he
warmth and truth of Vasari's sentiment comes straight through all his
nonsense. Because he really felt he can still arrest.

Take an artist who has always been popular, and see what the ages have
had to say about him. For more than two hundred and fifty years Poussin
has been admired by most of those who have been born sensitive to the
visual arts. No pretexts could be more diverse than those alleged by
these admirers. Yet it would be as perverse to suppose that they have
all liked him for totally different reasons as to maintain that all
those who, since the middle of the seventeenth century, have relished
strawberries have tasted different flavours. What is more, when I read,
say, the fantastic discourses on the pictures of Poussin delivered by
the Academicians of 1667, I feel certain that some of these erudite old
gentlemen had, in fact, much the same sort of enthusiasm, stirred by the
monumental qualities of his design and the sober glory of his colours,
that I have myself. Through all the dry dust of their pedantry the
accent of aesthetic sensibility rings clear.

Poussin's contemporaries praised him chiefly as a preceptor, an
inculcator of historical truths, more especially the truths of classical
and Hebrew history. That is why Philippe de Champaigne deplores the fact
that in his _Rebecca_ "Poussin n'ait pas traite le sujet de son tableau
avec toute la fidelite de l'histoire, parce qu'il a retranche la
representation des chameaux, dont l'Ecriture fait mention." But Le Brun,
approaching the question from a different angle, comes heavily down on
his scrupulous colleague with the rejoinder that "M. Poussin a rejete
les objets bizarres qui pouvaient debaucher l'oeil du spectateur et
l'amuser a des minuties." The philosophic eighteenth century remarked
with approval that Poussin was the exponent of a wholesome doctrine
calculated to advance the happiness of mankind. But to the fervid pages
of Diderot, wherein that tender enthusiast extols Poussin to the skies,
asserting that one finds in his work "le charme de la nature avec les
incidents ou les plus doux ou les plus terribles de la vie," our modern
sensibility makes no response. And we are right. The whole panegyric
rings hollow. For to visual art Diderot had no reaction, as every line
he wrote on the subject shows.

That devout critic who, in the reign of the respectable Louis-Philippe,
discovered that "Nicolas Poussin etait doue d'une foi profonde: la piete
f