this preference of
French art that they express pride in it, and, indeed, defend it in a
way that makes one feel slightly amateurish and fanciful in thinking of
beauty apart from truth. A walk through the Louvre, however, suffices to
restore one's confidence in his own convictions. The French rooms, at
least until modern periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the
sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists--that
something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment
are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M.
Eugene Veron 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