In spite of this lamentable coarseness, my noble sergeant, give me thy hand as nature made it!  A great, and famous, and noble handiwork I have seen here.  Not the greatest picture in the world—­not a work of the highest genius—­but a performance so great, various, and admirable, so shrewd of humour, so wise of observation, so honest and complete of expression, that to have seen it has been a delight, and to remember it will be a pleasure for days to come.  Well done, Bartholomeus Van der Helst!  Brave, meritorious, victorious, happy Bartholomew, to whom it has been given to produce a masterpiece!

...  Was it a dream?  It seems like one.  Have we been to Holland?  Have we heard the chimes at midnight at Antwerp?  Were we really away for a week, or have I been sitting up in the room dozing, before this stale old desk?  Here’s the desk; yes.  But if it has been a dream, how could I have learned to hum that tune out of Dinorah? Ah, is it that tune, or myself that I am humming?  If it was a dream how comes this yellow NOTICE DES TABLEAUX DU MUSEE D’AMSTERDAM AVEC FASCIMILE DES MONOGRAMMES before me, and this signature of the gallant

  Bartholomeus van der Helst fecit A; 1648.

Yes, indeed, it was a delightful little holiday; it lasted a whole week.

    Roundabout Papers (London, 1863).

L’EMBARQUEMENT POUR L’ILE DE CYTHERE

(WATTEAU)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT

Watteau is the great poet of the Eighteenth Century.  A creation, a whole creation of poetry and dreams, emanated from his brain and filled his work with the elegance of a supernatural life.  From the fantasies of his brain, from the caprice of his art, from his perfectly original genius, not one but a thousand fairies took their flight.  From the enchanted visions of his imagination, the painter has drawn an ideal world, and, superior to his own time, he has created one of those Shakespearian realms, one of those countries of love and light, one of those paradises of gallantry that Polyphile built upon the cloud of dreams for the delicate joy of poetic mortals.

Watteau revived grace.  Grace with Watteau is not the antique grace—­a rigid and solid charm, the perfection of the marble of a Galatea, the entirely plastic and the material glory of a Venus.  Grace with Watteau is grace.  It is that nothing that invests a woman with an attraction, a coquetry, a more than physical beauty.  It is that subtile quality which seems the smile of a line, the soul of form, the spiritual physiognomy of matter.

[Illustration:  L’EMBARQUEMENT POUR L’ILE DE CYTHERE.
        Watteau.]