borious
experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an
essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over
two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions
and gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word,
French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its
first practitioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they
were inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather
than the poetic, spirit. And so evident is this inclination in even
contemporary French painting--and indeed in all French aesthetic
expression--that it cannot be ascribed wholly to the circumstances
mentioned. The circumstances themselves need an explanation, and find it
in the constitution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless,
to other circumstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less
imaginative and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.

Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the
Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France
had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the
lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in
fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of
rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Gericault painting in general held
itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may
be called the illustrated _vers de societe_ of the Louis Quinze
painters--of Watteau and Fragonard--even Prudhon, did little to change
the prevailing color and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly
classic. His _personal_ influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He
stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly
original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first
thoroughly original modern painter. He has been assigned to both the
French and Italian schools--to the latter by Gallophobist critics,
however, through a partisanship which in aesthetic matters is ridiculous;
there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth
is that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his
landscape is Italianate. But more conspicuously still, it is
ideal--ideal in the sense intended by Goethe in saying, "There are no
landscapes in nature like those of Claude." There are not, indeed.
Nature has been transmuted by C