Note 15 — Chapter IV

We may trace something of their national origin in both their minds. In Claude there is the French finicalness, and love of minute details; but there is a fusion of all these into the most perfect harmony from the influence of a southern sky, and he has none of the flimsiness or littleness of effect, to which his countrymen are prone. Again, it cannot be denied that there is a certain setness and formality, a didactic or prosing vein in Nicolas Poussin’s compositions. He proceeds on system, has a deliberate purpose to make out, and is often laboured, monotonous, and extravagant. His pictures are the finest subjects in the world for French criticism—to point the moral, or detach an episode. He is somewhat pedantic and over-significant, in the manner of French orators and poets. He had, like his countrymen, no great eye for nature or truth of expression; but he had what they chiefly want—imagination, or the power of placing himself in the circumstances of others. Poussin, in fact, held a middle place between Raphael and other painters of the Italian school, who have embodied the highest poetry of expression, and the common run of French artists, whose utmost stretch of invention reaches no farther than correctness in the costume and chronology of their subject.