ruin is not melancholy enough till it is seen by moonlight or twilight;
and every condition of theatrical pensiveness or of the theatrical
terrific is exhausted in setting forth scenes or persons which in
themselves are, perhaps, very quiet scenes and homely persons; while
that which, without any accessories at all, is everlastingly melancholy
and terrific, we refuse to paint,--nay, we refuse even to observe it in
its reality, while we seek for the excitement of the very feelings it
was meant to address, in every conceivable form of our false ideal.

For instance: there have been few pictures more praised for their
sublimity than the "Deluge" of Nicolas Poussin; of which, nevertheless,
the sublimity, such as it is, consists wholly in the painting of
everything grey or brown,--not the grey and brown of great painters,
full of mysterious and unconfessed colors, dim blue, and shadowy purple,
and veiled gold,--but the stony grey and dismal brown of the
conventionalist. Madame de Genlis, whose general criticisms on painting
are full of good sense--singularly so, considering the age in which she
lived[85]--has the following passage on this picture:--

"'I remember to have seen the painting you mention; but I own I found
nothing in it very beautiful.'

"'You have seen it rain often enough?'

"'Certainly.'

"'Have you ever at such times observed the color of the clouds
attentively?--how the dusky atmosphere obscures all objects, makes them,
if distant, disappear, or be seen with difficulty? Had you paid a proper
attention to these effects of rain, you would have been amazed by the
exactitude with which they are painted by Poussin.'"[86]

Sec. 24. Madame de Genlis is just in her appeal to nature, but had not
herself looked carefully enough to make her appeal accurate. She had
noticed one of the principal effects of rain, but not the other. It is
true that the dusky atmosphere "obscures all objects," but it is also
true that Nature, never intending the eye of man to be without delight,
has provided a rich compensation for this shading of the tints with
_darkness_, in their brightening by _moisture_. Every color, wet, is
twice as brilliant as it is when dry; and when distances are obscured by
mist, and bright colors vanish from the sky, and gleams of sunshine from
the earth, the foreground assumes all its loveliest hues, the grass and
foliage revive into their perfect green, and every sunburnt rock glows
into an agate. The c