have managed this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have
done the thing better--done the impossible.

February 1716.

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and
not for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty
clothes which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain
immobility of disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which
is like physical pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am
better far beside Jean-Baptiste--in contact with his quiet, even
labour, and manner of being. At first he did the work to which he
had set himself, sullenly; but the mechanical labour of it has
cleared his mind and temper at last, as a sullen day turns quite
clear and fine by imperceptible change. With the earliest dawn he
enters his workroom, the Watteau chamber, where he remains at work
all day. The dark evenings he spends in industrious preparation with
the crayon for the pictures he is to finish during the hours of
daylight. His toil is also his amusement: he goes but rarely into
the society whose manners he has to re-produce. The animals in his
pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he knows it. But he finishes a
large number of works, door-heads, clavecin cases, and the like. His
happiest, his most genial moments, [29] he puts, like savings of fine
gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as he hopes),
The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with a certain
pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must be confessed
that he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of course, should
understand at least twice as well as all other people--with
surpassing expression.