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Imaginary Portraits

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June 1714.

He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike
grace, the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as
we visited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian
architecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of
flowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree,
with that wonderful lightness which is one of the charms of his [23]
work. I can understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys,
what he selects by preference, from all that various world we pass
our lives in. I am struck by the purity of the room he has re-
fashioned for us--a sort of moral purity; yet, in the forms and
colours of things. Is the actual life of Paris, to which he will
soon return, equally pure, that it relishes this kind of thing so
strongly? Only, methinks 'tis a pity to incorporate so much of his
work, of himself, with objects of use, which must perish by use, or
disappear, like our own old furniture, with mere change of fashion.

July 1714.

On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai.
We entered the cathedral church: it was the hour of Vespers, and it
happened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, the author of
Télémaque, was in his place in the choir. He appears to be of great
age, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to
be seen in Paris; and Antony had much desired to behold him.
Certainly it was worth while to have come so far only to see him, and
hear him give his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of
infinite sweetness, and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of
the hands. A veritable grand seigneur! His refined old age, the
impress of genius and [24] honours, even his disappointments, concur
with natural graces to make him seem too distinguished (a fitter word
fails me) for this world. Omnia vanitas! he seems to say, yet with a
profound resignation, which makes the things we are most of us so
fondly occupied with look petty enough. Omnia vanitas! Is that
indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, as it does in this
case, from one who might have made his own all that life has to
bestow? Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived here
almost as an exile. Was our "Great King Lewis" jealous of a true
grand seigneur or grand monarque by natural gift and the favour of
heaven, that he could not endure his presence?

July 1714.

My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure. I sat
for it in a walking-dress, made under his direction--a gown of a
peculiar silken stuff, falling into an abundance of small folds,
giving me "a certain air of piquancy" which pleases him, but is far
enough from my true self. My old Flemish faille, which I shall
always wear, suits me better.

I notice that our good-hearted but sometimes difficult friend said
little of our brother Jean-Baptiste, though he knows us so anxious on
his account--spoke only of his constant industry, [25] cautiously,
and not altogether with satisfaction, as if the sight of it wearied
him.

September 1714.

Will Antony ever accomplish that long-pondered journey to Italy? For
his own sake, I should be glad he might. Yet it seems desolately
far, across those great hills and plains. I remember how I formed a
plan for providing him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But
that he no longer needs.

With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes the question,-
-unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a
life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is yielding
just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from the far
horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and willow-woods,
upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows of the tower
on the square--from which the Angelus is sounding--with a momentary
promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast. The
walk thither is a longer one, and I have a fancy always that I may
meet Antony Watteau there again, any time; just as, when a child,
having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for
long afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my
hands, expecting it to open.

[26]

September 1714.

We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry
evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffed the lights in the sconces on
the walls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the
afternoon, broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach,
rattling across the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-
Baptiste is with us once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;--
dismissed!

October 1714.

Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship
and fraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less
sedulously than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old
master, in that Watteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of
whom Jean-Baptiste dares not yet speak,--to come very near his work,
and understand his great parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its
nearness to his, may stand, for the future, as the central interest
of my life. I bury myself in that.

February 1715.

If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that
delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly
[27] because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To
persuade myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his
preference--his apparent preference--for a world so different from
mine. Those coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be
rendered so perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of
them. For him, to understand must be to despise them; while (I think
I know why) he nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that
discontent with himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would
have been better for him--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real
happiness--had he remained here, obscure; as it might have been
better for me!

It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that
life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its
own; and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain,
produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways.

March 1715.

There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own
persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose
more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to
speak at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each
of his pictures, for the rest so just and true, how [28] Antony would
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.

March 1716.

Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting
labour? I know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he
expresses a strange apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean
surroundings in old age; reminding me of that childish disposition to
hoard, which I noticed in him of old. And then--inglorious Watteau,
as he is!--at times that steadiness, in which he is so great a
contrast to Antony, as it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of
genius, a grace, an inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his
heaviness leaves him for a while, and he actually goes beyond the
master; as himself protests to me, yet modestly. And still, it is
precisely at those moments that he feels most the difference between
himself and Antony Watteau. "In that country, all the pebbles are
golden nuggets," he says; with perfect good-humour.

[30]

June 1716.

'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just now
lodged--the hôtel, or town-house of M. de Crozat, which is not only a
comfortable dwelling-place, but also a precious museum lucky people
go far to see. Jean-Baptiste, too, has seen the place, and describes
it. The antiquities, beautiful curiosities of all sorts--above all,
the original drawings of those old masters Antony so greatly admires-
-are arranged all around one there, that the influence, the genius,
of those things may imperceptibly play upon and enter into one, and
form what one does. The house is situated near the Rue Richelieu,
but has a large garden about it. 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. I
fancy Antony fled thither for a few moments, from the visitors who
weary him; breathing the freshness of that dewy garden in the very
midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate this summer afternoon in this
pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where Jean-Baptiste is at work so
contentedly.

[31]

May 1717.

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 Anthony'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. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliant
one? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes
his judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he
despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by
an enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if
Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder,
some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from
his work at the sound of praise--as if such praise could hardly be
altogether sincere.

June 1717.

And at last one has actual sight of his work--what it is. He has
brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in
quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming
Noblesse--can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so
naturally [32] aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the
drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them,
not less than the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of
which they group themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a
certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For
their framework they have around them a veritable architecture--a
tree-architecture--to which those moss-grown balusters; termes,
statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon
those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself
involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always
brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-
dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly
clad; and the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another
generation.

July 1717.

There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the
Academy of Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see.

Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these
persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in
those persons and things themselves, close at hand we had not seen.
He has enabled us to see it: we are so much the better-off thereby,
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
Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals with that world under a
fascination, of the nature of which he is half-conscious methinks,
puzzled at "the queer trick he possesses," to use his own phrase.
You see him growing ever more and more meagre, as he goes through the
world and its applause. Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the
secret of an adjustment of colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I
know not what air of real superiority on such things. He will never
overcome his early training; and these light things will possess for
him always a kind of representative or borrowed worth, as
characterising that impossible or forbidden world which the mason's
boy saw through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden. Those
trifling and petty graces, the insignia to him of that nobler world
of aspiration and idea, even now that he is aware, as I conceive, of
their true littleness, bring back to him, by the power of
association, all the old magical exhilaration of his dream--his dream
of a better world than [35] the real one. There, is the formula, as
I apprehend, of his success--of his extraordinary hold on things so
alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarity in my
brother's fêtes champêtres--more truth to life, and therefore less
distinction. Yes! the world profits by such reflection of its poor,
coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the height of a
Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact that I
think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remained
obscure at Valenciennes.

September 1717.

My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on
the easel, at his departure from Valenciennes--perhaps for ever;
since the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last
year, at no distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to
sketch and plan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of
humour with himself because he cannot project into a picture the life
and spirit of his first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin
where that famous master Gerard Dow left off, and snatch, as it were
with a single stroke, what in him was the result of infinite
patience. It is the sign of this sort of promptitude that he values
solely in work of another. To my thinking there is a [36] kind of
greed or grasping in that humour; as if things were not to last very
long, and one must snatch opportunity. And often he succeeds. The
old Dutch painter cherished with a kind of piety his colours and
pencils. Antony Watteau, on the contrary, will hardly make any
preparations for his work at all, or even clean his palette, in the
dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tis the contrast perhaps
between the staid Dutch genius and the petulant, sparkling French
temper of this new era, into which he has thrown himself. Alas! it
is already apparent that the result also loses something of
longevity, of durability--the colours fading or changing, from the
first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste notes. 'Tis true, a mere
trifle alters or produces the expression. But then, on the other
hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a kind of
harmony, the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the
failure of the whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social
conjunctions it is meant to perpetuate. This is what has happened,
in part, to that portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded
Jean-Baptiste to finish it; and so it must be.

October 1717.

Anthony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite [37] surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the
little wood here, a new book he left behind him--a great favourite of
his; as it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris.* Those
pathetic shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and
remorse, which must always lie among the very conditions of an
irregular and guilty love, as in sinful games of chance:--they have
begun to talk of these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the
spectacle of them, set forth here, in the story of poor Manon
Lescaut--for whom fidelity is impossible, so vulgarly eager for the
money which can buy pleasures such as hers--with an art like
Watteau's own, for lightness and grace. Incapacity of truth, yet
with such tenderness, such a gift of tears, on the one side: on the
other, a faith so absolute as to give to an illicit love almost the
regularity of marriage! And this is the book those fine ladies in
Watteau's "conversations," who look so exquisitely pure, lay down on
the cushion when the children run up to have their laces righted.
Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is a tone about
it which strikes me as going well with the grace of these leafless
birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark, and a
certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is all
one half-light; and the heroine, nay! the [38] hero himself also,
that dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I
think, but a half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could
fancy myself almost of their condition sitting here alone this
evening, in which a premature touch of winter makes the world look
but an inhospitable place of entertainment for one's spirit. With so
little genial warmth to hold it there, one feels that the merest
accident might detach that flighty guest altogether. So chilled at
heart things seem to me, as I gaze on that glacial point in the
motionless sky, like some mortal spot whence death begins to creep
over the body!

And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back
to me, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with blossom and fruit,
of the past summer, among the streets and gardens of some of our old
towns we visited; when the thought of cold was a luxury, and the
earth dry enough to sleep on. The summer was indeed a fine one; and
the whole country seemed bewitched. A kind of infectious sentiment
passed upon us, like an efflux from its flowers and flower-like
architecture--flower-like to me at least, but of which I never felt
the beauty before.

And as I think of that, certainly I have to confess that there is a
wonderful reality about this lovers' story; an accordance between
themselves and the conditions of things around them, so deep as to
make it seem that the course of [39] their lives could hardly have
been other than it was. That impression comes, perhaps, wholly of
the writer's skill; but, at all events, I must read the book no more.

June 1718.

And he has allowed that Mademoiselle Rosalba--"ce bel esprit"--who
can discourse upon the arts like a master, to paint his portrait: has
painted hers in return! She holds a lapful of white roses with her
two hands. Rosa Alba--himself has inscribed it! It will be
engraved, to circulate and perpetuate it the better.

One's journal, here in one's solitude, is of service at least in
this, that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience.
One puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it
so.

And then, it was at the desire of M. de Crozat that the thing was
done. One must oblige one's patrons. The lady also, they tell me,
is consumptive, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he, who
has always lacked either the money or the spirits to make that long-
pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work the
veritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would so
willingly have studied under the sunshine of their own land. Alas!
How little peace have his great successes given him; how little of
[40] that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in
true dignity of character.

November 1718.

His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England,
that veritable home of the consumptive. Ah me! I feel it may be the
finishing stroke. To have run into the native country of
consumption! Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has
really indulged so little in his life--of the restlessness which,
they tell me, is itself a symptom of this terrible disease!

January 1720.

As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us, a slight
token that he remembers--an etched plate, one of very few he has
executed, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the
weary soldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his
way from England to Paris.

February 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.

[41] I am reminded of the day when, already with that air of seemly
thought, le bel sérieux, he was found sketching, with so much truth
to the inmost mind in them, those picturesque mountebanks at the Fair
in the Grande Place; and I find, throughout his course of life,
something of the essential melancholy of the comedian. He, so
fastidious and cold, and who has never "ventured the representation
of passion," does but amuse the gay world; and is aware of that,
though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now, however,
he is finishing a very different picture--that too, full of humour--
an English family-group, with a little girl tiding a wooden horse:
the father, and the mother holding his tobacco-pipe, stand in the
centre.

March 1720.

To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of
the Academy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to
conduct their illustrious fellow-citizen, by torch-light, to supper
in their Guildhall, where all their beautiful old corporation plate
will be displayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them.
There is something in the payment of great honours to the living
which fills one with apprehension, especially when the recipient of
them looks so like a dying man. God have mercy on him!

[42]

April 1721.

We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a
messenger arrived post-haste with a letter on behalf of Antony
Watteau, desiring Jean-Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go
to bed that night; and my brother was on his way before daylight, his
heart full of a strange conflict of joy and apprehension.

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