he 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 Carre_. 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 aesthetic delicacy
that he exhibits, and aesthetically 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,