expressions.  These are not the less real for being foreign to us.  They are less spiritual and more material, less poetic and spontaneous, more schooled and traditional than we like to see associated with such adequacy of expression, but they are not for that reason more mechanical.  They are ideas and substance that lend themselves to technical expression a thousand times more readily than do ours.  They are, in fact, exquisitely adapted to technical expression.

The substance and ideas which we desire fully expressed in color, form, or words are, indeed, very exactly in proportion to our esteem of them, inexpressible.  We like hints of the unutterable, suggestions of significance that is mysterious and import that is incalculable.  The light that “never was on sea or land” is the illumination we seek.  The “Heaven,” not the atmosphere that “lies about us” in our mature age as “in our infancy,” is what appeals most strongly to our subordination of the intellect and the senses to the imagination and the soul.  Nothing with us very deeply impresses the mind if it does not arouse the emotions.  Naturally, thus, we are predisposed insensibly to infer from French articulateness the absence of substance, to assume from the triumphant facility and felicity of French expression a certain insignificance of what is expressed.  Inferences and assumptions based on temperament, however, almost invariably have the vice of superficiality, and it takes no very prolonged study of French art for candor and intelligence to perceive that if its substance is weak on the sentimental, the emotional, the poetic, the spiritual side, it is exceptionally strong in rhetorical, artistic, cultivated, aesthetically elevated ideas, as well as in that technical excellence which alone, owing to our own inexpertness, first strikes and longest impresses us.

When we have no ideas to express, in a word, we rarely save our emptiness by any appearance of clever expression.  When a Frenchman expresses ideas for which we do not care, with which we are temperamentally out of sympathy, we assume that his expression is equally empty.  Matthew Arnold cites a passage from Mr. Palgrave, and comments significantly on it, in this sense.  “The style,” exclaims Mr. Palgrave, “which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo.”  Upon which 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.”