In these words Delacroix is very aptly characterised. His range of subjects included everything: decorative, historical, and religious painting, landscape, flowers, animals, sea pieces, classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the scorching heat of the south and the mists of the north. He left no branch of the art of painting untouched; nothing escaped his lion’s claws. But there is one bond uniting all: to all the figures for which he won the citizenship of art he gave passion and movement. His predominant quality is a passion for the terrible, a kind of insatiability for wild and violent action. His over-excited imagination heaps pain, horror, and pathos one upon another. The critics called him “the tattooed savage who paints with a drunken broom.” There is nothing pretty or lovable about his art; it is a wild art. He depicted passion wherever he found it, in the shape of wild animals, stormy seas, or battling warriors; and he sought it in every sphere, in nature no less than in poetry and the Bible. Hardly any painter—not even Rubens—has depicted with equal power the passions and movements of animals: lions in which he is own brother to Barye; fighting horses, in which he stands side by side with Géricault. No other artist painted waves more grand, wind-beaten, foaming, dashing, towering on high. Looking at them, one divines all the horrors concealed beneath the roar of the blue surface, horrors which were as yet so insufficiently suggested in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa.” In his historical pictures there reigns now terror and despair, as in the “Massacre of Chios”; now gloomy horror, as in the “Medea”; now feverish movement, as in the “Death of the Bishop of Liège.” He passes from Dante to Shakespeare, from Goethe to Byron, but only to borrow from them their most moving dramatic situations—Hamlet at Yorick’s grave, his fight with Laertes, Macbeth and the Witches, Lady Macbeth, Gretchen, Angelica, the Prisoner of Chillon, the Giaour, and the Pasha. All time is his domain, all countries are open to him; he hurries through the broad fields of imagination, a lordly reaper of all harvests.

Baschet.L’Art.
DELACROIX.MEDEA.DELACROIX.THE EXPULSION OF HELIODORUS.

And at the same time, in all his great human tragedies, he compels the elements to obey him as if they were his slaves. The passions of men set heaven and earth in motion. The agonising cries of victims find in his paintings an echo in the sullen shadows and the leaden, heavy clouds of the sky. The gloomy shores which Dante’s boat is approaching are as desolate as the spirits who wander through the night. But where splendour and glory reign, as in the “Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople,” the air, too, glistens and shines as though saturated with dust of gold. In his pictures a human soul which was great and full of meaning, and which possessed such combustibility that it took fire of itself, expressed itself recklessly, with the volcanic strength of an elemental power.

This proud self-reliance explains also how it was that this painter of unruly genius was, as a man, very far from being a revolutionist. For Delacroix the outer world had no existence; that world alone existed which was within him. After his picture of “The Barricades” in 1831 he avoided all political allusions, painted, read, and led a tranquil, measured, uniform life. In society polite and reserved, of aristocratic coldness, gentlemanly in appearance, and well-bred; in his speech curt, mordant, emphatic, and occasionally witty, he could nevertheless show himself, when he chose, an amiable, original talker, full of piquant ideas. Moreover, he was a great writer and critic, whose essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes have the perfect classic stamp. Nevertheless, he was always displeased when any one put him forward as the chief of official Romanticism, and saluted him as the Victor Hugo of painting. Surrounded as he was by young assailants of tradition who would allow no merit to anything old, he found pleasure in acknowledging his admiration for Racine, whom he knew by heart, and whom, when need was, he defended against the younger generation. He was too diplomatic to stir up against himself unnecessarily the hatred of those whom the long-haired Samsons of Romanticism called Philistines.

So far as in him lay, his quiet and methodical life should suffer no interruption. Worshipper though he was of light and colour, he was almost always shut up in his gloomy studio, and it was only when he found himself brush in hand that the reserved man became the passionate, vibrating painter. Then the memories with which his study of the poets had stored his mind grew in his fantasy into grand pictures glowing with life. By these visions he was excited, set on fire, and filled with enthusiasm. His studio was open but to few, for the intrusion of visitors chilled his inspiration, and he found it difficult to recover the proper frame of mind. Not till evening did he take his first meal, for he thought he could work with greater intensity when hungry. During a period of forty years he lived in his various studios, quiet and solitary, inventing, drawing, and painting without intermission, his door always bolted, so that when it suited him he could give out that he was ill of a fever. Every morning before work he drew an arm, a hand, or a piece of drapery after Rubens. He had formed the habit of taking Rubens to himself when other people were drinking their coffee.

Indeed, when one speaks of Delacroix, the name of Rubens rises almost involuntarily to one’s lips; and yet there is a profound difference between him and the great Flemish master. Rubens has the same passion, the same ever-active fancy; yet all his pictures rest in triumphant repose, while every one of Delacroix’s seems to resound as with a cry of battle. Looking at Rubens’ works you feel that he was a happy, healthy man; but by the time you have seen half a score of Delacroix’s it is borne in upon you that the life of the artist was one of strife and suffering. Rubens was the very essence of strength, Delacroix was a sick man; the former full of fleshly joyous sensuality, the latter consumed by a feverish internal fire.

His portrait of himself in the Louvre, with its pale forehead, its large dark-rimmed eyes, its lean, hollow face, its parchment-like skin stretched tightly over the bones, explains his pictures better than any critical appreciation. Delacroix was one of the âmes maladives, the spirits sick unto death, to whom Baudelaire addresses himself in his Fleurs du Mal. Delicate from his youth up, thoroughly nervous by nature, he prolonged his sickly existence throughout his life by sheer energy of will. Even in his childhood he passed through serious illnesses, and later on he suffered in turn from his stomach, throat, chest, and kidneys. Like Goethe in his old age, he felt well only when the temperature was high. He was short in stature. A leonine head, with a lion’s mane, surmounted a body that seemed almost stunted. With his eyes flashing like carbuncles, and his disordered prickly moustache, his was the fascinating ugliness of genius.

It was only by the strictest dieting in his quiet retreat at Champrosay that he prolonged his life for the last few years. In his youth he hovered like a butterfly from flower to flower; when grown old and hypochondriacal he withdrew into solitary retirement, work was the only medicine for diseased conditions of all kinds, to which he found himself daily more and more a victim. Only thus could this sickly man, doomed from his very birth, come to produce no less than two thousand pictures—a number all the more astonishing as Delacroix, even when his health permitted him to work at his easel, by no means possessed Rubens’ sovereign facility of production. The fever of work alternated, in his case, with the extremest exhaustion. There was something morbid, nervous, over-excited in all he did. “Even work,” he writes, “is merely a temporary narcotic, a distraction; and every distraction, as Pascal has said in other words, is only a method which man has invented to conceal from himself the abyss of his suffering and misery. In sleepless nights, in illness, and in certain moments of solitude, when the end of all things discloses itself in its utter nakedness, a man endowed with imagination must possess a certain amount of courage, not to meet the phantom half-way, not to rush to embrace the skeleton.”

The feverish disposition which he brought with him into the world was heightened by the acrimonious feuds in which, as a painter, he was forced to engage, and which left great bitterness behind them in his mind. His life and his art were in accord, in as much as both were battles. It is not easy to live when one is always ill; not easy to meet with recognition when one proclaims the exact opposite of that which for a generation past all the world has held to be true. And Delacroix took not a single step to meet his opponents half-way. He did not trouble himself for a single moment to please the public; and therefore the public did not come to him. Controversies such as that which took place over the “Massacre of Chios” continued decade after decade, and the exhibition of each of his pictures was the signal for a battle. “No work of his,” writes Thoré, “but called forth deafening howls, curses, and furious controversy. Insults were heaped upon the artist, coarser and more opprobrious than one would be justified in applying to a sharper.” At Charenton, where he was born, is the Bedlam of France. Hence the epithet continually hurled at him by the critics, who called him the runaway from Charenton.