ude'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 occup