I
French taste? Why, of course--everybody knows all about that! It's the
way the women put on their hats, and the upholsterers drape their
curtains.
Certainly--why not?
The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the
beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a
woman's hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble, or between the droop
of an upholsterer's curtain and that of the branches along a great
avenue laid out by Le Nôtre.
It was the Puritan races--every one of them non-creative in the plastic
arts--who decided that "Art" (that is, plastic art) was something apart
from life, as dangerous to it as Plato thought Poets in a Republic, and
to be tolerated only when it was so lofty, unapproachable and remote
from any appeal to average humanity that it bored people to death, and
they locked it up in Museums to get rid of it.
But this article is headed "Taste," and taste, whatever it may be, is
not, after all, the same thing as art. No; it is not art--but it is the
atmosphere in which art lives, and outside of which it cannot live. It
is the regulating principle of all art, of the art of dress and of
manners, and of living in general, as well as of sculpture or music. It
is because the French have always been so innately sure of this, that,
without burdening themselves with formulas, they have instinctively
applied to living the same rules that they applied to artistic creation.