When a Frenchman
expresses ideas for which we do not care, with which we are
temperamentally out of sympathy, we assume that his expression is
equally empty. Matthew Arnold cites a passage from Mr. Palgrave, and
comments significantly on it, in this sense. "The style," exclaims Mr.
Palgrave, "which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower or
Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and
Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble
frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo." Upon which
Arnold observes that "the architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses show,
splendor, pleasure, unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for
their own sakes, but it expresses them; whereas, the architecture of
Gower Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the
architect to express anything."
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.
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