ondering _parvenu_. Titian through
the classical expresses the Renaissance liberation from scruple and
fear. But Poussin gives us a mortal comment upon this immortal
carelessness and delight. Whether his figures are tranquil or rapturous,
there is in his colour an expression of something far from their
felicity. Indeed, however voluptuous the forms may be, the colour is
always ascetic. It is not that he seems to disapprove of those glorified
pleasures of the senses, but that he cannot satisfy himself with his own
conception of them, as Titian could. Titian represents a world in which
all the mind consents to delight. His figures are not foolish, but they
are like dancers or dreamers to the music of their own pleasure. He
makes us hear that music to which his figures dance or dream; but, with
Poussin, we do not hear it, we only see the figures subject to it as to
some influence from which we are cut off; and that which cuts us off is
the colour.

Most painters, if they wished to paint a scene of voluptuous pleasure,
would conceive it first in colour; for colour is the natural expression
of all delights of the senses. But Poussin never allows the delight that
he paints to affect his colour at all. That is always an expression of
his own permanent mind, of a mind that could not dance or dream to the
music of any pleasure possible in this world. For him the ideal world
was not merely one of perpetual, intensified pleasure, but one in which
all the activities of the mind should work like gratified senses and yet
keep their own character, in which passion should be freed from its
bewilderment and intellect from its questioning. That was what he tried
to represent; and his colour was a comment, half-unconscious perhaps,
upon its impossibility. For the everlasting conflict between colour and
form does itself express that impossibility. Whatever he might
represent, Poussin could not, for one moment, lose his interest in form
or subordinate it to colour. His figures, whatever their raptures, must
express his own intellectual mastery of them; and it was impossible to
combine this with a colour that should express their raptures. But
Poussin, knowing this impossibility, was not content with a compromise.
He might have used a faintly agreeable colour that would not be
incongruous with their raptures; but he chose rather to express his own
exasperation in a colour that was violently incongruous with them, but
which at the same time h