The death of Eugene Delacroix cuts the last bond between the great
artistic epoch which commenced with the Bellini and that which had its
beginning with the nineteenth century, epochs as diverse in character as
the Venice of 1400 and the Paris of 1800. In him died the last great
painter whose art was moulded by the instincts and traditions that made
Titian and Veronese, and the greatest artist whose eyes have opened on
the, to him, uncongenial and freezing life of the nineteenth century. In
our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of
intellectual art, and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach
farther towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he
did no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away,--its
unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct, revelling in Art like children
in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and
glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to
science,--all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions
which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory,
as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls
kindling into like glow, with faint perception of what had passed from
the whole world beside. Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix, kept the line of color, now at last
utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out
of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the
greater substance; we kindle with the utilities, and worship with the
aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our
souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our
right minds in what we believe to be the noonday light of reason and
science. We are humanitarian, enlightened. We begin to comprehend the
great problems of human existence and development; our science touches
the infinitely removed, and apprehends the mysteries of macrocosmic
organism: but we have lost the art of painting; for, when Eugene
Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood
Art as Titian understood it, and painted with such eyes as Veronese's,
passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion
of a kingly race dies in some alien land. Greater artists than he we may
have in scores; but he was of the Venetians, and, with his _nearly_
rival, Turner, lived to testify that it was not from a degeneracy of the
kind that we have no more Tintorets and Veroneses; for both these, if
they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers.
Painting, as the Venetians understood it, is a lost art, because the
mental conditions which made it possible exist no longer. The race is
getting to that mannish stature in which every childlike quality is a
shame to it; and the Venetian feeling for and cultivation of color are
essentially childlike traits. No shadows of optics, no spectra of the
prism clouded their passionate enjoyment of color as it was or as it
might be, no uplifted finger of cold decorum frightened them into gray
or sable gloom; they garbed themselves in rainbows, and painted with the
sunset. Color was to them a rapture and one of the great pursuits of
their lives; it was music visible, and they cultivated it as such,--not
by rule and measure, by scales and opposites, through theories and
canons, with petrific chill of intellect or entangling subtilty of
analysis. Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts
their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore
color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They
went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother
meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts. I
do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a
given tint was true ever came; if only his fine instinct told him it was
lovely, he asked no question further,--and if he took a tint from
Nature, it was because it was lovely, and not because he found it in
Nature. _Our_ painter must see,--_their_ painter could feel; and in this
antithesis is told the whole difference between the times, so far as
color is concerned.
But while Delacroix worked in the same spirit and must be ranked in the
same school, there were differences produced by the action of the so
different social and intellectual influences under which he grew up. His
nature was intensely imaginative, and so was preserved from the dwarfing
effect of French rationalism and materialism: their clay could not hide
his light or close his eyes, for imagination sees at all points and
through all disguises, and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was
kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay.
Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his contemporaries
little else than cold propriety of form and color, studied negations of
spontaneity and imaginative abandon; yet such was the force of his
imagination, that these qualities, almost more than any other,
characterize his conceptions: but the perpetual contact and presence of
elements so uncongenial to his good genius produced their effects in a
morbid sadness, in his feeling for subject, and in a gloomy tone of
coloring, sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as
the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in
the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely
Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me
always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an
Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced children touched by
the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone. No color has ever
affected me like that of Delacroix,--his Dante pictures are the
"Commedia" set in color, and palpitating with the woe of the damned.
His intellect was of that nobler kind which cannot leave the questions
of the Realities; and conscious kindred with great souls passed away
must have given a terrible reality to the great question of the future,
the terror of which French philosophy was poorly able to dispel or lead
to anything else than this hopeless gloom. His great picture of the
_plafond_ of the Salon d'Apollon, in the Louvre, seems like a great ode
to light, in the singing of which he felt the gloom break and saw the
tones of healthy life lighten in his day for a prophetic moment; but
_dispelled_ the gloom _never_ was. What he might have been, bred in the
cheerful, unquestioning, and healthy, if unprogressive faith of Venice,
we can only conjecture, seeing how great he grew in the cold of Gallic
life.
His health was, through his later life, bad; and for my own part, I
believe that the same morbid feeling manifested in his art affected
injuriously his physical life, aided doubtless by the excessive work
which occupied all his available hours. For many years previous to his
death he alternated between periods of almost unbroken labor, taking
time only to eat and sleep, and intervals of absolute rest for days
together. In his working fits, so deranged had his digestion become, he
could take only one meal, a late dinner, each day, and saw no visitors
except in the hour preceding his dinner.
Having gone to Paris to spend a winter in professional studies, I made
an earnest application by letter to Delacroix to be admitted as a pupil
to his _atelier_. In reply, he invited me to visit him at his rooms the
next day at four, to talk with him about my studies, proffering any
counsel in his gift, but assuring me that it was impossible for him to
receive me into his studio, as he could not work in the room with
another, and his strength and occupations did not permit him to have a
school apart, as he once had.
At the appointed time I presented myself, and was received very
pleasantly in a little drawing-room at his house in the Latin Quarter.
His appearance, to me, was prepossessing; and though I had heard French
artists speak of him as morose and bearish, I must say that his whole
manner was most kindly and sympathetic, though not demonstrative. He was
small, spare, and nervous-looking, with evident ill-health in his face
and bearing, and under slight provocation, I should think, might have
been disagreeable, but had nothing egoistic in his manner, and, unlike
most celebrated artists, didn't seem to care to talk about his own
pictures. After personal inquiries of my studies and the masters whom I
knew and had studied, and most kindly, but appreciative criticism on all
whom we spoke of, "Ah," said he, "I could not have an _atelier_ (i.e.
school-_atelier_) now, the spirit in which the young artists approach
their work now is so different from that of the time when I was in the
school. Then they were earnest, resolute men: there were Delaroche and
Vernet," and others he mentioned, whose names I cannot remember, "men
who went into their painting with their whole souls and in seriousness;
but now the students come into the _atelier_ to laugh and joke and
frolic, as if Art were a game; there is an utter want of seriousness in
the young men now which would make it impossible for me to teach them. I
should be glad to direct your studies, but the work on which I am
engaged leaves me no time to dispose of." I asked if I could not
sometime see him working; but he replied that it was quite impossible
for him to work with any one looking on.
I asked him where, to his mind, was the principal want of the modern
schools. He replied, "In execution; there is intellect enough, intention
enough, and sometimes great conception, but everywhere a want of
executive ability, which enfeebles all they do. They work too much with
the crayon, instead of studying with the brush. If they want to be
engravers, it is all well enough to work in charcoal; but the execution
of an engraver is not that of a painter. I remember an English artist,
who was in Paris when I was a young man, who had a wonderful power in
using masses of black and white, but he was never able to do anything in
painting, much to my surprise at that time; but later I came to know,
that, if a man wants to be a painter, he must learn to draw with the
brush."
I asked him for advice in my own studies; to which he replied, "You
ought to copy a great deal,--copy passages of all the great painters. I
have copied a great deal, and of the works of almost everybody"; and as
he spoke, he pointed to a line of studies of heads and parts of pictures
from various old masters which hung around the room.
I am inclined to think that he carried copying too far; for the
principal defect of his later pictures is a kind of hardness and want of
thought in the touch, a verging on the mechanical, as if his hand and
feeling did not keep perfectly together.
I regret much that I did not immediately after my interview take notes
of the conversation, as he said many things which I cannot now recall,
and which, as mainly critical of the works of other artists, would have
been of interest to the world. I only remember that he spoke in great
praise of Turner and Sir Joshua Reynolds. As his dinner-hour drew near,
I took my leave, asking for some directions to see pictures of his which
I had not seen; in reply to which, he offered to send me notes securing
me admission to all the places where were pictures of his not easily
accessible,--a promise he fulfilled a day or two after. I left him with
as pleasant a personal impression as I have ever received from any great
artist, and I have met many.
The works of Delacroix, like those of all geniuses, are very unequal;
but those who, not having studied them, attempt to estimate them by any
ordinary standard will be far from the truth in their estimate, and will
most certainly fail to be impressed by their true excellence. The
public has a mistaken habit of measuring greatness by the capacity to
give _it_ pleasure; but the public has no more ignorant habit than this.
That is no great work which the popular taste can fully appreciate, and
no thoroughly educated man can at once grasp the full calibre of a work
of great power differing from his own standard. It took Penelope's
nights to unweave the web of her days' weaving, and no sudden shears of
untaught comprehension will serve to analyze those finer fabrics of a
genius like Delacroix. Perhaps, owing to many peculiarities of his
nature, showing themselves in unsympathetic forms in his pictures, he
may always fall short of complete appreciation by the educated taste
even,--and, indeed, to me he seems, of all the great colorists, the one
least likely ever to win general favor, but not from want of greatness.
I have often heard his drawing spoken of as bad. It was not the drawing
of a _dessinateur_, but there was method in its badness. I remember
hearing a friend say, that, going into his studio one day, he found him
just in the act of finishing a hand. He said, "It looks very badly
drawn, but I have painted it three times before I could get it right
Once I had it well drawn, and then it looked very badly; and now it
suits me better than when it was well drawn." A neatly drawn figure
would have made as bad an appearance in one of his pictures as a dandy
in the heat and turmoil of a battle-field; yet, as they came, all the
parts were consistent with the whole, reminding one of what Ruskin says
of Turner's figures.
For vigor and dash in execution, and the trooping energy of some of his
competitions, he reminds me more of Rubens than of any other; but his
composition has a more purely imaginative cast than that of Rubens, a
purer melody, a far more refined spiritualism. Nothing was coarse or
gross, much less sensual. His was the true imaginative fusion from which
pictures spring complete, subject to no revision. Between him and Turner
there were many points of resemblance, of which the greatest was in a
common defect,--an impulsive, unschooled, unsubstantial method of
execution, contrasting strongly with the exact, deliberate, and yet,
beyond description, masterly touch of Titian and most of his school.
Tintoret alone shows something of the same tendency,--attributable, no
doubt, to the late time at which he came into the method of his master.
If Delacroix has none of the great serenity and cheerfulness of Titian,
or the large and manly way of seeing of Veronese, he has an imaginative
fervor and intensity we do not see in them, and of which Tintoret and
Tiepolo only among the Venetians show any trace. Generations hence,
Eugene Delacroix will loom larger above his contemporaries, now hiding
him by proximity.
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