everyone to sympathetic appreciation.  The special ideas of his time seem to pass him by unmoved.  He has no community of interest with them.  While he was painting his still life and domestic genre, the whole fantastic whirl of Louis Quinze society, with its aesthetic standards and accomplishments—­accomplishments and standards that imposed themselves everywhere else—­was in agitated movement around him without in the least affecting his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure.  There can rarely have been such an instance as he affords of an artist’s selecting from his environment just those things his own genius needed, and rejecting just what would have hampered or distracted him.  He is as sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and unpretending as the most literal and unimaginative Dutchman of his time or before it; but he has also that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding the common and unclean which always seem to prevent French painters from “sinking with their subject,” as Dutch painters have been said to do.  He seems never to let himself go either in the direction of Greuze’s literary and sentimental manipulation of his homely material, or in the direction of supine satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and unelevated by an individual point of view, illustrated by the Brauers and Steens and Ostades.  One perceives that what he cared for was really art itself, for the aesthetic aspect and significance of the life he painted.  Affectionate as his interest in it evidently was, he as evidently thought of its artistic potentialities, its capability of being treated with refinement and delicacy, and of being made to serve the ends of beauty equally well with the conventionally beautiful material of his fan-painting contemporaries.  He looked at the world very originally through and over those round, horn-bowed spectacles of his, with a very shrewd and very kindly and sympathetic glance, too; quite untinctured with prejudice or even predisposition.  One can read his artistic isolation in his countenance with a very little exercise of fancy.

VI

It is the fashion to think of David as the painter of the Revolution and the Empire.  Really he is Louis Seize.  Historical critics say that he had no fewer than four styles, but apart from obvious labels they would be puzzled to tell to which of these styles any individual picture of his belongs.  He was from the beginning extremely, perhaps absurdly, enamoured of the antique, and we usually associate addiction to the antique with the Revolutionary period.  But perhaps politics are slower than the aesthetic movement; David’s view of art and practice of painting were fixed unalterably under the reign of philosophism.  Philosophism, as Carlyle calls it, is the ruling spirit of his work.  Long before the Revolution—­in 1774—­he painted what is still his most characteristic picture—­“The Oath of the Horatii.”  His art developed