M. Leon Werth deals neither in rhetoric nor in orders of merit.  Bonnard is his theme; and on Bonnard he has written thirty-six pages without, I think, pronouncing the name of one rival, leaving to his readers the agreeable task of putting the right heads in the way of such blows as he occasionally lets fly.  Of Bonnard he has written with a delicacy of understanding hardly to be matched in contemporary criticism.  He has sketched exquisitely a temperament, and if he has not told us much about its fruits, about the pictures of Bonnard that is to say, he can always refer us to the series of reproductions at the end of the volume.

[Illustration:  BONNARD (Photo:  E. Druet)]

What M. Werth would say to the distinction implied in my last paragraph I cannot tell; but I am sure it is important.  Certainly, behind every work of art lies a temperament, a mind; and it is this mind that creates, that causes and conditions the forms and colours of which a picture consists; nevertheless, what we see are forms and colours, forms and colours are what move us.  Doubtless, M. Werth is right in thinking that Bonnard paints beautifully because he loves what he paints; but what Bonnard gives us is something more significant than his feeling for cups or cats or human beings.  He gives us created form with a significance of its own, to the making of which went his passion and its object, but which is something quite distinct from both.  He gives us a work of art.

To consider a picture by Vuillard, whose work is often compared with that of Bonnard, might help us here.  Vuillard loves what he paints, and his pictures are attractive, as often as not, chiefly because they represent lovely things.  A picture by Bonnard, for all its fascinating overtones, has a life entirely of its own.  It is like a flower, which is beautiful not because it represents, or reminds one of, something beautiful, but because it is beautiful.  A picture by Bonnard escapes from its subject, and from its author, too.  And this is all-important because it is just this independent life of its own that gives to a work of art its peculiar character and power.  Unluckily, about this detached life, about a work of art considered as a work of art, there is little or nothing to be said; so perhaps M. Werth has done well to confine himself to the task of giving his readers a taste of the quality of an artist’s mind.  This task was difficult enough in all conscience; the mind of Bonnard is subtle, delicate, and creative, and it has needed subtlety, delicacy, and not a little creative power, to give us even a glimpse of it.

The first thing one gets from a picture by Bonnard is a sense of perplexed, delicious colour:  tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there.  From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly.  When we have realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height.  And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone—­that it is witty, whimsical, fantastic.