geniuses; but they are
individual. The level of art is very low. The big names of El Greco,
Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Rubens, Jordaens, Poussin, and Claude,
Wren and Bernini (as architects) stand out; had they lived in the
eleventh century they might all have been lost in a crowd of anonymous
equals. Rembrandt, indeed, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, is a
typical ruin of his age. For, except in a few of his later works, his
sense of form and design is utterly lost in a mess of rhetoric, romance,
and chiaroscuro. It is difficult to forgive the seventeenth century for
what it made of Rembrandt's genius. One great advantage over its
predecessor it did enjoy: the seventeenth century had ceased to believe
sincerely in the ideas of the Classical Renaissance. Painters could not
devote themselves to suggesting the irrelevant emotions of life because
they did not feel them.[20] For lack of human emotion they were driven
back on art. They talked a great deal about Magnanimity and Nobility,
but they thought more of Composition. For instance, in the best works of
Nicolas Poussin, the greatest artist of the age, you will notice that
the human figure is treated as a shape cut out of coloured paper to be
pinned on as the composition directs. That is the right way to treat the
human figure; the mistake lay in making these shapes retain the
characteristic gestures of Classical rhetoric. In much the same way
Claude treats temples and palaces, trees, mountains, harbours and lakes,
as you may see in his superb pictures at the National Gallery. There
they hang, beside the Turners, that all the world may see the difference
between a great artist and an after-dinner poet. Turner was so much
excited by his observations and his sentiments that he set them all down
without even trying to co-ordinate them in a work of art: clearly he
could not have done so in any case. That was a cheap and spiteful
thought that prompted the clause wherein it is decreed that his pictures
shall hang for ever beside those of Claude. He wished to call attention
to a difference and he has succeeded beyond his expectations: curses,
like hens, come home to roost.

In the eighteenth century, with its dearth of genius, we perceive more
clearly that we are on the flats. Chardin is the one great artist.
Painters are, for the most part, upholsterers to the nobility and
gentry. Some fashion handsome furniture for the dining-room, others
elegant knick-knacks for