is so excessive as to imply an absence of character, the form itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to supply the element of character, and character consequently particularly refined and immaterial.  And one quality is always present:  elegance is always evidently aimed at and measurably achieved.  Native or foreign, real or factitious as the inspiration of French classicism may be, the sense of style and of that perfection of style which we know as elegance is invariably noticeable in its productions.  So that, we may say, from Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, taste—­a refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished—­has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting.  It is this which has made the France of the past three centuries, and especially the France of to-day—­as we get farther and farther away from the great art epochs—­both in amount and general excellence of artistic activity, comparable only with the Italy of the Renaissance and the Greece of antiquity.

Moreover, it is an error to assume, because form in French painting appeals to us more strikingly than substance, that French painting is lacking in substance.  In its perfection form appeals to every appreciation; it is in art, one may say, the one universal language.  But just in 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