except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and
soft "St. Scholastica" in the _Salon Carré_. With more sapience and less
sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, to say which is
certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.
He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and
elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an æsthetic delicacy
that he exhibits, and æsthetically he exercises his sweeter and more
sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circumscribe
that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less
sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no
greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more
agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of
variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is,
that both equally illustrate the classic spirit, the spirit of their age
_par excellence_ and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree,
though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other
passive, so to say; and that neither illustrates quite the subserviency
to the conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many
conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in
particular.


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,