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.
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