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 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