French Art | Page 2

intelligent interest and technical accomplishment
are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M.
Eugène Véron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting
absolute beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the mass of
French painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians and
Dutchmen, eloquent of the lack of poetry that results from a scepticism
of abstractions. The French classic painters--and the classic-spirit, in
spite of every force that the modern world brings to its destruction,
persists wonderfully in France--show little absorption, little delight in
their subject. Contrasted with the great names in painting they are
eclectic and traditional, too purely expert. They are too cultivated to
invent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in their inspiration.
They are addicted to the rational and the regulated. Their substance is
never sentimental and incommunicable. Their works have a distinctly
professional air. They distrust what cannot be expressed; what can only
be suggested does not seem to them worth the trouble of trying to
conceive. Beside the world of mystery and the wealth of emotion
forming an imaginative penumbra around such a design as Raphael's
Vision of Ezekiel, for instance, Poussin's treatment of essentially the
same subject is a diagram.

On the other hand, qualities intimately associated with these defects are
quite as noticeable in the old French rooms of the Louvre. Clearness,
compactness, measure, and balance are evident in nearly every canvas.
Everywhere is the air of reserve, of intellectual good-breeding, of
avoidance of extravagance. That French painting is at the head of
contemporary painting, as far and away incontestably it is, is due to the
fact that it alone has kept alive the traditions of art which, elsewhere
than in France, have given place to other and more material ideals.
From the first its practitioners have been artists rather than poets, have
possessed, that is to say, the constructive rather than the creative, the
organizing rather than the imaginative temperament, but they have
rarely been perfunctory and never common. French painting in its
preference of truth to beauty, of intelligence to the beatific vision, of
form to color, in a word, has nevertheless, and perhaps _à fortiori_,
always been the expression of ideas. These ideas almost invariably
have been expressed in rigorous form--form which at times fringes the
lifelessness of symbolism. But even less frequently, I think, than other
peoples have the French exhibited in their painting that contentment
with painting in itself that is the dry rot of art. With all their addiction
to truth and form they have followed this ideal so systematically that
they have never suffered it to become mechanical, merely _formal_--as
is so often the case elsewhere (in England and among ourselves,
everyone will have remarked) in instances where form has been mainly
considered and where sentiment happens to be lacking. Even when care
for form is so excessive as to imply an absence of character, the form
itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to supply the element of
character, and character consequently particularly refined and
immaterial. And one quality is always present: elegance is always
evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. Native or foreign, real or
factitious as the inspiration of French classicism may be, the sense of
style and of that perfection of style which we know as elegance is
invariably noticeable in its productions. So that, we may say, from
Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, _taste_--a
refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent,
reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and
distinguished--has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of
excellence in French painting. It is this which has made the France of

the past three centuries, and especially the France of to-day--as we get
farther and farther away from the great art epochs--both in amount and
general excellence of artistic activity, comparable only with the Italy of
the Renaissance and the Greece of antiquity.
Moreover, it is an error to assume, because form in French painting
appeals to us more strikingly than substance, that French painting is
lacking in substance. In its perfection form appeals to every
appreciation; it is in art, one may say, the one universal language. But
just in proportion as form in a work of art approaches perfection, or
universality, just in that proportion does the substance which it clothes,
which it expresses, seem unimportant to those to whom this substance
is foreign. Some critics have even fancied, for example, that Greek
architecture and sculpture--the only Greek art we know anything
about--were chiefly concerned with form, and that the ideas behind
their perfection of form were very simple and elementary ideas, not at
all comparable in complexity and elaborateness with those that confuse
and