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 _a
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