European
painting up to the present day, and because most great painters in
modern times have struggled in one way or another to escape from them.
We associate them with mediocrity and insincerity; and we do not
understand that for many of the better painters of the seventeenth
century they were only a basis for discoveries of a different kind. Il
Greco, for instance, is often as dramatically platitudinous as Guido
Reni, but he also was making discoveries in design which happen to
interest us now, so that we overlook his platitudes. He was trying to
express his emotions not so much by gesture and the play of features as
by a rhythm really independent of those, a rhythm carried through
everything in the picture, to which all his platitudes are subject. And
because this rhythm is new to us now we hardly notice the platitudes.
Poussin was playing the same game, but his rhythm has been imitated by
so many dull painters that we are tempted to think it as platitudinous
as his drama, and that is where we are unjust to him.

Poussin had a mind that was at once passionate and determined to be
master of its passions. He would not suppress them, but he would express
them with complete composure; and as Donne in poetry tried to attain to
an intellectual mastery over his passions by means of conceits, so
Poussin in painting tried to attain to the same mastery through the
representation of an ideal world. Each was enthralled with his
experience of real life; but each was dissatisfied with the haphazard,
tyrannous nature of that experience, and especially with the divorce
between passion and intellect, which in actual experience is so painful
to the man who is both passionate and intelligent. So each, in his art,
tried to make a new kind of experience, in which passion should be
intelligent and intellect passionate. This, no doubt, is what every
artist tries to do; but the effort was peculiarly fierce in Donne and
Poussin because in them there was a more than common discord between
passion and intelligence, because they were instantly critical both of
what they desired and of their own process of desire. Donne, at the very
height of passion, asked himself why he was passionate; and he could not
express his passion without trying to justify it to his intelligence. So
in his poetry he endeavoured to experience it again with simultaneous
intellectual justification which in that poetry was a part of the
experience itself. Poussin aims no