But in what a narrow round they move!  How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality!  What a talent, what a genius they have for artificiality.  It is the era par excellence of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than dilettantism.  Their evident feeling—­and evidently genuine feeling—­is feeling for the factitious, for the manufactured, for what the French call the confectionne.  Their romantic quality is to that of the modern Fontainebleau group as the exquisite vers de societe of Mr. Austin Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or Burns.  Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a frame.  All their material is traditional.  They simply handle it as enfants terribles.  Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a silver age.  Of ideas they have almost none.  They are as barren of invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a sense, the originators of a new phase.  Their originality is arrived at rather through exclusion than discovery.  They simply drop pedantry and exult in irresponsibility.  They are hardly even a school.

Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine.  They are as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when we use the epithet Louis Quinze.  Of everything thus indicated one predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one’s thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully, whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of one’s action have been settled by more laborious, more conscientious philosophy than in such circumstances one feels disposed to frame for one’s self.  There is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, not a symptom of revolt; only, after them the deluge!  But out of this very condition of things, and out of this attitude of mind, arises a new art, or rather a new phase of art, essentially classic, as I said, but nevertheless imbued with a character of its own, and this character distinctly charming.  Wherein does the charm consist?  In two qualities, I think, one of which has not hitherto appeared in French painting, or, indeed, in any art whatever, namely, what we understand by cleverness as a distinct element in treatment—­and color.  Color is very prominent nowadays in all writing about art, though recently it has given place, in the fashion of the day, to “values” and the realistic representation of natural objects as the painter’s proper aim.  What precisely is meant by color would be difficult, perhaps, to define.  A warmer general tone than is achieved by painters mainly occupied with line and mass is possibly what is oftenest meant by amateurs who profess themselves fond of color.  At all events, the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Fragonard,