In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of fashion. Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When, however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment, followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher, and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response. Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuousness of the seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of convictions.