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,