"No, madame," he replied; "I shall give you some more 'Dorés.'"
What he enjoyed was an audacious and gigantic experiment, a subject which allowed him free and bold handling and a mystic, half-grotesque attitude toward what he found in it of poetry or strength. The feverish and hurried character of his work is sadly evident in many of his most ambitious designs. His illustrations of Milton, Dante, and the Wandering Jew may be said to show his powers at their best,—and perhaps we ought to include his Bible-pictures. Too often he uses without apparent motive feeble allegory and fantasy; and many of his later works must be considered by his most charitable critics not only obscure, but almost insane.
To turn from Doré to Delacroix is to take up the very different career of one of those "immortals" among whose works the great designer was eager to see his own unlucky paintings enrolled. Opposite as these two artists were, they had nevertheless certain things in common: their work was their life,—all personal gratification was subordinated to art,—each denied himself marriage, and yet enjoyed the untiring devotion of some sort of womankind. Doré had both his mother and his nurse to humor and spoil him. Delacroix endured the affectionate tyranny of his housekeeper, who watched over him as a lioness over her young. Delacroix, who was frail, sensitive, feverishly carried away by his work, needed just the careful intervention which this woman imposed to save him from the depressing influences of every-day life. She kept all uncongenial visitors from him. He was fastidious to a degree,—could not use a spoiled palette, and Jenny learned to prepare his palette, colors, and brushes with the nicest care. Delacroix began with a masterpiece. He was only twenty-three when he produced his "Dante and Virgil," which put him at the head of the so-called "romantic school." His clear intellect, his strength as a draughtsman, his abundance of invention, his wonderful color, made themselves felt at once. He had a long career in which to develop, and he was tireless in reinforcing his own great powers by profound and careful study of great authors, besides working perpetually to discover the secrets of the splendid paintings of Raphael, Velasquez, Veronese, and, above all, Rubens. It was his habit to spend whole days at the Jardin des Plantes, watching the animals, observing their postures and movements, aiming to pluck the heart out of the mystery of each organization. In 1828 he went to England, and, although he disliked the country, its architecture, the ill-made shoes and soiled stockings of the women, he carried back with him powerful impressions from Constable and from Kean's impersonations of Shakespeare which animated all his later work. His picture of "Hamlet," although it was not completed until 1843, owes its conception to this period. His lithographs of "Faust" elicited from Goethe the remark, "He has surpassed the pictures I had made for myself of the scenes written by myself."
The carefully-prepared monographs on Millet and Holbein, accompanied by excellent designs after their works, are full of suggestive criticism, and show how well the modern practice of popularizing art is carried on in Paris. Millet was born some sixteen years after Delacroix, and came to Paris in 1837, when that great master had produced some of his best pictures, which of all contemporary art were what aroused Millet's admiration and homage. "Grands par les gestes," he called them, "grands par l'invention et la richesse du coloris." Millet himself, however, was to found a separate school from that of the brilliant Delacroix. The fac-similes in this brochure from his original designs in crayon or pastel give much of the sentiment and meaning of his work. As the author says, they might well be the illustrations of a mighty poem called "The Earth." Night and morning, sunrise, noon, and sunset, the succession of seasons, the patient industries of the workers who toil like nature's own forces, simply, sternly, and with silent strength, all tell their story here. Millet had passed his youth in the fields, and, the son of a peasant, he must himself have been the central figure in many such scenes as those with which he has charmed the world. His picture of "The Haricot-Gatherer" represents the paternal cottage, and the figure of the woman in the garden is that of his mother herself. When he enshrined personal memories like these, no wonder we find in Millet's work the interpretation of so much that is deepest and most intimate in the history of man.
The gallery of the portraits of Hans Holbein the younger is well chosen, and gives some excellent instances of the artist's unsurpassed manner. There is inevitably something in any picture of Holbein's which holds the attention by its absolute reality: it is not only natural, but true, the reflection of an actual personality. An interest attaches to the portrait of Anne of Cleves, although one hardly finds in it the beauty which misled Henry VIII. and altered the history of England a little.
Five Novels.
"A Wheel of Fire." By Arlo Bates. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
"As it was Written: A Jewish Musician's Story." By Sidney Luska. New York: Cassell & Co.
"Love—or a Name." By Julian Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor & Co.
"A Social Experiment." By E. A. P. Searing. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons.