t so much at an intellectual
justification of passion as at an expression of it in which there shall
be also complete intellectual composure. He aims in his art at an
experience in which the intellect shall be free from the bewilderment of
the passions and the passions also free from the check of the intellect;
and to this he attains by the representation of an ideal state in which
the intellect can make all the forms through which the passion expresses
itself. He is, in fact, nearer than most painters to the musician; but
still he is a painter and appeals to us through the representation of
objects that we can recognize by their likeness to what we have seen
ourselves. His intellect desires to make its forms, not to have them
imposed upon it by mere ocular experience, since ocular experience for
him is full of the tyrannous bewilderment of actual passion. But at the
same time those forms which his intellect makes must be recognized by
their likeness to what men see in the world about them. So he found a
link between his ideal forms and what men see in what is vaguely called
the antique.

But he did not go to the antique out of any artistic snobbery or because
he distrusted his own natural taste. The antique was not for him an
aristocratic world of art that he tried to enter in the hope of becoming
himself an aristocrat. He showed that he was perfectly at ease in that
world by the manner in which he painted its subjects. When, for
instance, he paints Bacchanals, he is really much less overawed by the
subject than Rubens would be. Rubens, who was a man of culture and an
intellectual _parvenu_, tried desperately to combine his natural tastes
with classical subjects. When he painted a Flemish cook as Venus he
really tried to make her look like Venus; and the result is a Flemish
cook pretending to be Venus, an incongruity that betrays a like
incongruity in the artist's mind. Poussin's Venus, far less flesh and
blood, does belong entirely to the world in which he imagines
her--indeed, so intensely that, if we have lost interest in that world,
she fails to interest us. The Venetians have done this much better, we
think; and why, if Poussin was going to paint like Titian, did he not
use Titian's colour? The answer is, Because his mood was very far from
Titian's, because he makes a comment that Titian never makes upon his
Venuses and Bacchanals. Rubens makes no comment at all: his attitude
towards the classical is that of the w