And that is the reason
why his art seems so impersonal to us, why there is the same cold
passion in all his pictures, whether religious or mythological. In all
of them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of his
actual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his own
actual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never even
seen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealist
dissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses or
understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of everything that he
draws--
O God, can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
It is the very substance and matter of things that he tries to master;
and that so intensely that he never sees them flushed or dimmed by any
mood of his own. Nor does he allow the passions of his figures to affect
his representation of them or of their surroundings. He is cold,
himself, towards these passions, for to him they are only a part of the
bewilderment of actual experience. But in making forms he escapes from
that bewilderment and shows us matter utterly subject to mind. Yet in
this triumph there is always implied the sadness that such a triumph is
impossible in life, that the artist cannot be what he paints. The
Renaissance had failed, and Poussin's art was a bitterly sincere
announcement of its failure.
A Defence of Criticism
The only kind of critic taken seriously in England is the art critic;
and he is taken seriously as an expert, that is to say, as one who will
tell us not what he has found in a work of art, but who produced it.
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