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.
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