But to find the suggestion
of the infinite, the Shakespearian touch in his work seems to demand the
imaginativeness of M. Victor Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold
ventured to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider Lamartine
as a very important poet, Sainte-Beuve replied: "He was important to
us." Many critics, among them one severer than Sainte-Beuve, the late
Edmond Scherer, have given excellent reasons for Lamartine's absolute as
well as relative importance, and perhaps it is a failure in
appreciation on our part that is really responsible for our feeling that
Poussin is not quite the great master the French deem him. Assuredly he
might justifiably apply to himself the "Et-Ego-in-Arcadia" inscription
in one of his most famous paintings. And the specific service he
performed for French painting and the relative rank he occupies in it
ought not to obscure his purely personal qualities, which, if not
transcendent, are incontestably elevated and fine.
His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise,
rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and
style quite outshining significance and suggestion.
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