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
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 aesthetic 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 appe