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.