it, too, is essentially classic. It is free enough--no one, I
think, would deny that--but it is very far from individual in any
important sense. It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of
Lesueur or Lebrun. The artist's susceptibility seems to come to the
surface for the first time. Watteau, Fragonard--Fragonard especially,
the exquisite and impudent--are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as
vivacious as Boldini. Boucher's goddesses and cherubs, disporting
themselves in graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined
in cumulus masses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and
independent of prescription as Monticelli's figures. Lancret, Pater,
Nattier, and Van Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a
sportive and abandoned license. But in what a narrow round they move!
How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality! What a
talent, what a genius they have for artificiality. It is the era _par
excellence_ of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than
dilettantism. Their evident feeling--and evidently genuine feeling--is
feeling for the factitious, for the manufactured, for what the French
call the _confectionne_. Their romantic quality is to that of the modern
Fontainebleau group as the exquisite _vers de societe_ of Mr. Austin
Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or
Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a
frame. All their material is traditional. They simply handle it as
_enfants terribles_. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a
silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They are as barren of
invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a
sense, the originators of a new phase. Their originality is arrived at
rather through exclusion than discovery. They simply drop pedantry and
exult in irresponsibility. They are hardly even a school.

Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct
quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine. They are
as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when
we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of everything thus indicated one
predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought
modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one's
thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully,
whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and lim