methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched and
powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own satisfaction,
partly because he despises it; if this be a possible condition of
excellent artistic production. People talk of a new era now dawning upon
the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a novel sort of social
freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart will blossom at a
thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in
an infinite, benevolent ease of life--yes! perhaps of infinite littleness
also. And it is the outward manner of that, which, partly by anticipation,
and through pure intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together
with a flattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of
the old time--that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of
which he carries on his physiognomy--he dignifies, by what in him is
neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential
insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its mere
pettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh, animated,
"piquant," as they love to say--yes! and withal, I repeat, perfectly pure,
and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a fallacious grace, not
its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals
with that world under a fascination, of the nature of which he is
half-conscious methinks, puzzled at "the queer trick he possesses," to use
his own phrase. You see him growing ever more and more meagre, as he goes
through the world and its applause. Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity
the secret of an adjustment of colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I
know not what air of real superiority on such things. He will never
overcome his early training; and these light things will possess for him
always a kind of representative or borrowed worth, as characterising that
impossible or forbidden world which the mason's boy saw through the closed
gateways of the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, the
insignia to him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that