or
that his eyes are stars; but with the absolutely literal and brutal
part of his Dutch nature supposes the head of Argus full of real eyes
all over, and represents Hebe cutting them out with a bloody knife and
putting one into the hand of the goddess, like an unseemly oyster.

That conception of the action, and the loathsome sprawling of the
trunk of Argus under the chariot, are the essential contributions of
Rubens' own Netherland personality. Then the rest of the treatment he
learned from other schools, but adopted with splendid power.

47. First, I think, you ought to be struck by having two large
peacocks painted with scarcely any color in them! They are nearly
black, or black-green, peacocks. Now you know that Rubens is always
spoken of as a great colorist, _par excellence_ a colorist; and would
you not have expected that--before all things--the first thing he
would have seen in a peacock would have been gold and blue? He sees
nothing of the kind. A peacock, to him, is essentially a dark bird;
serpent-like in the writhing of the neck, cloud-like in the toss and
wave of its plumes. He has dashed out the filaments of every feather
with magnificent drawing; he has not given you one bright gleam of
green or purple in all the two birds.

Well, the reason of that is that Rubens is not _par excellence_ a
colorist; nay, is not even a good colorist. He is a very second-rate
and coarse colorist; and therefore his color catches the lower public,
and gets talked about. But he is _par excellence_ a splendid
draughtsman of the Greek school; and no one else, except Tintoret,
could have drawn with the same ease either the muscles of the dead
body or the plumes of the birds.

48. Farther, that he never became a great colorist does not mean that
he could not, had he chosen. He was warped from color by his lower
Greek instincts, by his animal delight in coarse and violent forms and
scenes--in fighting, in hunting, and in torments of martyrdom and of
hell: but he had the higher gift in him, if the flesh had not subdued
it. There is one part of this picture which he learned how to do at
Venice, the Iris, with the golden hair, in the chariot behind Juno. In
her he has put out his full power, under the teaching of Veronese and
Titian; and he has all the splendid Northern-Gothic, Reynolds or
Gainsborough play of feature with Venetian color. Scarcely anything
more beautiful than that head, or more masterly than the composition
of it