Such epithets one uses because they are the best that language affords, hoping that they will not create a false impression.  They are literary terms, and the painting of Bonnard is never literary.  Whatever, by way of overtone, he may reveal of himself is implicit in his forms:  symbolism and caricature are not in his way.  You may catch him murmuring to himself, “That’s a funny-looking face”; he will never say “That’s the face of a man whom I expect you to laugh at.”  If you choose to take his Apres-Midi Bourgeoise (which is not reproduced here) as a sly comment on family life you may:  but anyone who goes to it for the sort of criticism he would find in the plays of Mr. Shaw or Mr. Barker is, I am happy to say, doomed to disappointment.  What amused Bonnard was not the implication, social, moral, or political, of the scene, but the scene itself—­the look of the thing.  Bonnard never strays outside the world of visual art.  He finds significance in the appearance of things and converts it into form and colour.  With the pompous symbolism of the grand-mannerist, or the smart symbolism of the caricaturist, or the half-baked symbolism of the pseudo-philosophical-futuro-dynamitard he has no truck whatever.  His ambition is not to convey, without the aid of words, certain elementary ideas, unimportant facts, or obvious sentiments, but to create forms that shall correspond with his intimate sense of the significance of things.  The paraphernalia of symbolism are nothing to his purpose:  what he requires are subtlety of apprehension and lightness of touch, and these are what he has.  So M. Leon Werth meets people who complain that “Bonnard manque de noblesse.”

Bonnard is not noble.  A kitten jumping on to the table moves him, not because he sees in that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of feminine instability, the spirit of youth or the pathos of the brute creation, nor yet because it reminds him of pretty things, but because the sight is charming.  He will never be appreciated by people who want something from art that is not art.  But to those who care for the thing itself his work is peculiarly sympathetic, because it is so thoroughly, so unmitigatedly that of an artist; and therefore it does not surprise me that some of them should see in him the appropriate successor to Renoir.  Like Renoir, he loves life as he finds it.  He, too, enjoys intensely those good, familiar things that perhaps only artists can enjoy to the full—­sunshine and flowers, white tables spread beneath trees, fruits, crockery, leafage, the movements of young animals, the grace of girls and the amplitude of fat women.  Also, he loves intimacy.  He is profoundly French.  He reminds one sometimes of Rameau and sometimes of Ravel, sometimes of Lafontaine and sometimes of Laforgue.