This contrast between the exquisite and the vulgar is usually very strong in France. We find it in the most visible form in French painting, which leads us to the conclusion that art does not refine a nation, but only expresses, and expresses equally and indifferently, whatever natural refinement and whatever inborn coarseness and vulgarity may already be existing in the race. If all the refined work in a French _Salon_ could be put into an exhibition by itself it would be delightful; but the _Salons_ as they exist at present are quite as much an annoyance as an enjoyment. A student with plenty of physical energy may by sheer hard labour arrive at a kind of noisy performance which attracts attention to his name, but the delicate and tender spirit of true art is absent from such work. Painting having been understood in France very much as a matter of apprenticeship, like the handicraft trades, all the technical part of it is taught by the straightest and surest methods to any lad who will be at the pains to go steadily through them, and the consequence is that a great number of men in France possess the handicraft without either intellectual culture or poetic invention, and it is they who have vulgarised the art. The English have been, and are still, inferior in manual force; they cannot attack a large canvas with the same certainty of covering it in a workmanlike manner, and some of their artists, like gifted amateurs, have not technical ability equal to the realisation of their ideas. Still there is less of coarseness in the English school, and more amenity and tenderness; its art is more gentle and nearer to poetry and music. There was a time when the French had such a horror of crude colouring that, to avoid it, they took refuge in dull grays and browns, but that time is now so completely past that the most glaring colours are admitted into the _Salon_. English painting, on the contrary, has become more sober than in the early days of uncompromising naturalism. An art critic who understood the English and French minds, and who was not himself turned aside from justice by the perversions of vulgar French or vulgar English patriotism, would probably say that, on the whole, the artists of both nations had been equally successful with regard to the interior of their own countries. As for foreign success, that is quite another thing, and I reserve it for the following chapter. At present I mean simply that English artists delight and instruct English people as much as French artists delight and instruct the French, and that the modern renaissance of the fine arts has been as effectual, nationally, in one country as in the other. On the ground of pure merit (always without reference to foreign estimation) an impartial critic would probably say that there were more draughtsmen in France and more colourists in England. Technical comparisons are difficult, because the art of painting contains, in