It was Nature in bondage: 'green architecture,' with all its parts,
walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and theatres
with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with
full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats
and hair in towers, played at private theatricals.

Where water was available, water devices were added. And in the midst
of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced: the story
of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and Atalanta in
another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the walls and
niches. And the people were like their gardens both in dress and
manners; imposing style was everything.

Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV. The great periwig shrivelled
to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of Lenotre's
grandezza.

'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took
its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the
time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and
people were unnatural and affected--mere inventions to suit the
gallant _fêtes_. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with
the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a
glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's rosy-blue
landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. His world
had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that
its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the
period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of
the idyllic--witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's brightest
pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path--the path it