"Courage, my good Greuze," said Diderot of one of Greuze's pictures of domestic drama; "introduce morality into painting. What! has not the palette been long enough, and too long, consecrated to debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last, united with dramatic poetry, in instructing, correcting us, and inviting us to virtue?" Living amidst such ideas as these, Greuze founded in France, in the words of De Goncourt, "the deplorable school of the literary painter, and the moralizing artist," or of "that barbaric, story-telling art," as Muther, writing in a similar strain, has described it. It was this manner of painting that brought out what similarity there is between Hogarth and Greuze, who has been called "a sentimental Hogarth." Like the painter of _The Rake's Progress_, Greuze told moral tales in a series of pictures in which virtue is exalted and vice abashed, a kind of painting quite different from the pictures which had hitherto been exhibited in Paris. Truly, as Charles Normand has written, "the hour of the reaction against the pastorals and the mythological insipidities of Boucher had sounded. It was Greuze who was the pioneer in the new departure, and he reaped the reward. His fault is that he replaced one convention by another." Hitherto {48} the Court had been all in all, but now had arrived, in the phrase of Charles Blanc, "l'usurpation bourgeoise." Yet though Greuze thus parted from his predecessors, and, at his best, went along the line of progress towards a study of Nature at first hand, he brought about no violent change such as was seen in England when Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites broke in upon the complacent mediocrities who represented art in England during early Victorian times. Though he preached against the ardent sensuality of his era, his own pictures were not wholly free from it, and in the collection at Hertford House his _L'Offrande a l'Amour_, and particularly _La Bacchante_, strike no new note amongst the other paintings of the same period. There is not the great difference that would be noticed if an early Millais were to be hung amidst a collection of the works of Maclise, Landseer, Collins, Newton, Leslie, Mulready, and Webster. Greuze did not free France in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites loosed the bonds of convention and tradition in our own country. Greuze founded no school, and indeed outlived his own movement; for he and Fragonard were left in hopeless isolation when the Revolution overwhelmed France. There are few more pathetic passages in the lives of painters than those which relate how, for the sake of their daily bread, these poor old men made {49} ineffectual attempts, Fragonard with his _Le Grand Prêtre Corésus se sacrifie pour sauver Callirrhoé_, and Greuze with his _Ariadne at Naxos_, to adapt themselves to the new situation.