French Art | Page 9

elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at
once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be
clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as they
certainly are the typical, clever artists.

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing
to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness, and
really a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as they paint their
pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill in the
composition of sensation-provoking combinations--combinations, thus,
provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind. When
you stand before one of Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly
modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the
color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides
exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues
and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just
poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a
detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in addition,
that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of cleverness; that it
is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an environment wholly
attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence, facility, grace,
elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse qualities, quite
unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is concrete and
vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis Quinze epoch,
indeed, that one may say that nature itself was artificial--that is to say,
all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to paint; at least all they could
have been called upon to think of painting. What a distinction is, after
all, theirs! To have created out of nothing, or next to nothing,
something charming, and enduringly charming; something of a truly
classic inspiration without dependence at bottom on the real and the
actual; something as little indebted to facts and things as a fairy tale,
and withal marked by such qualities as color and cleverness in so
eminent a degree.
The Louis Quinze painters may be said, indeed, to have had the
romantic temperament with the classic inspiration. They have audacity
rather than freedom, license modified by strict limitation to the lines
within which it is exercised. But there can be no doubt that this
limitation is more conspicuous in their charmingly irresponsible works
than is, essentially speaking, their irresponsibility itself. They never
give their imagination free play. Sportive and spontaneous as it appears,
it is equally clear that its activities are bounded by conservatory

confines. Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is almost an exception.
Temperament in him seems constantly on the verge of conquering
tradition and environment. Now and then he seems to be on the point of
emancipation, and one expects to come upon some work in which he
has expressed himself and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly
disappointed. His color and his cleverness are always admirable and
winning, but his import is perversely--almost bewitchingly--slight.
What was he thinking of? one asks, before his delightful canvases; and
one's conclusion inevitably is, certainly as near nothing at all as can be
consistent with so much charm and so much real power. As to Watteau,
one's last thought is of what he would have been in a different æsthetic
atmosphere, in an atmosphere that would have stimulated his really
romantic temperament to extra-traditional flights, instead of confining
it within the inexorable boundaries of classic custom; an atmosphere
favorable to the free exercise of his adorable fancy, instead of
rigorously insistent on conforming this, so far as might be, to
customary canons, and, at any rate, restricting its exercise to material
_à la mode_. A little landscape in the La Caze collection in the Louvre,
whose romantic and truly poetic feeling agreeably pierces through its
elegance, is eloquent of such reflections.
V
With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a
sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a "return
to nature"--that "return to nature" of which we hear so much in histories
of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is not quite sound.
Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart,
quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could
not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the classic spirit in
the French æsthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze. The first French
painter of genre, in the full modern sense of the term, the first true
interpreter of scenes from humble life--of lowly incident and familiar
situations, of broken jars and paternal curses, and buxom girls and
precocious children--he certainly