To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all convention it is only necessary to remember that Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun.  All the sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament withholds from the histrionism of Lebrun is instinctively accorded to his gentle and graceful contemporary, who has been called—­faute de mieux, of course—­the French Raphael.  Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as Lebrun.  He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain that he had a more individual point of view, his works are assuredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense.  It is impossible to recall any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or, except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and soft “St. Scholastica” in the Salon Carre.  With more sapience and less sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur’s true successor, to say which is certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.  He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an aesthetic delicacy that he exhibits, and aesthetically he exercises his sweeter and more sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circumscribe that of Lebrun.  He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances.  The truth is, that both equally illustrate the classic spirit, the spirit of their age par excellence and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree, though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other passive, so to say; and that neither illustrates quite the subserviency to the conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in particular.

IV

Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by contrast with that of Louis Quatorze, it, too, is essentially classic.  It is free enough—­no one, I think, would deny that—­but it is very far from individual in any important sense.  It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of Lesueur or Lebrun.  The artist’s susceptibility seems to come to the surface for the first time.  Watteau, Fragonard—­Fragonard especially, the exquisite and impudent—­are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as vivacious as Boldini.  Boucher’s goddesses and cherubs, disporting themselves in graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined in cumulus masses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and independent of prescription as Monticelli’s figures.  Lancret, Pater, Nattier, and Van Loo—­the very names suggest not merely freedom but a sportive and abandoned license.