_Roundabout Papers_ (London, 1863).




L'EMBARQUEMENT POUR L'ÎLE DE CYTHÈRE

(_WATTEAU_)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT


Watteau is the great poet of the Eighteenth Century. A creation, a whole
creation of poetry and dreams, emanated from his brain and filled his
work with the elegance of a supernatural life. From the fantasies of his
brain, from the caprice of his art, from his perfectly original genius,
not one but a thousand fairies took their flight. From the enchanted
visions of his imagination, the painter has drawn an ideal world, and,
superior to his own time, he has created one of those Shakespearian
realms, one of those countries of love and light, one of those paradises
of gallantry that Polyphile built upon the cloud of dreams for the
delicate joy of poetic mortals.

Watteau revived grace. Grace with Watteau is not the antique grace--a
rigid and solid charm, the perfection of the marble of a Galatea, the
entirely plastic and the material glory of a Venus. Grace with Watteau
is grace. It is that nothing that invests a woman with an attraction, a
coquetry, a more than physical beauty. It is that subtile quality which
seems the smile of a line, the soul of form, the spiritual physiognomy
of matter.