Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/47



the first half of the nineteenth century, England and France were the only two countries of Europe where art was sufficiently alert to catch the innovations of Constable and experiment with them. Each nation used his discoveries, but with a difference of result corresponding to the difference between the two national characters. English landscape has remained local, and is practically unknown on the Continent. The complex ramifications of French realism have had an enormous influence upon the art of the world, and have spread to every country where oil-painting is practised. It will therefore be best to deal with France, before surveying the narrower paths of English landscape since the death of Constable.

When we think of French culture and talent we are apt to form a false opinion of them, from associating them either with work done in periods of unusual social or political excitement, with the neurotic products of over-civilized city life, or with intellects that are French only by geographical accident. We may thus lose sight of the essential character of the French genius, and forget that Racine is perhaps its truest type; that if it inherits the excitability of its Roman progenitors, it also inherits (at least in the Arts) the Roman sense of style, proportion, and logic.

In 1824, when Constable's pictures first appeared in Paris, the country had not fully recovered from the shock and stress of the Revolution, and was still bent on endowing Art and Literature with the freedom which had already been gained in politics. It was a time of reaction against the stereotyping of the national characteristics, which had resulted from centuries of absolute monarchy. The pictures of Constable and of the brilliant shallow 27