and I, for [33] one, the better. The world he sets before us so
engagingly has its care for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what
one is to see--in the outsides of things--and there is something, a
sign, a memento, at the least, of what makes life really valuable,
even in that. There, is my simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps,
but which I may hold by, of the purpose of the arts.

August 1717.

And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different
terms) 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. People talk of a new era
now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a
novel sort of social freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart
will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars
disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life--
yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward
manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure
intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with a
flattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of
the old time--that serious old time which is passing away, the
impress of which he carries on his physiognomy [34]--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 pettiness 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. For in truth Antony