[CHAPTER XI]
Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix had exhibited in the Salon of 1831 his Tigres, his Liberté, his Mort de l'Évêque de Liége. Notice how well the grave and misanthropie face of Delaroche is framed between Horace Vernet, who is life and movement, and Delacroix, who is feeling, imagination and fantasy. Here is a painter in the full sense of the term, à la bonne heure! Full of faults impossible to defend, full of qualities impossible to dispute, for which friends and enemies, admirers and detractors can cut one another's throats in all conscience. And all will have right on their side: those who love him and those who hate him; those who admire, those who run him down. To battle, then! For Delacroix is equally a fait de guerre and a cas de guerre.
We will try to draw this great and strange artistic figure, which is like nothing that has been and probably like nothing that ever will be; we will try to give, by the analysis of his temperament, an idea of the productions of this great painter, who bore a likeness to both Michael Angelo and Rubens; not so good at drawing as the first, nor as good at composition as the second, but more original in his fancies than either. Temperament is the tree; works are but its flowers and fruit.
Eugène Delacroix was born at Charenton near Paris,—at Charenton-les-Fous; nobody, perhaps, has painted such fools as did he: witness the stupid fool, the timid fool and the angry fool of the Prison du Tasse. He was born in 1798, in the full tide of the Directory. His father was first a Minister during the Revolution, then préfet at Bordeaux, and was later to become préfet at Marseilles. Eugène was the last of his family, the culot—the nestling, as bird-nest robbers say; his brother was twenty-five years old when he was born, and his sister was married before he was born. It would be difficult to find a childhood fuller of events than that of Delacroix. At three, he had been hung, burned, drowned, poisoned and strangled! He must have been made very tough by Fate to escape all this alive. One day his father, who was a soldier, took him up in his arms, and raised him to the level of his mouth; meantime the child amused itself by twisting the cord of the cavalryman's forage cap round his neck; the soldier, instead of putting him down on the ground, let him fall, and behold there was Delacroix hung. Happily, they loosened the cord of the cap in time, and Delacroix was saved. One night, his nurse left the candle too near his mosquito net, the wind set the net waving and it caught fire; the fire spread to the bedding, sheets and child's nightshirt, and behold Delacroix was on fire! Happily he cries; and, at his cries people come in, and Delacroix is extinguished. It was high time, the man's back is to this day marked all over with the burns which scarred the child's skin. His father passed from the prefecture of Bordeaux to that of Marseilles, and they gave an inaugural fête to the new préfet in the harbour; while passing from one boat to another, the serving lad who carried the child made a false step, dropped him and there was Delacroix drowning! Luckily, a sailor jumped into the sea and fished him out just when the serving lad, thinking of his own salvation, was about to drop him. A little later, in his father's study, he found some vert-de-gris which was used to clean geographical maps; the colour pleased his fancy,—Delacroix has always been a colourist;—he swallowed the vert-de-gris, and there he was poisoned! Happily, his father came back, found the bowl empty, suspected what had happened and called in a doctor; the doctor ordered an emetic and freed the child from the poison. Once, when he had been very good, his mother gave him a bunch of dried grapes; Delacroix was greedy; instead of eating his grapes one by one, he swallowed the whole bunch; it stuck in his throat, and he was being suffocated in exactly the same way as was Paul Huet with the fish bone! Fortunately, his mother stuffed her hand into his mouth up to the wrist, caught hold of the bunch by its stalk, managed to draw it up, and Delacroix, who was choking, breathed again. These various events no doubt caused one of his biographers to say that he had an unhappy childhood. As we see, it should rather have been said exciting. Delacroix was adored by his father and mother, and it is not an unhappy childhood to grow up and develop surrounded by the love of father and mother. They sent him to school at eight,—to the Lycée Impérial. There he stayed till he was seventeen, making good progress with his studies, spending his holidays sometimes with his father and sometimes with his uncle Riesener, the portrait-painter. At his uncle's house he met Guérin. The craze to be a painter had always stuck to him: at six years old, in 1804, when in the camp at Boulogne, he had made a drawing with white chalk on a black plank, representing the Descente des Français en Angleterre; only, France figured as a mountain and England as a valley; and a company of soldiers was descending the mountain into the valley: this was the descent into England. Of the sea itself there was no question. We see that, at six years of age, Delacroix's geographical ideas were not very clearly defined. It was agreed upon between Riesener and the composer of Clymnestre and Pyrrhus that, when Delacroix left college, he should enter the studio of the latter. There were, indeed, some difficulties raised by the family, the father inclining to law, the mother to the diplomatic service; but, at eighteen, Delacroix lost his fortune and his father; he had only forty thousand francs left, and liberty to make himself a painter. He then went to Guérin, as soon as it could be arranged, and, working like a negro, dreamed, composed and executed his picture of Dante. This picture, not the worst of those he has painted,—strong men sometimes put as much or even more into their first work as into any afterwards,—came under the notice of Géricault. The gaze of the young master when in process of painting his Naufrage de la Méduse was like the rays of a hot sun. Géricault often came to see the work of Delacroix; the rapidity and original fancy of the brush of his young rival, or, rather, of his young disciple, amused him. He looked over his shoulder—Delacroix is of short and Géricault of tall stature,—or he looked on seated astride a chair. Géricault was so fond of horses that he always sat astride something. When the last stroke of the brush was put to the dark crossing of hell, it was shown to M. Guérin. M. Guérin bit his lips, frowned and uttered a little growl of disapprobation accompanied by a negative shake of the head. And that was all Delacroix could extract from him. The picture was exhibited. Gérard saw it as he was passing by, stopped short, looked at it a long time and that night, when dining with Thiers,—who was making his first campaign in literature, as was Delacroix in painting,—he said to the future Minister—
"We have a new painter!"
"What is his name?"
"Eugène Delacroix!"