Here is the new Olympus and the new mythology; the Olympus of all the demi-gods forgotten by antiquity.  Here is the deification of the ideas of the Eighteenth Century, the soul of Watteau’s world and time led to the Pantheon of human passions and fashions.  These are the new humours of aging humanity—­Languor, Gallantry, and Reverie, which Watteau incarnates as clothed allegories, and which he rests upon the pulvinar of a divine nature; these are the moral muses of our age out of which he has created the women, or, we might say, the goddesses of these divine pictures.

Love is the light of this world, it penetrates and fills it.  It is the youth and serenity of it; and amidst rivers and mountains, promenades and gardens, lakes and fountains, the Paradise of Watteau unfolds; it is Cythera.  Under a sky painted with the colours of summer, the galley of Cleopatra swings at the bank.  The waves are stilled.  The woods are hushed.  From the grass to the firmament, beating the motionless air with their butterfly wings, a host of Cupids fly, fly, play and dance, here tying careless couples with roses, and tying above a circlet of kisses that has risen from earth to the sky.  Here is the temple, here is the end of this world:  the painter’s L’Amour paisible, Love disarmed, seated in the shadows, which the poet of Theos wished to engrave upon a sweet cup of spring; a smiling Arcadia; a Decameron of sentiment; a tender meditation; attentions with vague glances; words that lull the soul; a platonic gallantry, a leisure occupied by the heart, an idleness of youthful company; a court of amorous thoughts; the emotional and playful courtesy of the young newly married leaning upon the offered arm; eyes without fever, desire without appetite, voluptuousness without desire, audacious gestures regulated like the ballet for a spectacle, and tranquil defences disdainful of haste through their security; the romance of the body and the mind, soothed, pacified, resuscitated, happy; an idleness of passion at which the stone satyrs lurking in the green coulisses laugh with their goat-laughter.  Adieu to the bacchanales led by Gillot, that last pagan of the Renaissance, born of the libations of the Pleiad to the rustic gods of Arcueil!  Adieu to the Olympus of the Io Paean, the hoarse pipe and the goat-footed Gods, the laughter of the Cyclops of Euripides and the Evohe of Ronsard, the licentious triumphs, the ivy-crowned Joys;

  “Et la libre cadence
  De leur danse.”

These gods have gone, and Rubens, who lives again in that palette of light and rosy flesh, wanders bewildered in these fetes, where the riot of the senses is stilled,—­animated caprices which seem to await the crack of a whip to dissolve and disappear in the realm of fancy like a mid-summer night’s dream!  It is Cythera; but it is Watteau’s.  It is love, but it is a poetic love, a love that dreams and thinks; modern love, with its aspirations and its crown of melancholy.