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.  It originated nothing.  It was eclectic at the outset.  Compared with the slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like, in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of artificiality.  The court of France was far more splendid than, and equally enlightened with, that of Florence.  The monarch felt his title to Maecenasship as justified as that of the Medici.  He created, accordingly, French painting out of hand—­I mean, at all events, the French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present tradition.  He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio, and founded the famous Fontainebleau school.  Of necessity it was Italianate.  It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it.  Italian was the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable.  It was very much in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day.  Like our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth, beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.