Delacroix was another of the pupils who had grown up in Guérin’s studio, but he became the latter’s antipode. Even in his student years he took counsel, not of the antique, but of Rubens and Veronese; and when Géricault was painting his “Raft of the Medusa,” Delacroix belonged to the little band of enthusiastic admirers which gathered round the young master. He served as model for the half-submerged man to the left in the foreground of that picture. After busying himself at first almost entirely with caricatures, and studies of horses, and with Madonnas in the Classical style, he exhibited in 1822 his “Dante’s Bark,” in a pictorial sense the first characteristic picture of the century. One is inclined even to-day to repeat David’s exclamation when he caught sight of the work, the first great epoch-making life-utterance of the revolutionary Romanticists: “D’où vient-il? Je ne connais pas cette touche-la.” There were thoughts in it which had not been conceived and expressed in the same manner since the time of Tintoretto. Dante and Virgil, ferried by Phlegyas over Acheron, are passing among the souls of the damned, who grasp hold of the boat with the energy of despair. A theme taken from a mediæval author; an antique figure, that of Virgil, but seen through the prism of modern poetry. While the Florentine, stiff with horror, gazes upon the swimming figures which cling to the boat with teeth and nails, Virgil, tranquil and serious, turns on them a face which the emotions of life can no longer affect.

The work obtained a decisive success. A carpenter in Delacroix’s house had made for the young painter an inartistic frame of four boards. When he went to the exhibition and looked for his picture in the side-rooms he could not find it. The frame had fallen to pieces during removal, but the picture had been hung in an honourable place in the Louvre, in a rich frame ordered for it by Baron Gros. “You must learn drawing, my young friend, and then you will become a second Rubens,” was the salute which this remarkable man, whose theory ever gave the lie to his practice, gave the young master. Naturally Delacroix would not now have been admitted into the school of David, or would have been placed there in the lowest rank—with Rubens and a few other immortals, who drew no better than he did. He was absolutely opposed to all the exact, regular, well-balanced, colourless traditions which held sway in David’s school with their pedantic erudition and bourgeois discretion. The principle of the Classicists was the Greek type of beauty, and the translation of sculpture into painting. In Delacroix’s picture there was no longer anything of that sort. Géricault had already broken away from the academic stencilling of form, and had substituted natural expression, life, and emotion for conventional types; Delacroix now set aside the sullen colouring of the Classical school, and its painted statues made way for the colour-symphonies of the Venetians.

Baschet.
DELACROIX.   HAMLET AND THE GRAVE-DIGGERS.

These reforming qualities found in his second work, a few years later, a much fuller expression than in the “Dante’s Bark.” At that time the Greeks, that heroic nation, struggling and dying for its religion and independence, had excited everywhere the deepest sympathy and enthusiasm. Delacroix was the very man to be inspired by such a theme. From the agitation caused by the martyrdom of Greece, and from his taste for Byron’s poetry, resulted in 1824 the celebrated “Massacre of Chios,” on which he was already employed in 1821, before the completion of his “Dante’s Bark,” and in which his power of expression as well as of colour was carried much further than in the earlier picture. In the “Dante’s Bark” there were still, both in form and colour, reminiscences of the great Florentine masters; as, for instance, in the female figure in the foreground, which is almost an exact reproduction of Michael Angelo’s “Night.” The event depicted was comparatively quiet and tranquil, and the well-balanced composition would have done honour to the most rigorous follower of David. The only novelty lay in the treatment of colour, and in the substitution of the individual and characteristic for the typical and ideal. But undoubtedly it was now possible not only to produce in colour more powerful chords, but also in expression to strike notes more dramatic, for the academic plaster-of-Paris heads of the David school had depicted human emotion only in icy immobility. Delacroix had put all these possibilities into the new picture. The pyramidal configuration has resolved itself into an unconstrained grouping of figures. Here we have for the first time the artistic spirit intoxicated with colour, the “Orlando Furioso of colourists,” the pupil of Rubens, Delacroix. An entire world of deep feeling and of painfully passionate poetry, an entire world of tones, which the master under whose eyes he painted his “Dante” could not have conceived, lies enclosed within the frame of this picture. The figures, sitting, kneeling, partly reclining, with their half-starved bodies and their gloomy, brooding, hopeless faces; the desperate struggle between the conquerors and their victims in the far distance; the contrast between this scene of horror and the luminous splendour of the atmosphere, and the wealth of colour in the whole, made and still make this fine painting one of the most impressive pictures in the Louvre. It is a work which flames in glow of colour more than any that had appeared in France since the days of Rubens. The English had been his teachers. “It is here only that colour and effect are understood and felt,” Géricault had previously written from London. Delacroix’s work had already been sent off to the Salon when Constable’s first pictures were just arriving there, and the impression which they made upon him was so powerful that, at the very last moment, and in the Louvre itself, he gave his picture a brighter and more luminous colouring.

L’Art.
DELACROIX.TASSO IN THE MAD-HOUSE.

And indeed it was not till now that the Classicists perceived how great an opponent had arisen against them. Not only did the aged Gros call the “Massacre of Chios” “le massacre de la peinture,” but all the critics talked about barbarism, and prophesied that on this path French painting would hasten to its destruction. The prize of the Salon was awarded, not to the “Massacre,” but to Sigalon’s “Locusta,” an unimportant work of compromise, though very clever and well studied in draughtsmanship. It was said that Delacroix’s picture was lacking in symmetrical arrangement, that he showed too great a contempt for the beautiful, that indeed he appeared systematically to prefer the ugly—that is to say, he was blamed for the very qualities wherein lay his importance as a reformer. Accustomed as they had been for many years to an art in which intellect, correctness, and moderation held sway, not one of the critics was in a position to perceive all at once the value of this fiery spirit. Delécluze, the indefatigable defender of the sacred dogmas of the Classical school, characterised “dramatic expression and composition marked by action” as the reef whereon the grand style of painting must inevitably be wrecked. The modern schools of art, he taught as late as 1824, exist, flourish, and have their being only by the utilisation of what we can learn from the Greeks. Even acknowledging the progress in colour which the work showed, it nevertheless belonged, he said, to an inferior genus, and all its excellences in colouring could not outweigh the ugliness of its form.

Therewith began the battles of the Romantic school, and all the daring of Théophile Gautier, Thiers, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, Bürger-Thoré, Gustave Planche, Paul Mantz, and others had to be called upon in order to storm the heights held by the batteries of the Classical critics. Count Forbin gave proof of no less courage when he bought the picture, torn to shreds as it was by hostile criticism, for the State, at the price of six thousand francs. This enabled Delacroix to visit England. He spent the time from spring to autumn of 1825 in London, where he consorted amicably with all the artists of the day. And he took an interest not only in English art, but also in literature and the drama. His preference for Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott, who were already his favourite poets, found new sustenance. An English opera made him acquainted with Goethe’s Faust; and henceforth these poets entered into the foreground of his works. A picture of “Tasso” (the poet in a cell of the madhouse, through the window of which two grinning lunatics look in upon him) in 1826, the “Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero” and the “Death of Sardanapalus,” both after Byron, in 1827, and “Faust in his Study” in 1828, followed the “Massacre”—all of them obviously the works of a painter who loved bright, glowing colour, had studied Rubens and had recently returned from England. In 1828 was published, in seventeen plates, his cycle of illustrations to Faust, to accompany a translation of the poem into French; and this was followed by a number of lithographs on Shakespearian subjects.

And here we may notice a singular exchange of parts. When the word “Romantic” was first heard in Germany it had originally much the same sense as “Roman.” The German Romanticists were moved to enthusiasm by Roman Catholicism and Roman church painting. But when Romanticism reached France, the word came to mean exactly the opposite: a preference for the German and English spirit as compared with the Greek and Latin, and an enthusiasm for the great Anglo-Saxon and German poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, in whom, contrasting with Racine’s correctness, were to be found unrestrained genius and glowing passion. This influence of poetry over art may easily become dangerous, if painters sponge, so to speak, upon the poet, as the Düsseldorf school did, and make use of his work only for the purpose of enabling works, in themselves valueless, to keep their heads, artistically speaking, above water, by means of their extrinsic poetical interest. But Delacroix had no need of any such support. He was not the poets’ pupil, but their brother. He did not study them in order to illustrate their works, but was imbued with their spirit and possessed by their souls. He lived with them; he did not borrow his subjects from them, but rather made use of them to express in his own powerful language the strongest emotions of the human heart. Nor did he ever forget that painting must, before all, be painting. Endowed as he was with a poet’s soul, he conceived things as a painter, not laboriously translating passages from the poets, but simply thinking in colour. What the musician hears, what the poet imagines, he saw. The scenes of which he read appeared at once before his eyes as sketches, in great masses of colour. For him, composition, action, and colour ever united together into one inseparable whole.