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 fut son seul refuge,” is in the same boat.  And for companion they have Mr. Ruskin, who, being, like them, incapable of a genuine aesthetic emotion, is likewise incapable of infecting a truly sensitive reader.  So far as I remember, Ruskin’s quarrel with Poussin is that to his picture of the Flood he has given a prevailing air of sobriety and gloom, whereas it is notorious that an abundance of rain causes all green things to flourish and the rocks to shine like agate.  But when Ingres attributes the excellence of Poussin to the fact that he was a faithful disciple of the ancients we feel that he is talking about the thing that matters, and that he is talking sense.  And we feel the same—­what instance could more prettily illustrate my theory?—­when Delacroix passionately asserts that Poussin was an arch-revolutionary. [S]