kes life really valuable, even in that. There, is my
simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which I may hold by, of the
purpose of the arts.

August 1717.

And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms)
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 he is
aware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring bac