French Art | Page 3

distinguish the modern world. When one comes to French art it is
still more difficult for us to realize that the ideas underlying its
expression are ideas of import, validity, and attachment. The truth is
largely that French ideas are not our ideas; not that the French
who--except possibly the ancient Greeks and the modern Germans--of
all peoples in the world are, as one may say, addicted to ideas, are
lacking in them. Technical excellence is simply the inseparable
accompaniment, the outward expression of the kind of æsthetic ideas
the French are enamoured of. Their substance is not our substance, but
while it is perfectly legitimate for us to criticise their substance it is idle
to maintain that they are lacking in substance. If we call a painting by
Poussin pure style, a composition of David merely the perfection of
convention, one of M. Rochegrosse's dramatic canvasses the rhetoric of
technic and that only, we miss something. We miss the idea, the
substance, behind these varying expressions. These are not the less real
for being foreign to us. They are less spiritual and more material, less
poetic and spontaneous, more schooled and traditional than we like to
see associated with such adequacy of expression, but they are not for
that reason more mechanical. They are ideas and substance that lend
themselves to technical expression a thousand times more readily than

do ours. They are, in fact, exquisitely adapted to technical expression.
The substance and ideas which we desire fully expressed in color, form,
or words are, indeed, very exactly in proportion to our esteem of them,
inexpressible. We like hints of the unutterable, suggestions of
significance that is mysterious and import that is incalculable. The light
that "never was on sea or land" is the illumination we seek. The
"Heaven," not the atmosphere that "lies about us" in our mature age as
"in our infancy," is what appeals most strongly to our subordination of
the intellect and the senses to the imagination and the soul. Nothing
with us very deeply impresses the mind if it does not arouse the
emotions. Naturally, thus, we are predisposed insensibly to infer from
French articulateness the absence of substance, to assume from the
triumphant facility and felicity of French expression a certain
insignificance of what is expressed. Inferences and assumptions based
on temperament, however, almost invariably have the vice of
superficiality, and it takes no very prolonged study of French art for
candor and intelligence to perceive that if its substance is weak on the
sentimental, the emotional, the poetic, the spiritual side, it is
exceptionally strong in rhetorical, artistic, cultivated, æsthetically
elevated ideas, as well as in that technical excellence which alone,
owing to our own inexpertness, first strikes and longest impresses us.
When we have no ideas to express, in a word, we rarely save our
emptiness by any appearance of clever expression. When a Frenchman
expresses ideas for which we do not care, with which we are
temperamentally out of sympathy, we assume that his expression is
equally empty. Matthew Arnold cites a passage from Mr. Palgrave, and
comments significantly on it, in this sense. "The style," exclaims Mr.
Palgrave, "which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower
or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and
Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble
frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo." Upon which
Arnold observes that "the architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses show,
splendor, pleasure, unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for
their own sakes, but it expresses them; whereas, the architecture of
Gower Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the

architect to express anything."
And in characterizing the turn for poetry in French painting as
comparatively inferior, it will be understood at once, I hope, that I am
comparing it with the imaginativeness of the great Italians and
Dutchmen, and with Rubens and Holbein and Turner, and not asserting
the supremacy in elevated sentiment over Claude and Corot, Chardin,
and Cazin, of the Royal Academy, or the New York Society of
American Artists. And so far as an absolute rather than a comparative
standard may be applied in matters so much too vast for any hope of
adequate treatment according to either method, we ought never to
forget that in criticising French painting, as well as other things French,
we are measuring it by an ideal that now and then we may appreciate
better than Frenchmen, but rarely illustrate as well.
II
Furthermore, the qualities and defects of French painting--the
predominance in it of national over individual force and distinction, its
turn for style, the kind of ideas that inspire its substance, its classic
spirit in fine--are explained hardly less by its historic origin than by the
character