Watteau Part 3

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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tles 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!"