Just the same, it is the felicity in his work that carries me away, a joy sensuous and spiritual at the same time. If we find in France almost none of the mythological nudes in his first style, before the Roman gravity that he liked to paint at the time of his long sojourn in Paris, if those canvasses of a bewitching lewdness, have gone astray in museums or private galleries abroad, the reason (one of the reasons) has been given to us by his contemporary, Louis-Henri de Loménie, Count of Brienne, in a manuscript dating from about 1694, discovered and published recently by Louis Hourticq; I could not tention to instruct. The contemporaries of Poussin were not deceived by it; and for a long time after his death, one proved himself connoisseur in painting by explaining his pictures: not a gesture without motive, they revealed his subtle intentions; the painting was presented as a sort of picture-puzzle, for which it was necessary to find the key to be able really to admire it. After which, one would have tired of them, had their value not been, properly speaking, pictorial. Paltry teaching of a work of art, if it had had to be limited by the solution of petty problems.
The teaching I draw from it is very different. Doubtless it is Poussin’s spirit speaking to me; but it is less to my mind that he speaks than to something very deep within me, that I don’t know whether to call soul or will. He invites me to a very particular contemplation of nature that is only permitted to works of art, music, painting or poetry; to what Poussin himself calls “delight,” the only aim, according to him, of his works. And I should like to add to that word an epithet: persuasive delight; a delight by which, as I emerge from it, my vision of the exterior world and even my demeanor recognizes itself changed.
The joy that comes to us from the contemplation of certain canvasses of Poussin is not only the delight to say all of the above; for I think it he came back to earth, that is how he would speak.
To tell the truth his ideas concern us scarcely at all and I can not make much of them. Nothing surprising or revealing in his aphorisms on his art, nor in his famous Principles, so often quoted. All that goes without saying. It is only by studying the ideas of a painter that we get them; as those of the musician, only when they come into sonorous existence. Even a poet’s ideas are of value only when they fill out and animate fine poetry. Otherwise the most sublime prophecies, even of a Hugo, irritate me; I don’t know what to do with them and I can’t take them seriously. As for the thinker, Sully Prudhomme, I abandon him to his ruin. Poussin’s idea has no value except it become plastic, and he transmit it to us pictured. But once that is said, let us recognize that it is the thought that motivates and animates all his pictures. That is what determines the grouping of his figures and their gestures, the movement of the lines, the distribution of the light, and the choice of colors. There is nothing, not even the leafing of the trees in his huge landscapes, that does not seem an emanation because of its balance and the serenity that it breathes.
And never more than in him has painting shown itself more tractable in spirit, or shown such an into them.1 In his Jesus in the Garden of Olives, the indiscreet introduction of cherubs, bearers of instruments of torture, takes away all solemnity from that ultra-pathetic scene, and Paul Desjardins has every reason to write: “The unreality and playfulness of that conception wound like profanity.” But Poussin is not conscious of it; there is no desecration in it for him, because there is no preliminary consecration. No mystical emotion takes part in that play of the spirit. He is, and remains reasonable; cartesian, it could be said, even before the influence of Descartes began to be felt. No anxiety in him, except concerning his work; no secret torment, no appeal to redemption, no need for recourse to the supernatural, to grace.
It will be said we are not any more conscious of the religious sentiment in the religious pictures of Rubens or Van Dyck, of Titian or of Raphael who, like Poussin later, found himself fully at ease only on the Greek Parnassus, and painted with the same brush, with a serene indifference, The School in Athenes or The Dispute over the Holy Sacrament. In not one of them is there any of that inexpressible mystical emotion that illuminates the little canvas of Rembrandt for instance; The Disciples at Emmaus. In any case, that assertion would be of very little importance if Poussin, like Courbet or Manet, saw and made us see nothing beyond the subject matter and had dreamed only of glorifying it. But that is not the case; don’t let us be deceived by it; Poussin is an anti-realist painter; there is no one more spiritual or idealistic than he. There is not one who transports humanity more resolutely and more spontaneously at the same time, above itself. And of course I am not speaking of his Assumption of the Virgin or the Rapture of Saint Paul, in which angelic efforts cooperate. A strange thing, as to the mystical feeling of which Poussin was capable, it is in his Inspiration of Anacreon (or in his Inspiration of the Poet, although a little less perceptible) that, unexpectedly, I find it. Pagan mysticism, needless to say, but alive and sincere, and such as one would not imagine different if, instead of quenching his spiritual thirst at the cup of poetry the god holds out to him, he should slake his thirst at the communion cup. He has the gesture of offering, the ecstatic look of the communicant. And nothing is more revealing than this admirable work1 that moves us by its extraordinary beauty, doubtless, but also like a confession.
This inspired poet he paints (in that second picture the Louvre owns to-day) is Virgil, we may think, judging by the Iliad and the Odyssey, books that figure in the picture near the god. As Virgil imitates Homer, Poussin imitates Raphael. For his tradition forms, as though outside of time, a continuity so homogeneous that he does not hesitate to locate, in his Orpheus and Eurydice, the drama that separates the two lovers in the Greek fable, in a Roman setting where we are astounded to find the Castle of Saint-Angelus. Yes, Poussin imitates, and La Fontaine, and Racine, and Molière; and in our day, Péguy, Claudel and Valéry. And it is well to say that at a time when nothing discredits an artist more than his resemblances. It is commonly judged today that an artist has all the more value if he has risen up, invented himself out of whole cloth, and if one can no longer recognize kinships in him. But then he is in danger of rendering obeisance to the times, and in that apparent and forced originality, to yield to the anarchistic taste of the day. As far as I am concerned, I think the courageous artist is the one who bucks the current, whether it tries to carry him to the right or the left. It was by retaining and restoring tradition, when it was slipping away, that Poussin was able to seem to Delacroix healthily revolutionary. Yet his originality remains profound, but is revealed only after a thorough examination. Proud in the midst of his epoch, modest as regards the past, he wishes to be an important mile-post in a glorious culture. To attain it, he will rely only on himself, and expect it only from himself; but he will know how “to neglect nothing.” It is to his own “generosity” alone that he appeals (I am quoting his own words) to maintain himself from then on in his “assured and constant position.”