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 Raphael—­and any painter who suggests Raphael inevitably suffers for it—­but always with an individual, a native, a French difference, and he is as far removed in spirit and essence from the Fontainebleau school as the French genius itself is from the Italian which presided there.  In Poussin, indeed, the French genius first asserts itself in painting.  And it asserts itself splendidly in him.

We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of the susceptibility as well as—­shall we say rather than?—­interest of the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever.  But I confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin’s magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to wish one’s self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one’s opportunities.