ature,
Liszt tells us. Watteau never married, and never, as far as is known,
had a love affair. He is an inspired painter of women. (Perhaps,
because of his celibacy.) He loved to depict them in delicious poses,
under waving trees in romantic parks or in the nude. A gallant artist,
he was not a gallant man. He had the genius of friendship but not the
talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur Rimbaud, he suffered
from the nostalgia of the open road. He disappeared frequently. His
whereabouts was a mystery to his friends. He did not care for money or
for honours. He was elected without volition on his part as a member
of the Academy. Yet he did not use this powerful lever to further his
welfare. Silent, a man of continent speech, he never convinced his
friends that his art was chaste; yet he never painted an indelicate
stroke. His personages, all disillusionised, vaguely suffer, make love
without desire--disillusioned souls all. L'Indifferent, that young man
in the Louvre who treads the earth with such light disdain, with such
an airy expression of sweetness and _ennui_, that picture, Mauclair
remarks, is the soul of Watteau. And, perhaps, spills his secret.

Mauclair does not like the coupling of Watteau's name with those of
Boucher, Pater, Lancret, De Troy, Coypel, or Vanloo. They imitated him
as to externals; the spirit of him they could not ensnare. If Watteau
stemmed artistically from Rubens, from Ruysdael, from Titian (or
Tiepolo, as Kenyon Cox acutely hints) he is the father of a great
school, the true French school, though his stock is Flemish. Turner
knew him; so did Bonington. Delacroix understood him. So did Chardin,
himself a solitary in his century. Without Watteau's initiative
Monticelli might not be the Monticelli we know, while Claude Monet,
Manet, Renoir are the genuine flowering of his experiments in the
division of tones and the composition of luminous skies.

Mauclair smiles at Caylus for speaking of Watteau's mannerisms, the
mannerisms that proclaim his originality. Only your academic,
colourless painter lacks personal style and always paints like
somebody he is not. Watteau's art is peculiarly personal. Its
peculiarity--apart from its brilliancy and vivacity--is, as Mauclair
remarks, "the contrast of cheerful colour and morbid expression."
_Morbidezza_ is the precise phrase; _morbidezza_ may be found in
Chopin's art, in the very feverish moments when he seems brimming over
with high spirits.