French painting) the general interest in æsthetic subjects which a
general subscription to academic precedent implies is certainly to be
credited with the force and genuineness of the occasional protestant
against the very system that has been powerful enough to popularize
indefinitely the subject both of subscription and of revolt. Without
some such systematic propagandism of the æsthetic cultus as from the
first the French Institute has been characterized by, it is very
doubtful if, in the complexity of modern society, the interest in
æsthetics can ever be made wide enough, universal enough, to spread
beyond those immediately and professionally concerned with it. The
immense impetus given to this interest by a central organ of authority,
that dignifies the subject with which it occupies itself and draws
attention to its value and its importance, has, _à priori_, the manifest
effect of leading persons to occupy themselves with it, also, who
otherwise would never have had their attention drawn to it. It would
scarcely be an exaggeration to say, in other words, that but for the
Institute there would not be a tithe of the number of names now on the
roll of French artists. When art is in the air--and nothing so much as
an academy produces this condition--the chances of the production of
even an unacademic artist are immensely increased.

So in the midst of the Mignardise of Louis Quinze painting it is only
superficially surprising to find a painter of the original force and
flavor of Chardin. His wholesome and yet subtle variations from the art
_à la mode_ of his epoch might have been painted in the Holland of his
day, or in our day anywhere that art so good as Chardin's can be
produced, so far as subject and moral and technical attitude are
concerned. They are, in quite accentuated contra-distinction from the
works of Greuze, thoroughly in the spirit of simplicity and directness.
One notes in them at once that moral simplicity which predisposes