One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history
and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less
personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely
intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic
interest, wider. They have more the cultivated man's bent for
experimentation, for variety. They care more scrupulously for
perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense of reality and far less
felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the
abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind to their successful
handling of line and mass and movement, is to neglect a source of
refined pleasure. To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their
admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness
is to miss their delightful decorum.
V
As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every
field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and
movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how
strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into association with some one
of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these
categories and stands quite by itself.
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