The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly.  It saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious experimentation, of crudity, of failure.  But it stamped it with an essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions and gradually brought about its own inherent development.  In a word, French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin.  Its first practitioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they were inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather than the poetic, spirit.  And so evident is this inclination in even contemporary French painting—­and indeed in all French aesthetic expression—­that it cannot be ascribed wholly to the circumstances mentioned.  The circumstances themselves need an explanation, and find it in the constitution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless, to other circumstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less imaginative and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.

Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of rhetoric.  Certainly up to the time of Gericault painting in general held itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry.  Claude, Chardin, what may be called the illustrated vers de societe of the Louis Quinze painters—­of Watteau and Fragonard—­even Prudhon, did little to change the prevailing color and tone.  Claude’s art is, in manner, thoroughly classic.  His personal influence was perhaps first felt by Corot.  He stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart.  He was the first thoroughly original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first thoroughly original modern painter.  He has been assigned to both the French and Italian schools—­to the latter by Gallophobist critics, however, through a partisanship which in aesthetic matters is ridiculous; there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to.  The truth is that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his landscape is Italianate.  But more conspicuously still, it is ideal—­ideal in the sense intended by Goethe in saying, “There are no landscapes in nature like those of Claude.”  There are not, indeed.  Nature has been transmuted by Claude’s alchemy with lovelier results than any other painter—­save always Corot, shall I say?—­has ever achieved.  Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome, the “Dido and AEneas” at Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the National Gallery canvases over the struggling competition manifest in the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of