eightens his emphasis upon form. So, though
there is an incongruity between the subject itself and the mood in which
it is treated, there is none in the treatment. Poussin himself seems to
look, and to make us look, at a mythological Paradise, with the
searching, mournful gaze of a human spectator. This glory is forbidden
to us not merely by our circumstances but by the nature of our own
minds. It is, indeed, one of our own conceptions of Heaven, but
inadequate like all the rest; and Poussin, by making the conception
clear to us, reveals its inadequacy.

He paints the subjects of the Renaissance like a man remembering his own
youth, and sad, not because he has lost the pleasures of youth, but
because he wasted himself upon them. Here are these deities, he seems to
tell us, but there must be a secret in their felicity that we do not
understand. The joy they seem to offer is below us, and he will not
pretend to have caught it from them in his art. For that art is always
sad, not with a particular grief nor with mere low spirits, but with the
incongruity of the passions and the intellect; and this noble sadness is
expressed by Poussin as no other painter has expressed it. He was
himself a melancholy man to whom art was the one happiness of life; but
he did not use his art to talk of his sorrows. He used it to create a
world of clear and orderly design, and satisfied his intellect in the
creation of it. In his art he could exercise the composure which actual
experience disturbed; he could remake that reality so troubled by the
conflict of sense, emotion, and understanding; but, even in remaking it,
he added the comment that it was only his in art. And that is the reason
why his art seems so impersonal to us, why there is the same cold
passion in all his pictures, whether religious or mythological. In all
of them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of his
actual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his own
actual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never even
seen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealist
dissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses or
understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of everything that he
draws--

O God, can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?

It is the very substance and matter of things that he tries to master;
and that so intensely that he never