French Ways and Their Meaning

by Edith Wharton

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Kitchin: "History of France," vol. I.

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III TASTE

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.