Must I say that I prefer Delacroix with his exaggerations, his mistakes,
his obvious falls, because he belongs to no one but himself, because he
represents the spirit, the time, and the idiom of his time? Sickly, too
highly strung, perhaps, since his art has the melodies of our
generation, since in the strained note of his lamentations as in his
resounding triumphs, there is always a gasp of the breath, a cry, a
fever that are alike our own and his.
We are no longer in the Olympian Age, like Raphael, Veronese, and
Rubens; and Delacroix's art is powerful, as a voice from Dante's
Inferno.
_Rousseau._