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.
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