French Art | Page 5

pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in
observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting
sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his
grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler--"the lot of critics" being "to be
remembered by what they have failed to understand"--"will survive his
finest prose passage." I am not sure about Mr. Whistler.
Contemporaries are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But
assuredly Mr. Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of view--to
perceive that Claude's aim and Stanfield's, say, were quite different;
that Claude, in fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the
geologist whom Mr. Ruskin's "reverence for nature" would make of
every landscape painter--is a failure in appreciation than to have shown
which it would be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It
seems hardly fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr.
Ruskin, who is a landscape painter himself, using the medium of words

instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.
"Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the
shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping
down in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and
there with new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look
up toward the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll
silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."
Claude's landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the
beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this
famous passage. Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.
He was perhaps the first--though priority in such matters is trivial
beside pre-eminence--who painted effects instead of things. Light and
air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and
stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the
phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still
unsurpassed. But, superficially, his scheme wore the classic aspect, and
neither his contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred
years, discovered the immense value of his point of view, and the
puissant charm of his way of rendering nature.
Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the classic spirit, and perhaps
the reason why a disinterested foreigner finds it difficult to appreciate
the French estimate of him is that no foreigner, however disinterested,
can quite appreciate the French appreciation of the classic spirit in and
for itself. But when one listens to expressions of admiration for the one
French "old master," as one may call Poussin without invidiousness, it
is impossible not to scent chauvinism, as one scents it in the German
panegyrics of Goethe, for example. He was a very great painter, beyond
doubt. And as there were great men before Agamemnon there have
been great painters since Raphael and Titian, even since Rembrandt and
Velasquez. He had a strenuous personality, moreover. You know a

Poussin at once when you see it. But to find the suggestion of the
infinite, the Shakespearian touch in his work seems to demand the
imaginativeness of M. Victor Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold
ventured to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider
Lamartine as a very important poet, Sainte-Beuve replied: "He was
important to us." Many critics, among them one severer than
Sainte-Beuve, the late Edmond Scherer, have given excellent reasons
for Lamartine's absolute as well as relative importance, and perhaps it
is a failure in appreciation on our part that is really responsible for our
feeling that Poussin is not quite the great master the French deem him.
Assuredly he might justifiably apply to himself the
"Et-Ego-in-Arcadia" inscription in one of his most famous paintings.
And the specific service he performed for French painting and the
relative rank he occupies in it ought not to obscure his purely personal
qualities, which, if not transcendent, are incontestably elevated and
fine.
His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise,
rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and style
quite outshining significance and suggestion. He learned all he knew of
art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was eclectic
rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found in the
works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as Raphael the
frescos of the Baths of Titus, or Donatello the fragments of antique
sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its Italian
leading-strings. He might often suggest