Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of the _magot_ came elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris to break with the pompous Louis XIV style, and to begin the representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage. Rubens had been the first in his "Garden of Love," of the Dresden and Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter of _fêtes galantes_, the painter of "Society." For in his shepherds and shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff stage-scenery character of landscape vanished. The grave formality of geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp. Watteau's art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem-- "Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame Nature Eut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture. Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau." Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had been for Flemish--the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past. It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the "Venus di Milo," no longer the marble perfection of Raphael's "Galatea." Into those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century. [Illustration: ANTOINE WATTEAU.]