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The rosy cheeked maid hesitated a little, and her eyes wandered doubtfully from the veil to the cloak and the shabby skirt. "Kapellmeister Felix Ritter, I mean." "He is in, Madame, but he is engaged." "May I come in and wait?" The maid hesitated again: "What name shall I say, Madame?" "My name," said Kaya, "is Mademoiselle de de Poussin." The German words came stumbling from her lips.
Such pictures should not be hung in the same room with that of Orion. 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.
In his landscapes, instead of selecting the cultured amenity which captivates in the views of Claude or Poussin, he made choice of the lonely haunts of wolves and robbers; instead of the delightful vistas of Tivoli and the Campagna, he adopted the savage scenery of the Alps, rocky precipices, caves with wild thickets and desert plains; his trees are shattered, or torn up by the roots, and in the atmosphere itself he seldom introduced a cheerful hue, except occasionally a solitary sunbeam.
In a composition by Poussin, Mary, who has just seated herself on the ass, takes the Child from the arms of Joseph. Two angels lead the ass, a third kneels in homage, and two others are seen above with a curtain to pitch a tent. I must notice here a tradition that both the ox and the ass who stood over the manger at Bethlehem, accompanied the Holy Family into Egypt.
At these words Porbus and Poussin, amazed at the disdain which the master showed for such marvels of art, looked about them for the secret treasure, but could see it nowhere. "There it is!" said the old man, whose hair fell in disorder about his face, which was scarlet with supernatural excitement. His eyes sparkled, and his breast heaved like that of a young man beside himself with love.
And surely we have had but one prose-writer who could be compared with him in aërial perspective, if we may use the painter's term. If Irving is the Claude of our unrhymed poetry, Hawthorne is its Poussin. This is not the occasion for the analysis and valuation of Hawthorne's genius.
He might have become rich, but he cared not for wealth, and was perhaps the only artist that ever thought his works too highly paid for. On one occasion, being sent one hundred crowns for a picture, he returned fifty. Cardinal Mancini paid him a visit one evening, and when he was going away, Poussin attended him with a lantern to the outer gate, and opened it himself.
The intellectual POUSSIN, as Nicholas has been called, could never, from an early devotion to the fine statues of antiquity, extricate his genius on the canvas from the hard forms of marble: he sculptured with his pencil; and that cold austerity of tone, still more remarkable in his last pictures, as it became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance.
An officer of the royal household was charged with the execution of the order. He repaired to Poussin's lodgings; but Poussin was not at home; he was supping at the Blue Posts, a tavern much frequented by Jacobites, the very tavern indeed at which Charnock and his gang had breakfasted on the day fixed for the murderous ambuscade of Turnham Green.
To approach Poussin and his younger contemporary Claude rightly, the traveller will do well to free his mind from Ruskin's partial and prejudiced depreciation of these two supreme masters, in order to effect an equally partial appreciation of Turner. The story of Poussin's single-minded and stubborn application to his art cannot here be told.