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