V

With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a “return to nature”—­that “return to nature” of which we hear so much in histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts.  The notion is not quite sound.  Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the classic spirit in the French aesthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze.  The first French painter of genre, in the full modern sense of the term, the first true interpreter of scenes from humble life—­of lowly incident and familiar situations, of broken jars and paternal curses, and buxom girls and precocious children—­he certainly is.  There is certainly nothing regence about him.  But the beginning and end of Greuze’s art is convention.  He is less imaginative, less romantic, less real than the painting his replaced.  That was at least a mirror of the ideals, the spirit, the society, of the day.  A Louis Quinze fan is a genuine and spontaneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic impulse beside one of his stereotyped sentimentalities.

The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly a natural note in his gamut.  Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration.  He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough.  His conventions are those not merely of the litterateur, but of the extremely conventional litterateur.  An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn’t even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals.  Greuze’s genre is really a genre of his own—­his own and that of kindred spirits since.  It is as systematic and detached as the art of Poussin.  The forms it embodies merely have more natural, more familiar associations.  But compare one of his compositions with those of the little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feeling, nature handled after her own suggestions, instead of within limits and on lines imposed upon her from without.  By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, for example, one of Greuze’s bits of humble life seems like an academic composition, quite out of touch with its subject, and, except for its art, absolutely lifeless and insipid.

In a word, his choice of subjects, of genre, is really no disguise at all of his essential classicality.  Both ideally and technically, in the way he conceives and the way he handles his subject, he is only superficially romantic or real.  His literature, so to speak, is as conventional as his composition.  One may compare him to Hogarth, though both as a moralist and a technician a longo intervallo, of course.  He is assuredly not to be depreciated.  His scheme of color is clear if not rich, his handling is frank if not unctuous or subtly interesting, his composition is careful and clever, and some of his heads are admirably painted—­painted with a genuine feeling for quality.  But his merits as well as his failings are decidedly academic, and as a romanticist he is really masquerading.  He is much nearer to Fragonard than he is to Edouard Frere even.