r of pamphlets about him; the one side, led by
Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the other
side, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens.
Here is a passage from a poem against Poussin:--

Il scavoit manier la regle et le compas,
Parloit de la lumiere et ne l'entendoit pas;
Il estoit de l'antique un assez bon copiste,
Mais sans invention, et mauvais coloriste.
Il ne pouvait marcher que sur le pas d'autruy:
Le genie a manque, c'est un malheur pour luy.

Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, the
criticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed that
Velasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art of
painting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet it
remains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between the
genius of Poussin and the pedantry of his imitators, to convince people
that he was not a bad colourist, and that he did not imitate the
antique.

This difficulty is connected with the age in which he happened to live.
Nobody calls Mantegna a pedant nowadays; yet one might say against him
most of the things that have been said against Poussin. But Mantegna
lived in a century that we like, and Poussin in one that we dislike. The
seventeenth century is for us a time of pictorial platitude; there was
nothing then to discover about gesture or expression, and painters, even
the best of them, used stock gestures and stock expressions without any
of the eagerness of discovery. Now Poussin is, or appears to be, in many
of his works a dramatic painter, and for us his drama is platitudinous.
Take the "Plague of Ashdod," in the National Gallery. There are the
gestures that we are already a little weary of in Raphael's cartoons.
The figures express horror and fear with uplifted hands or contorted
features; but their real business seems to be to make the picture. The
drama is thrust upon us, and we cannot ignore it; yet we feel that it
is no discovery for the artist, but something that he has learnt like a
second-rate actor--that he has, in fact, a "bag of tricks" in common
with all the Italian painters of his time, and that he is only
pretending to be surprised by his subject. Now every age has its
artistic platitudes; but these platitudes of dramatic expression are
peculiarly wearisome to us because they have persisted in