Part 3

Watteau finds himself, not wholly perhaps, but the formative period has passed. The artist is made; is himself, gives himself. No longer will the classicists prevail; no longer will art be cold and eclectic. The youth from Valenciennes will call Paris back to Nature, and through a temperament will show the world familiar things, will let his imagination play, taking his good where he finds it, but resolving it into something that is his own. He will see with his own eyes. He will paint pictures as he pleases.

When Watteau, perhaps unknown to himself, resolved to be himself, a new school was born in France, a school whose influence still prevails. We are fond of taking credit to ourselves for the initiation of the modern school of landscape. We remember with pride the day in 1824 when the French Salon was illumined with three of Constable's pictures; we also remember the acknowledgment by French painters of the inspiration of Turner and Bonnington; but it would be interesting to follow back their inspiration; and it would not be difficult to trace Monet's division of tones and envelope of air to Watteau.

Influence in art and inspiration is a ball that is tossed back and forth. If Constable, Turner, and Bonnington influenced the French school they owe allegiance to Watteau, and through him to "the bull in art," Rubens, who was master to Van Dyck, the founder of the English school.

Does Gainsborough's lovely "Perdita" in the Wallace Collection owe nothing of its exquisite femininity, sweet melancholy, and woodland background, to Watteau? Constable and Turner were but paying old debts, for the painter of the _Fêtes Galantes_ had shown the beauty of landscape and made it something more than a setting for figures. He taught also that Nature is intimate and familiar with accidental beauty of sunlight and twilight, misty horizons, and lovable little things near to us; not swept and garnished and coldly unreal, but a world where human beings may wander happily with Nature on a level with their own eyes; not a world where only Titans and gods roam through pseudo-classical scenes.

In Watteau's pictures poetry and reality dwell in harmony. He proved their compatibility; he showed that all the world is a vision seen through a temperament.

It is unjust to attribute to Watteau's influence only the frivolous school of painters which immediately followed him; they were incidents of the reaction of their time against the dull and the pedantic. They copied him, but they missed his sincerity; they lacked his genius; they were begotten of their age when dulness tired of being good and grew wanton. But even his followers have more of life and warmth and beauty than his predecessors, the frigid and attenuated school of Le Brun. Fragonard is a master and lives; we are rising to a new appreciation of him; and Pater and Lancret do not tire us even if they are "soulless Watteaus." Le Brun and his school are dead, and must one day be buried in the cellars of the Louvre to make way for their betters--the painters inspired by the Flemish Frenchman--Antoine Watteau--who made possible the modern school. From him Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, Corot, Manet and Monet derived. What an achievement for a short life of thirty-seven years!

IV

HIS CRITICS AND ADMIRERS

Most critics of Watteau allow something of his rhythmic sense and beauty of colour to tinge their appreciations. Ordinary statements of facts seem inadequate to express the feeling he evokes, whether the writer be concerned with the "outwardness" of his genius, like the brothers De Goncourt, or the "inwardness" of it, like M. Camille Mauclair. Instinctively language becomes flowery, and light and lovely words rise spontaneously to re-echo in another medium the music of his pictures.

According to our temperament and taste we are influenced by the familiar-and-candid friend standpoint of De Caylus; by the De Goncourts' searching analysis clothed in apt and sparkling words; by M. Camille Mauclair's soul-search into the effect on Watteau's life of the disease from which he suffered, or by the calm and cultivated mind of Walter Pater with its rare and sympathetic insight, and that "tact of omission" which he extolls in Watteau.

The source of all the biographies is the memoir of the Comte de Caylus, which was lost from the archives of the Academy, and discovered by the brothers De Goncourt in a second-hand book-shop. While we are grateful for the information De Caylus's memoir contains, we can but smile at the judgment of a friend and admirer on a contemporary so far in advance of his age as Watteau. Solemn De Caylus entirely failed to understand the real man and artist. Apart from the details he gives of Watteau's life, the passages which describe his method of work are the most interesting. He informs us that Watteau could never be an heroic or allegorical painter (thank Heaven!), not being trained academically; he also tells us that his reflections on painting were profound, and that his execution was inferior to his ideas; that he had no knowledge of anatomy, having hardly ever drawn from the nude, so that he neither understood it nor was able to express it. De Caylus also calls Watteau "mannered," but admits that he was endowed with charm, and so on, and so on. Watteau's nudes are studied, and, what is more, achieved. Recall any one of them, "The Toilet," "Antiope," "The Judgment of Paris"--they are as documentary as his drawings. The values and reflected lights of his nude bodies are academic enough to satisfy a modern student at Julian's, the most carping and exacting of critics.

De Caylus, while deploring Watteau's methods of technique, contributes the interesting information that he preferred to use his paints liquid; that he rubbed his pictures all over with oil and repainted over this surface; also that he was slovenly in his habits, rarely cleaning his palette, and allowing days to pass without setting it afresh; that his pot of medium was full of dirt and dust and the sediment of used colours, and that he was idle and indolent.

Well, as to Watteau's methods, I prefer to think that the surface of oil while it mellows preserves also. The worst artists are often the most solicitous of their mediums, and the laborious industry of the mediocre painter is often laborious idleness. A man who can leave behind him, after a short life, the quality and quantity of work bequeathed to the world by Watteau refutes, by that work, accusations of indolence and idleness. Neither can I admit that he was mannered. His manner was different from the clique of painters then in vogue, and it is obvious that he had a manner, but this very manner is his originality. Of course his pictures are "invented," but invented from the accumulated facts of his own drawings, wrested from life hurriedly, for he had very little time, and yet showing no marks of haste. If, as M. Mauclair says, "There exists in intellectual consumptives a condition of mind which seems to concentrate all those preceptions of supreme delicacy conferred on noble minds by the presentiment of approaching death," we need not grieve that the lives of such men as Keats, Watteau, and Schubert were short. "The body's disease caused a mystic exaltation in the soul, whose productions, far from being touched by debility or decadence, are rather the concentration of extreme power and violent emotion." This intelligent and sympathetic critic goes on to say that the very unwholesomeness of body is marked by "unmistakable health of mind," which may indeed be a "courageous facing of earthly finality," but is also a fertile field in which great enterprises are undertaken and achieved.

As I have said, according to your temperament you may take Watteau seriously, lightly, joyously or sadly. There is recompense whether you feel that he is the great and profound master M. Mauclair calls him, or whether you range yourself with the De Goncourts, who describe him as "a painter of Utopias, a beautifier, the most amiable and determined of liars, a painter of pictures where the fiddles of Lérida play marches that lead the way to death, where smart La Tulipe struts and swaggers, and Manon flirts between two gun shots, and a host of little love-birds flutter, light-heartedly, into war's stern discipline."

The De Goncourts note that there is in Watteau's work "murmurs of vague and slow harmony behind the laughing words," and that a "musical sadness gently contagious exhales from these _Fêtes Galantes_. Like the seduction of Venice, I know not what veiled poetry breathes sweet and low to our charmed senses."

M. Mauclair asserts that no one has ever understood Watteau so well as Verlaine, and that "his exquisite little volume of poems _Fêtes Galantes_ is an absolute transposition of the painter's work"; but it is the brilliant appreciation of the De Goncourts that has had the strongest influence on subsequent writers, so admirably do they reveal Watteau, so like the colour of his pictures are the colours of their words, so adequate is their exposition of one side of Watteau's fascination. They claim Watteau as the great poet of the eighteenth century, and then proceed to give in glittering prose a penetrating and persuasive criticism, apostrophising Watteau's art as "a country refreshed by fountains, decorated with marbles and statues, and peopled by naiades, a country lovable and radiant, far from a jealous world, where baskets of flowers swing from bending trees; where fields are full of music, gardens full of roses and tangled vines; a France where the pines of Italy grow, where villages are gay with weddings, coaches, ceremonies and festal attire, and violins and flutes conduct to a _temple Jesuite_ the marriage of Nature and the Opera."

"_La Mode de Watteau_--that divine tailor whose artist scissors have fashioned playfully the delight in disorder, the morning _négligé_, and the beautiful ceremonious garments of the afternoon. Fairy scissors dowering the times to come with fashions from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Beribboned scissors of Watteau, what a delightful realm of coquetry you cut from the bigoted realm of the Maintenon!"

How different in manner and method is Walter Pater's "Imaginary Portrait," called "A Prince of Court Painters: Extracts from an old French Journal." Calmly this subtle analysis begins, which shows a deeper insight into the personality of Watteau than either the brothers De Goncourt, or M. Mauclair, who calls Pater's "Imaginary Portrait" a "whimsical interpretation." I have read many books about the painter of the _Fêtes Galantes_, but I always return to Pater's "whimsical portrait," for it gives the very atmosphere of his artistic descent and development, from the age of seventeen to the last year of his life. Missing no dominant event, misusing no legends, cast in the form of a diary, the narrative is made convincingly real by Pater's sympathetic imagination.

These extracts are from an imaginary old French Journal, kept apparently by an elder sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, Watteau's pupil. This lonely and sensitive lady, who has evidently lost her cloistral heart to the unconcerned painter, is living in Valenciennes, Watteau's birthplace. The first entry is dated:--

"VALENCIENNES, _September 1701_.

"They have been renovating my father's large workroom.... Among old Watteau's work-people came his son, 'the genius,' my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed and a painter born.... And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old _Hôtel de Ville_, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine seem like people in some fairyland.... His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter."

"_October 1701._

"Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here.... Ah! such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while.... He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces.... Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that, as I can see, he treats himself to the same quality."

So this gentle woman continues to record in her diary, as if musing on the life of one she loved, the salient happenings in Antony Watteau's career. Nothing escapes Walter Pater's sympathy and understanding, so that at the end we come to a perfect appreciation of his reading of Watteau. This essay, in the form of a journal, is a little masterpiece about a "little master." Under August 1705 we find the following:--

"Antony, looking well, in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my younger sister danced a minuet on the grass, to the notes of some strolling lutanist, who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church here."

Under August 1717 she writes: "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--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 prettiness 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."

We are shown his restless nostalgia, his progress, success, and journeying to and fro, his broidery of the world he painted, until, as she says of a summer, "a kind of infectious sentiment passed upon us, like an efflux from its flowers and flower-like architecture."

"_January 1720._

"Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than ever--something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in his expression--speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a summing up of his life."

And then the end under date July 1721:--

"Antony Watteau departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix for the good _curé_ of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.

"He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."

EPILOGUE

The greatest gift in art is personality. But all masters are not of equal personality. Indeed, so rare is the gift in its fulness, that in the whole field of art there are but a few who appear as planets in the monotony of sidereal excellence.

Luminous examples of this quality of personality are such originals as Donatello, Holbein, Vermeer of Delft, and Watteau, to mention only a few of the most lovable. That something in an artist which finds a new way to express an old thing is the rarest and most to be desired of gifts. This gift Watteau had in the highest degree. He originated a grace unsurpassed in its way--dare I say it?--even by the Greeks. Attic simplicity of grace is grander, but not more beautiful, not more intimately beautiful. The Greeks gave us the grand beauty of form; Watteau gives us the beauty of caprice, of frills and fripperies; but his people are adorned by garments that lend them grace; his women walking are rhythmical lines, sitting they are silhouettes of delight, their garments enhancing beauty, not hiding it.

Watteau is the great master of the eighteenth century in France, a century distinctly feminine. To say that he is the most feminine painter that ever lived is in no sense a disparagement, for to this quality of grace and daintiness, of coquetry and caprice, of melancholy and longing, was united a very masculine quality of craft and originality in craft.

We tingle with delight in looking at his luscious colour and studying the mastery of its application. What artist has not known the envious desire to possess one of his drawings, the part of his achievement which entitles him to be ranked with the greatest, so truthful, so full of subtle distinction of line, whether it be a blackamoor's face or a beauty's back.

The origin of the broken tone in modern art is his. From him we may trace the modern impressionist movement, and from him modern pointillism. What is impressionism, and what is pointillism?

Impressionism is the elimination of the little, the giving of the large truth, the instantaneous impression of vision; but all vision is not the same, and as the lens of the looking eye varies, so the impression will vary. We may teach ourselves to see little or much, our memory may be accurate or false, according to our gifts. Emerson says: "Our difference of wit appears to be only a difference of impressionability or power to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions." This faculty of seeing at the first glance "faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest," the impressionist claims. He may be so impressionable, or so little capable of sensitiveness to impression, that his picture in one instance may be fuller of fine truths than the most laborious idleness of finish can make it, and in the other his lack of sensitiveness to impression may be a mere jumble of decomposed colour understood only by himself.

Pointillism is the application of pure colour to the canvas in small streaks or dots, and has become part of the doctrine of the impressionists. To them it represents the decomposition of light; the streak and dot--broken colour--is used to increase the appearance of the vibration of light, which it does in a marvellous manner. The use of broken colour was one of Watteau's characteristics, and is part of the charm and originality of his technique.

Even his inconsistencies have charm. His drawings were from the life; his nudes were also from the life, so true to Nature are they, so very modern as to reflection and value, with the added Watteau grace. But, let me confess it, the modern craftsman more wedded to truth than inspiration may feel less conviction of his greatness in examining his pictures because, admire his colour and technique as much as we will, we cannot but feel that in his "invented" pictures Watteau's inspiration is what the student in France calls _chic_. And yet who would have them different? His Pastorals may be "_chic'd_," but there they are, done--unrivalled, supreme.

Eighteenth-century art in France means, for most of us, Watteau. He is the fitting master of a century in which women played so great a part. He did not immortalise any woman. No Mona Lisa, no Giovanna Tornabuoni, no Emma Lady Hamilton, lives through his brush. He immortalised women--not any particular woman; he created a type, the Watteau type--adorable, dainty, and fragrant as a flower. She has no name, no place of abode since Watteau died. He saw her in his dream-life, held her for a moment as she flitted past, so she remains: eternally young, eternally free.

"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave The song, nor ever can those trees be bare; She cannot fade, ... For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London

The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh