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Watteau, it need hardly be said, was far above the other two, but it was fortunate indeed that his romantic genius had two such gifted imitators as Lancret and Pater or to put it the other way, that they had such a master to imitate, without whom neither their work nor their influence would have been nearly as great as it was.
And with what extraordinary loveliness did the long branches hang out of the tall, stately plane trees like plumes; in the hush of sound and decline of light the droop of the deciduous foliage spoke like a memory. I seemed to have known the park for centuries; yon glade I recognised as one that Watteau had painted. But in what picture?
Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's training as a painter, has most generously offered to receive him for his own pupil. My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to hesitate the first; but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony visibly refines and beautifies his whole nature, has won the necessary permission, and this dear young brother will leave us to-morrow.
In spite of all that happened, Jean-Baptiste has been looking forward to a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau had proposed to make. He hopes always has a patient hope that Antony's former patronage of him may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at his work-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous malady.
And of all these eighteenth century houses, Evelyn's was the cosiest, and the elder of the two men, who, from the opposite pavement, stood watching the prima donna stroking the quivering nostrils of her almost thoroughbred chestnuts with her white-gloved hand, could easily imagine her in her pretty drawing-room standing beside a cabinet filled with Worcester and old Battersea china, for he knew Owen's taste and was certain the Louis XVI. marble clock would be well chosen, and he would have bet five-and-twenty-pounds that there were some Watteau and Gainsborough drawings on the walls.
That was the theory: and if the end of art were representation it would be sound enough. Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of desolating dullness Monet towards the end, for instance. The Neo-Impressionists Seurat, Signac, and Cross have produced little else. And any Impressionist, under the influence of Monet and Watteau, was capable of making a poor, soft, formless thing.
How we feel the man of it in Franz Hals, in Rembrandt, in Rubens, Van Dyck, Valasquez, Ribera and Goya, in Watteau and Teniers, in Millet and Troyon, in Rousseau and Rico, in Turner, Constable and Gainsborough, in Fildes and Holl, in Whistler, in Monet, in Rodin and Barnard, in Inness, in Wyant and Geo. Fuller. Like religion, art is not a matter of surfaces.
The Frenchman had sprung upon Nathaniel and was kissing his cheeks, which were now crimson with excitement. "Oh, it is Giotto come back again. He shall be anything Watteau." Nathaniel broke away and ran toward the old man, his eyes blazing with hope. "What does he mean?" he demanded.
Tennyson's power there was a hush and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the awfulness, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things, which invested these poems as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and majesty of tone, beside which both Keats's and Wordsworth's methods of handling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio Romano or Watteau by the side of Correggio or Titian.
M. de Crozat gives his musical parties there, and Antony Watteau has painted the walls of one of the apartments with the Four Seasons, after the manner of ours, but doubtless improved by second thoughts. This beautiful place is now Antony's home for a while. The house has but one story, with attics in the mansard roofs, like those of a farmhouse in the country.
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