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 [34]--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 he is
aware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, by
the power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of his
dream--his dream of a better world than [35] the real one. There, is
the formula, as I apprehend, of his success--of his extraordinary hold
on things so alien from himself. And I think there is more real
hilarity in my brother's fetes champetres--more truth to life, and
therefore less distinction. Yes! the world profits by such reflection
of its poor, coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the
height of a Corneille. That is my way