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 of the French genius itself. French painting
really began in connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation,
that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are,
unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination.