French Art | Page 7

such inconsistencies as the "Doge praying" in a picture
of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic marriage itself.
Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes are mainly what
we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become literal and
exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if not of the
prosaic.

Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Rêve," which won
him so much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable
realist, and may do what he likes in the way of the materially
impossible with impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button
lacking, bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets
would prick; above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly
armies--wraiths born of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with.
No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as
pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is to
say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed for the
moment--as Lebrun's "Triumph of Alexander." The latter is as much a
true expression of an ideal as Detaille's picture. It is an ideal now
become more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal
and as clearly genuine. The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's
painting--Louis Quatorze painting--is not the perfunctory thing we are
apt to assume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as maintaining
that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid. Lebrun was
assuredly not a strikingly original painter. His crowds of warriors bear
a much closer resemblance to Raphael's "Battle of Constantine and
Maxentius" than the "Transfiguration" of the Vatican does to Giotto's,
aside from the important circumstance that the difference in the latter
instance shows development, while the former illustrates mainly an
enfeebled variation. But there is unquestionably something of Lebrun
in Lebrun's work--something typical of the age whose artistic spirit he
so completely expressed.
To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all convention it is only
necessary to remember that Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun. All
the sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament withholds from the
histrionism of Lebrun is instinctively accorded to his gentle and
graceful contemporary, who has been called--faute de mieux, of
course--the French Raphael. Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional
as Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may
maintain that he had a more individual point of view, his works are
assuredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible
to recall any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity,
or, except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet

and soft "St. Scholastica" in the _Salon Carré_. With more sapience
and less sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, to say
which is certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older
painter. He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined
and elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an æsthetic delicacy
that he exhibits, and æsthetically he exercises his sweeter and more
sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circumscribe
that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less
sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no
greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more
agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of
variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is,
that both equally illustrate the classic spirit, the spirit of their age par
excellence and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree,
though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other passive,
so to say; and that neither illustrates quite the subserviency to the
conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many
conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in
particular.
IV
Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by contrast with that of Louis
Quatorze, it, too, is essentially classic. It is free enough--no one, I think,
would deny that--but it is very far from individual in any important
sense. It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of Lesueur or
Lebrun. The artist's susceptibility seems to come to the surface for the
first time. Watteau, Fragonard--Fragonard especially, the exquisite and
impudent--are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as vivacious as
Boldini. Boucher's goddesses and cherubs, disporting themselves in
graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined in cumulus
masses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and independent of
prescription as Monticelli's figures. Lancret, Pater, Nattier, and Van
Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a sportive and
abandoned license. But in what a