competence everywhere displayed, the high standard of culture
universally attested, by the overwhelming evidence that France stands at
the head of the modern world æsthetically--but not less, I think, does
one feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of spirituality, of
poetry in a word. The French themselves feel something of this. At the
great Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much admired by them as the
English, in which appeared, even to an excessive degree, just the
qualities in which French art is lacking, and which less than those of
any other school showed traces of the now all but universal influence of
French art. The most distinct and durable impression left by any
exhibition of French pictures is that the French æsthetic genius is at
once admirably artistic and extremely little poetic.

It is a corollary of the predominance of the intellectual over the
sensuous instinct that the true should be preferred to the beautiful,
and some French critics are so far from denying 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 æsthetics 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.
Eugène Véron 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,