What a wit this Parisian painter possessed!  Duret tells of a passage at arms between Manet and Alfred Stevens at the period when the former’s Le Bon Bock met for a wonder with a favourable reception at the Salon of 1873.  This portrait of the engraver Belot smoking a pipe, his fingers encircling a glass, caused Stevens to remark that the man in the picture “drank the beer of Haarlem.”  The mot nettled Manet, whose admiration for Frans Hals is unmistakably visible in this magnificent portrait.  He waited his chance for revenge, and it came when Stevens exhibited a picture in the Rue Lafitte portraying a young woman of fashion in street dress standing before a portiere which she seems about to push aside in order to enter another room.  Manet studied the composition for a while, and noting a feather duster elaborately painted which lies on the floor beside the lady, exclaimed:  “Tiens! elle a done un rendezvous avec le valet de chambre?”

XII.  A NEW STUDY OF WATTEAU

New biographical details concerning Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) may never be forthcoming, though theories of his enigmatic personality and fascinating art will always find exponents.  Our knowledge of Watteau is confined to a few authorities:  the notes in D’Argenville’s Abrege de la Vie des Plus Fameux Peintres; Catalogue Raisonne, by Gersaint; Julienne’s introduction to the Life of Watteau by Count de Caylus—­discovered by the Goncourts and published in their brilliant study of eighteenth-century art.  Since then have appeared monographs, etudes, and articles by Cellier, Mollet, Hanover, Dohme, Muentz, Seailles, Claude Phillips, Charles Blanc, Virgile Joez, F. Staley, Teodor de Wyzewa, and Camille Mauclair.  Mauclair is the latest and one of the most interesting commentators, his principal contribution being De Watteau a Whistler, a chapter of which has been afterward expanded into a compact little study entitled Watteau and translated from the French text by Mme. Simon Bussy, the wife of that intimate painter of twilight and poetic reverie, Simon Bussy, to whom the book is dedicated.

It is the thesis put forth and cleverly maintained by Mauclair that interests us more than his succinct notation of the painter’s life.  It is not so novel as it is just and moderate in its application.  The pathologic theory of genius has been overworked.  In literature nowadays “psychiatrists” rush in where critics fear to tread.  Mahomet was an epilept; so was Napoleon.  Flaubert died of epilepsy, said his friends; nevertheless, Rene Dumesnil has proved that his sudden decease was caused not by apoplexy but by hystero-neurasthenia.  Eye strain played hob with the happiness of Carlyle, and an apostle of sweetness and light declared that Ibsen was a “degenerate”—­Ibsen, who led the humdrum exterior life of a healthy bourgeois.  Lombroso has demonstrated—­to his own satisfaction—­that Dante’s mystic illumination was due to some