Until the year 1847 his pictures could without difficulty be excluded from the Salon. He irritated people by his violence, by the abruptness of his compositions, by his arrangement of figures with a view to pathos at the expense of plastic elegance; he displeased by the incompleteness of his works, which were regarded as sketches, not finished paintings. When Louis Philippe ordered a picture from his brush, it was on the express condition that it should be as little a Delacroix as possible. There was general ill-humour among the academicians when, at Thiers’ suggestion, he was commissioned to decorate the Palais Bourbon. And Delacroix, ambitious and sensitive as he was, was deeply hurt by every mortification of this kind, and affected by every gust of criticism as by a change of wind. Continually denounced in the newspapers, attacked, wounded, delivered over to the wild beasts, as he called it, he never had a moment of rest—he who, with his irritable temperament and fragile health, needed rest more than any man. It was not until almost all his works were brought together in the Universal Exhibition of 1885 that it became evident how great an artist this Delacroix was, whom his country for forty years had not understood, and to whom the Institute had closed its doors to the last. Yet he was no sooner dead than all with one voice proclaimed him a genius; his smallest drawing is to-day worth its weight in gold, while during his lifetime he seldom got more than two thousand francs for his largest paintings. His sketches, great works in small frames, have for the most part found their way to America. The sale of the pictures he left behind him produced three hundred and sixty thousand francs.

Delacroix, therefore, was victorious, but not as Rubens was; and his ceiling of the Louvre, with the “Triumph of Apollo,” one of his most remarkable works, strikes one almost as an allegory of his own life. What especially attracted and inspired the artist in this painting were the spasms and convulsions of the misshapen monsters which the god expels from the earth—the serpent twisting itself in movements of pain and fury, raising its head on high, hissing rage, and vomiting venom and blood. The god himself, who in the midst of a sea of light ascends into heaven in a golden chariot drawn by radiant steeds, shows in his sturdy limbs and attitude ready for defence, and in his wrathful face, no trace of the proud majesty and joyous splendour which Greece connected with the name of Apollo. He is a mortal who has fought and conquered, not a god who triumphs in tranquil power. He is Delacroix, not Rubens; a Titan, not an Olympian god.

L’Art.
J. A. D. INGRES.

The artistic power in Delacroix could in no wise submit to the confinement imposed by the French spirit of his time. It was not possible for a single man, though endowed with the most splendid courage, to overthrow in a moment all the traditions of French art. Any one who knows the French must feel that David’s Latin style could not so suddenly disappear out of their art, that it was not possible at a blow to banish all that had hitherto held sway and to replace it by its opposite. Ever since Poussin they had sought in Roman antiquity the formulæ of their art. The predilection which the Parisians have even to-day for the representation of Racine’s and Corneille’s tragedies, the admiration which even the most extreme Naturalists bestow upon Poussin and Lesueur, prove abundantly how deep Classicism is rooted in the flesh and blood of the French people. Brandes has remarked, very acutely, that, strictly speaking, even Romanticism was on French soil in many respects a Classical phenomenon, a product of French Classical rhetoric. “They never saw the dances of the elves, never heard the delicate harmony of their roundelays.” In Victor Hugo, the great opponent of Corneille, Corneille himself was re-embodied. He too is a draughtsman, constructs his poems like architectural works, chisels the form, polishes the verse, and confines his colouring within powerfully conceived Michelangelesque outlines.

Once the first eager impulse of the Romantic school had subsided, these old Classical tendencies showed themselves anew and with all the greater vehemence. Even Hugo’s dramas, with their predilection for all that is exuberant and monstrous, with their overflowing lyricism and sonorous pathos, became in the long run wearisome. He, who had hitherto been the idol of the young generation, was now called the Pater Bombasticus of the literature of the world.

Classicism found its poet and its muse. An unknown but very worthy young man, not endowed with wealth of imagination, but imbued with the most honourable intentions, came to Paris from the provincial town where he had grown to manhood, with a manuscript in his pocket. And François Ronsard’s Lucrèce, a tragedy from the antique, in its style sober and severe, reminding one of Racine, was represented amid thunders of applause, shortly after Hugo had been hissed off the stage. Enthusiastic admirers saw in it a glorious return to the great tragic drama of France, an emanation from the spirit of Corneille, and praised its clear, measured, and at once “classic and familiar” language. Together with its poet, the Classical reaction found its actress. In 1838 a young untrained child made her début at the Théâtre Français—a Jewish girl who had sung in the streets to the accompaniment of her harp. Rachel appeared upon the boards, and restored its former power of attraction to the old Classical repertoire, to the very tragedies which the Romantic school had banished from the theatre amid mockery and derision. The Cid, Mérope, Chimène, and Phèdre recovered their place upon the stage.

Seemann, Leipzig.
INGRES.THE MAID OF ORLEANS AT RHEIMS.

Painting took the same course. In opposition to the young painters who had burst into the arena with their gay-coloured uniforms, their gilded helmets and waving banners, Ingres came forth in the great tournament of Romanticism in the character of the Black Knight. An old gentleman, a man who in all his being belonged to the generation that was passing away, who was fifty years of age at the time of the Revolution of July, stations himself suddenly as the angel of the flaming sword, or, in the phrase of his opponents, as the gendarme of Classicism, at the gates of the Academy, barring them against every suspicious-looking person. And the young men, eccentric, eager for action as they were, who had recently fought with so much fury, had to retreat before him. Golden sunshine and glow of colour were once more tabooed, and their representative heroes, Veronese, Rubens, and Delacroix, regarded as flickering Will o’ the Wisps, whom every aspiring beginner should avoid as serpents and firebrands. One day when Ingres was taking his pupils through the Louvre he said, on entering the Rubens gallery: “Saluez, messieurs, mais ne regardez pas.” The acrimony of the strife was so great that it extended even to the personal relations of the rival chiefs, and Ingres was attacked by convulsive spasms whenever he heard the name of the painter of the “Massacre of Chios.” When in 1855 he had had a separate room prepared for his own pictures in the Universal Exhibition of that year, and observed Delacroix in the distance, just before the opening ceremony, he asked the attendant: “Has not somebody been here?—there is a smell of brimstone.” “Now the wolf is in the sheepfold” was his observation when Delacroix was elected to the Institute. He regarded him as the “hangman,” as the Robespierre of painting. “I used to love that young man, but he has sold himself to the evil one” (Rubens), said he, in righteous indignation, to his pupils.

INGRES.  PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.

“This famous thing, the Beautiful,” Delacroix had once written, “must be—every one says so—the final aim of art. But if it be the only aim, what then are we to make of men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and, in general, all the artistic natures of the North, who preferred other qualities belonging to their art? Is the sense of the beautiful that impression which is made upon us by a picture by Velasquez, an etching by Rembrandt, or a scene out of Shakespeare? Or again, is the beautiful revealed to us by the contemplation of the straight noses and correctly disposed draperies of Girodet, Gérard, and others of David’s pupils? A satyr is beautiful, a faun is beautiful. The antique bust of Socrates is full of character, notwithstanding its flattened nose, swollen lips, and small eyes. In Paul Veronese’s ‘Marriage at Cana’ I see men of various features and of every temperament, and I find them to be living beings, full of passion. Are they beautiful? Perhaps. But in any case there is no recipe by means of which one can attain to what is called the ideally beautiful. Style depends absolutely and solely upon the free and original expression of each master’s peculiar qualities. Wherever a painter sets himself to follow a conventional mode of expression he will become affected and will lose his own peculiar impress; but where, on the contrary, he frankly abandons himself to the impulse of his own originality, he will ever, whether his name be Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt, be sure master of his soul and of his art.”