So little significance has it that
one may say it exists merely to be cleverly dealt with, to be
represented, distributed, compared, and generally utilized solely with
reference to the display of the artist's jaunty skill. It is, one may
say, merely the raw material for the production of an effect, and an
effect demanding only what we mean by cleverness; no knowledge and love
of nature, no prolonged study, no acquaintance with the antique, for
example, no philosophy whatever--unless poco-curantism be called a
philosophy, which eminently it is not. To be adequate to the
requirements--rarely very exacting in any case--made of one, never to
show stupidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinctive feeling
for what is elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at
once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be
clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as
they certainly are the typical, clever artists.

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing
to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness,
and really a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as they
paint their pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill
in the composition of sensation-provoking combinations--combinations,
thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind.
When you stand before one of Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly
modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the
color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides
exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues
and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just
poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a
detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in
addition, that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of
cleverness; that it is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an
environment wholly attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence,
facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse
qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is
concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis
Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was
artificial--that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to
paint; at least a