ontent with
himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for
him--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness--had he
remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me!

It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that life,
and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own;
and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces
a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways.

March 1715.

There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own
persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose
more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak
at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his
pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed
this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thing
better--done the impossible.

February 1716.

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and
not for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes
which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of
disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical
pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside
Jean-Baptiste--in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of
being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly;
but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at
last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible
change. With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteau
chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends
in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to
finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement: he
goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to re-produce.
The animals in his pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he knows it.
But he finishes a large number of works, door-heads, clavecin cases,
and the like. His happiest, his most genial moments, he puts, like
savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as
he hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with a
certain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must be
confessed that he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of course, should
understand at least twice as well other peop