A PAINTER OF UNREALITIES. (4 'From the enchanted visions of his imagination the artist has drawn an ideal world . . . a country of love and light, a paradise of gallantry built upon a cloud of dreams, for the delicate joy of poetic souls." -M. de Goncourt. IF F any vision of the golden age has ever appeared to mortals since the departure of Saturn, it must have been seen by the noblesse of France during the early years of the eighteenth century. For in the royal park, with its gardens and woods, its groves and forest glades, lay a wondrous land of enchantment, a land of soft green lawns and of shadowy grottoes; where behind dark foliage stood marble nymphs, and fountains, half-concealed, rained down, cooling the dull air; where ever were heard soft laughter and low, sweet melodies; a land of delight in which "every pebble was a golden nugget." And in this realm of joy dainty shepherdesses, silken clad, with ivory crooks bedecked with ribbons "drove pink-ribboned flocks through some pinkflowered grove," or fair gardeners turned up the soft mould. with silver trowels. But never were they so absorbed in their pastoral duties as not to leave them gladly to listen to a love song in the shade or to dance with gallants satin-clad a minuette in a sunbeam. Cythère, the Isle of Love, could not be far distant from this enchanted garden. Nor was there any thought of the morrow. It was "A careless time, when France's bluest blood ་ Beat to the tune of After us the flood'." It was all too beautiful, too ideal to last, this delightful mock-Arcadia. A time would soon come when it must all be swept away. Now and then, darkly through the shadows would glare a starved, ravenous face. Or sometimes, when La Belle Marquise rode across the fields, a dainty huntress in crimson coat, she would meet "lean things with livid features," who bent low before her. And often the clear blue was shrouded with dark, sullen clouds of "the storm brooding through the massy splendor of the trees, above these sun-dried glades." But this new Arcadia could not vanish without leaving a legacy of its beauty. So, before the storm broke and the deluge swept them away, Antoine Watteau, Pientre de Roi, with dainty tints, pale rose and faintest green, azure and purplish violet, "colours of the air rather than of things" caught, and held fast that all might see, the dainty pastoral scenes, the delightful Fêtes Galantes. It must have been his early training at the theater (for his first master was a painter of scenes for the Opera), that gave Watteau the power of idealizing ever so slightly all his subjects; of adding a vague undefinable light and grace to unrealities that made them real. The pretended Arcadia became under his touch a paradise, where everything, exquisitely pure and sincere, sparkled with the sapphire and diamond. He showed the whole mimic world through a light golden mist. Nothing was sordid or mean, nor was there any unhappiness. All joy, though false as Pierrot's painted smile, seemed true. The dark, half-vanishing faces in the forest glades became only friendly satyrs peering out at the glad fête. The heavy leaden clouds above the trees served but to throw upon the smooth lawns and meadows a grateful shade. Mademoiselle, seen through the golden haze, whether as a milkmaid with silver pail and silken sleeves tucked up; whether crowned with rose garlands with arms full of violets as Spring or, hay-rake in hand, standing in the fields as Summer, is always smiling and delightful. Venus and Diana, painted on walls of old rose, surrounded by fairy arabesques and scroll work delicate as cobweb, or adorning the glistening amber panels of a quaintly fragile harpsichord, are not mere pagan goddesses. For even to these conventional divinities Watteau imparts a golden grace and daintiness that shows them to be, after all, sweet maids of the court. So, too, the dames of far Cathay-for everything Chinese was fashionable-have a beauty far beyond their Little Nikou, before a background of light clouds, in her silken gown, holding her parasol so daintily, "not Pekinese, but wholly Parisian," reminds one curiously of the Anglicized Yum Yum or Pitti Sing. own. There is one picture in which all Watteau's gift of idealizing, his stage-craft, his skill in the use of light and color, reach a wonderful culmination, his masterpiece, "the wonder of wonders of the master," the ideal of beauty toward which the Arcadia of the Regency was ever striving, L'Embarquement pour l'Ile de Cythère. The scene is a forest glade, with a green hillside sloping gently down to the sea, that lies silent and glistening in the warm glow of evening. A painted galley with gay silken sail, swarmed with tiny Cupids, awaits the pilgrims bound for the Isle of Love; cavaliers wondrously graceful in their bright satins, maids in gay brocade; and around each hovers a tiny, dainty love-god. Cupids indeed are everywhere "from grass to the firmament, beating the motionless air with their butterfly wings." Now flying in joyous pursuit of one another, now nestling in the flowers beneath a statue of Venus, or urging on with sweet whispers some reluctant girl. "The silk sail flaps, light breezes blow, Frail laces flutter, satins flow, You, with the love knot in your hair, Across the stilled lake rise dimly above the melting distances glistening, snow-capped mountains; but Cythère, the lovely cloud-paradise of pleasure, lies vague and indistinct, lost in the golden tints of sunset. Watteau, who could so idealize even the beautiful scenes around him, soon had the task not only of perpetuating the delights of Arcadia, but even of adding to them. Society dressed and danced, talked,-lived à la Watteau. Walter Pater thus describes a room decorated in this fashion that the Regency so relished. "The rough plaster-is replaced by dainty panellings of wood with mimic columns and a quite aerial scroll work around sunken spaces of a pale rosestuff, and certain oval openings four spaces in all filled with fantasties of the Four Seasons, painted by his own hand." Happy the dame who possessed one of his fans, dainty and fragile as Sèvres china, or a screen, glistening with amber varnish like transparent gold, adorned with tiny shepherdesses. It may be that Watteau owed something of this power of decoration, this skill in scenic effects, as well as the ability to gild and soften realities, to the Comèdie Italienne, with its "air of remoteness from the every-day world, and yet of actuality." But certainly he paid back the debt in full. For by the magic of his brush still live those quaint characters; Pierrot in great ruff and robe of white, with large eyes staring beneath his black skull cap; Colombine in her brilliant silks and tinsel, her little cap with its white feather so jauntily placed on one side of her pretty head; Mezzetin "with his great, brown, laughing face" in zebra suit-his guitar on one shoulder, a torch in his hand; and Harlequin with velvet mask and sword of lath, glistening with spangles and diamond-shaped checkers, red and black. Only a little have the figures in the Christmas pantomime changed in two hundred years. Just as Watteau drew characters from the theater so did he from all phases of the contemporary gay life. His sketches, which he used to make very delightfully à la sanguine et au crayon noir, have a grace and delicacy, in their clear sure lines and melting shadows, that makes one forget they are only studies. Two tall volumes of these sketches, "Figures de Different Caracters, dessinées d'apres nature" give delightful little side-lights on the court of the Regency, "a sort of view behind the scenes." Very much as when Pepys, himself a chronicler of Fêtes Gallants, describes the coronation of Charles II. on one page, and on the next tells how well looked Mistress Pepys, we see in Watteau's work, rose-colored as it is, the daily life of the mockArcadia. Nor was any one better fitted to depict it than he; for he was the greatest, as well as the first, exponent of the art of manners, the art of John Leech and Du Maurier, which concerning itself not with great nor heroic events, avoiding all that is not "gilded by the sunlight of a smile," illustrates rather the customs, the caprices, the holiday merriment of society. Alfred M. Cressler. THE PASSING OF THE GALLEON. Banner of old Of blood and gold From dizzy yard unfurled! Glory of Spain That swept the main And woke the startled world! Where art thou now, O Galleon, Proud in thy swaying gilded stem? The dripping surge hath moaned thy dirge The sea, that towered heaven-high Aud brushed with feathered lace the sky, No louder burst with sullen roar Upon the gaunt black-visaged shore Than boomed, mid shock of swinging blades And so, alike in majesty And might, and ruthlessness, the sea The sun, whose ribands fair unfurled |