paint the objects which they have they
have, they fancy themselves qualified to paint the ideas which they have
not seen. But it is possible to fail in this latter and more difficult
style of imitation, as well as in the former humbler one. The detection,
it is true, is not so easy, because the objects are not so nigh at hand
to compare, and therefore there is more room both for false pretension
and for self-deceit. They take an epic motto or subject, and conclude
that the spirit is implied as a thing of course. They paint inferior
portraits, maudlin lifeless faces, without ordinary expression, or one
look, feature, or particle of nature in them, and think that this is
to rise to the truth of history. They vulgarise and degrade whatever is
interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the
dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no
thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would
have you believe that this is the very sublime of expression, such as
it would appear in heroes, or demigods of old, when rapture or agony was
raised to its height. They show you a landscape that looks as if the sun
never shone upon it, and tell you that it is not modern--that so earth
looked when Titan first kissed it with his rays. This is not the true
ideal. It is not to fill the moulds of the imagination, but to deface
and injure them; it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the
poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung
in the same room with that of Orion.(1)

Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of
ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was
capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with
grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to
catch the reader's fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in
whatever he does (sometimes a vice, but oftener a virtue) beyond any
other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as
huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan's-pipes, seem to have
been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning
and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with
his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of
their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human
intellect. His trees grow and expand their l