[Sidenote: Inferiority of French Provincial Exhibitions.] [Sidenote: The French _bourgeois_.] [Sidenote: His Ignorance of Art.] [Sidenote: Provincial Building.] [Sidenote: The Provincial Nobility.] In France there has never been the same acute consciousness that modern life was making itself hideous; and, in fact, the conditions of urban life in France, except in certain quarters of Lyons and Marseilles, very rarely approach the melancholy imprisonment of an English manufacturing town. Most of the French towns are comparatively small, the country is easily accessible on all sides, they all have avenues of trees (many of them really magnificent), and those which are situated on the great rivers have spacious and well-built quays, which are the favourite residence and resort. In a word, the difference between urban and rural life is seldom painfully or acutely felt. It is, I believe, a consequence of this comparative pleasantness of French country towns that the artistic life in them is so torpid. Provincial exhibitions are, in France, quite incomparably inferior to English provincial exhibitions. The fine arts are much more successfully cultivated in Manchester and Liverpool than in Rouen or in Lyons. As for the smaller French towns, you find in them here and there an intelligent amateur, here and there a respectable artist, but, by the ordinary French _bourgeois_, art is not understood, it lies outside of his interests and his thoughts. He can no more appreciate style in painting and sculpture than he can appreciate it in literature. He lives in a country where you can hardly travel fifty miles without meeting with some remnant of noble architecture, and it has been necessary to pass a law to protect what remains against his ignorant spoliation. Contemporary provincial building is, as a rule, only masons’ work, and whenever an old church or a château is in any way meddled with, the chances are that it will be ruined beyond remission. The provincial nobility very rarely give any evidence whatever of artistic culture or attainment. If they attempt anything, the result is poor and incongruous, some pepper-box turret added to the corner of a modern house, or some feeble attempt to imitate the mediæval castle. [Sidenote: Paris the maintainer of Art in France.] [Sidenote: English Academical Teaching.]