of a new phase. Their originality is arrived at

rather through exclusion than discovery. They simply drop pedantry and

exult in irresponsibility. They are hardly even a school.

Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct

quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine. They are

as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when

we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of everything thus indicated one

predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought

modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one's

thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully,

whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of one's action

have been settled by more laborious, more conscientious philosophy than

in such circumstances one feels disposed to frame for one's self. There

is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, not a symptom of revolt;

only, after them the deluge! But out of this very condition of things,

and out of this attitude of mind, arises a new art, or rather a new

phase of art, essentially classic, as I said, but nevertheless imbued

with a character of its own, and this character distinctly charming.

Wherein does the charm consist? In two qualities, I think, one of which

has not hitherto appeared in French painting, or, indeed, in any art

whatever, namely, what we understand by cleverness as a distinct element

in treatment--and color. Color is very prominent nowadays in all writing

about art, though recently it has given place, in the fashion of the

day, to "values" and the realistic representation of natural objects as

the painter's proper aim. What precisely is meant by color would be

difficult, perhaps, to define. A warmer general tone than is achieved by

painters mainly occupied with line and mass is possibly what is oftenest

meant by amateurs who profess themselves fond of color. At all events,

the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Fragonard, and Pater--and

Boucher has a great deal of the same feeling--were sensitive to that

vibration of atmosphere that blends local hues into the _ensemble_ that

produces tone. The _ensemble_ of their tints is what we mean by color.

Since the Venetians _this_ note had not appeared. They constitute, thus,

a sort of romantic interregnum--still very classic, from an intellectual

point of view--between the classicism of Lebrun and the still greater

severity of David. Nothing in the evolution of French painting is more

interesting than this reverberation of Tintoretto and Tiepolo.

By cleverness, as exhibited by the Louis Quinze painters, I do not mean

mere technical ability, but something more inclusive, something relating

quite as much to attitude of mind as to dexterity of treatment. They

conceive as cleverly as they execute. There is a sense of confidence and

capability in the way they view, as well as in the way they handle,

their light material. They know it thoroughly, and are thoroughly at one

with it. And they exploit it with a serene air of satisfaction, as if

it were the only material in the world worth handling. Indeed, it is

exquisitely adapted to their talent. So little significance has it that

one may say it exists merely to be cleverly dealt with, to be

represented, distributed, compared, and generally utilized solely with

reference to the display of the artist's jaunty skill. It is, one may

say, merely the raw material for the production of an effect, and an

effect demanding only what we mean by cleverness; no knowledge and love

of nature, no prolonged study, no acquaintance with the antique, for

example, no philosophy whatever--unless poco-curantism be called a

philosophy, which eminently it is not. To be adequate to the

requirements--rarely very exacting in any case--made of one, never to

show stupidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinctive feeling

for what is elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at

once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be

clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as

they certainly are the typical, clever artists.

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing

to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness,

and really a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as they

paint their pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill

in the composition of sensation-provoking combinations--combinations,

thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind.

When you stand before one of Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly

modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the

color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides

exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues

and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just

poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a

detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in

addition, that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of

cleverness; that it is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an

environment wholly attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence,

facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse

qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is

concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis

Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was

artificial--that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to

paint; at least all 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 æsthetic

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

_à 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 and 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 æsthetic 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 _régence_ 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 æsthetic 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 _littérateur_, but of the extremely conventional _littérateur_.

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 the

way he conceives and the way he handles his subject, he is only

superficially romantic or real. His literature, so to speak, is as

conventional as his composition. One may compare him to Hogarth, though

both as a moralist and a technician _a longo intervallo_, of course. He

is assuredly not to be depreciated. His scheme of color is clear if not

rich, his handling is frank if not unctuous or subtly interesting, his

composition is careful and clever, and some of his heads are admirably

painted--painted with a genuine feeling for quality. But his merits as

well as his failings are decidedly academic, and as a romanticist he is

really masquerading. He is much nearer to Fragonard than he is to

Edouard Frère even.

Chardin, on the other hand, is the one distinguished exception to the

general character of French art in the artificial and intellectual

eighteenth century. He is as natural as a Dutchman, and as modern as

Vollon. As you walk through the French galleries of the Louvre, of all

the canvases antedating our own era his are those toward which one feels

the most sympathetic attraction, I think. You note at once his

individuality, his independence of schools and traditions, his personal

point of view, his preoccupation with the object as he perceives it.

Nothing is more noteworthy in the history of French art, in the current

of which the subordination of the individual genius to the general

consensus is so much the rule, than the occasional exception--now of a

single man, now of a group of men, destined to become in its turn a

school--the occasional accent or interruption of the smooth course of

slow development on the lines of academic precedent. Tyrannical as

academic precedent is (and nowhere has it been more tyrannical than in

French painting) the general interest in æsthetic subjects which a

general subscription to academic precedent implies is certainly to be

credited with the force and genuineness of the occasional protestant

against the very system that has been powerful enough to popularize

indefinitely the subject both of subscription and of revolt. Without

some such systematic propagandism of the æsthetic cultus as from the

first the French Institute has been characterized by, it is very

doubtful if, in the complexity of modern society, the interest in

æsthetics can ever be made wide enough, universal enough, to spread

beyond those immediately and professionally concerned with it. The

immense impetus given to this interest by a central organ of authority,

that dignifies the subject with which it occupies itself and draws

attention to its value and its importance, has, _à priori_, the manifest

effect of leading persons to occupy themselves with it, also, who

otherwise would never have had their attention drawn to it. It would

scarcely be an exaggeration to say, in other words, that but for the

Institute there would not be a tithe of the number of names now on the

roll of French artists. When art is in the air--and nothing so much as

an academy produces this condition--the chances of the production of

even an unacademic artist are immensely increased.

So in the midst of the Mignardise of Louis Quinze painting it is only

superficially surprising to find a painter of the original force and

flavor of Chardin. His wholesome and yet subtle variations from the art

_à la mode_ of his epoch might have been painted in the Holland of his

day, or in our day anywhere that art so good as Chardin's can be

produced, so far as subject and moral and technical attitude are

concerned. They are, in quite accentuated contra-distinction from the

works of Greuze, thoroughly in the spirit of simplicity and directness.

One notes in them at once that moral simplicity which predisposes

everyone to sympathetic appreciation. The special ideas of his time seem

to pass him by unmoved. He has no community of interest with them. While

he was painting his still life and domestic genre, the whole fantastic

whirl of Louis Quinze society, with its æsthetic standards and

accomplishments--accomplishments and standards that imposed themselves

everywhere else--was in agitated movement around him without in the

least affecting his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure.

There can rarely have been such an instance as he affords of an artist's

selecting from his environment just those things his own genius needed,

and rejecting just what would have hampered or distracted him. He is as

sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and unpretending as the most literal

and unimaginative Dutchman of his time or before it; but he has also

that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding the common and

unclean which always seem to prevent French painters from "sinking with

their subject," as Dutch painters have been said to do. He seems never

to let himself go either in the direction of Greuze's literary and

sentimental manipulation of his homely material, or in the direction of

supine satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and unelevated by an

individual point of view, illustrated by the Brauers and Steens and

Ostades. One perceives that what he cared for was really art itself, for

the æsthetic aspect and significance of the life he painted.

Affectionate as his interest in it evidently was, he as evidently

thought of its artistic potentialities, its capability of being treated

with refinement and delicacy, and of being made to serve the ends of

beauty equally well with the conventionally beautiful material of his

fan-painting contemporaries. He looked at the world very originally

through and over those round, horn-bowed spectacles of his, with a very

shrewd and very kindly and sympathetic glance, too; quite untinctured

with prejudice or even predisposition. One can read his artistic

isolation in his countenance with a very little exercise of fancy.