CHAPTER XII

Three portraits in one frame

Now--judging by myself at least--next to the appreciation of the work of great men, that which rouses the most curiosity is their method of working. There are museums where one can study all the phases of human gestation; conservatories where one can almost by the aid of the naked eye alone follow the development of plants and flowers. Tell me, is it not just as curious to watch the varying phenomena of the working of the intellect? Do you not think that it is as interesting to see what is passing in the brain of man, especially if that man be an artist like Vernet, or Delaroche or Delacroix; a scientist like Arago, Humboldt or Berzélius; a poet like Goethe, Hugo or Lamartine, as it is to look through a glass shade and see what is happening inside a bee-hive?

One day I remarked to one of my misanthropic friends that, amongst animals, the brain of the ant most resembled that of man.

"Your statement is not very complimentary to the ant!" replied the misanthrope.

I am not entirely of my friend's way of thinking. I believe, on the contrary, that the brain of man is, of all brains, the most interesting to examine. Now, as it is the brain--so far, at least, as our present knowledge permits us to dogmatise--which creates thought, thought which controls action and action which produces deeds, we can boldly say that to study character, to examine the execution of works which are the productions of temperament, is to study the brain. We have described Horace Vernet's physical appearance: small, thin, slight, pleasant to look at, good to listen to, with his unusual hair, his thick eyebrows, his blue eyes, his long nose, his smiling mouth beneath its long moustache, and his beard cut to a point. He is, we added, all life and movement. Vernet, at the end of his career, will, indeed, be one who has lived a full life, and, when he stops, he will have gone farthest; thanks to the post, to horses, camels, steamboats and the railroad, he has certainly, by now (and he is sixty-five), travelled farther than the Wandering Jew! True, the Wandering Jew goes on foot, his five sous not permitting him rapid ways of locomotion, and his pride declining gratuitous locomotion. Vernet, we say, had already travelled farther than the Wandering Jew had done in a thousand years; his work itself is a sort of journey: we saw him paint the _Smala_ with a scaffold mounting as high as the ceiling and terraces extending the whole length of the room; it was curious to see him, going, coming, climbing up, descending, only stopping at each station for five minutes, as one stops at Osnières for five minutes, at Creil for ten minutes and at Valenciennes for half an hour--and, in the midst of all this, gossiping, smoking, fencing, riding on horseback, on mules, on camels, in tilburys, in droschkys, in palanquins, relating his travels, planning fresh ones, impalpable, becoming apparently almost invisible: he is flame, water, smoke--a Proteus! Then there was another odd thing about Vernet: he would start for Rome as he would set out for Saint-Germain; for China as if for Rome. I have been at his house six or seven times; the first time he was there--the oddness of the thing fascinated me; the second time he was in Cairo; the third, in St. Petersburg; the fourth, in Constantinople; the fifth, in Warsaw; and the sixth, in Algiers. The seventh time--namely, the day before yesterday--I found him at the Institute, where he had come after following the hunt at Fontainebleau, and was giving himself a day's rest by varnishing a little eighteen-inch picture representing an Arab astride an ass with a still bleeding lion-skin for saddle-cloth, which had just been taken from the body of the animal; doing it in as sure and easy a manner as though he were but thirty. The ass is crossing a stream, unconscious of the terrible burden it bears, and one can almost hear the stream prattling over the pebbles; the man, with his head in the air, looks absently at the blue sky which appears through the leaves; the flowers with their glowing colours twining up the tree-trunks and falling down like trumpets of mother-of-pearl or purple rosettes. This Arab, Vernet had actually come across, sitting calm and indifferent upon his ass, fresh from killing and skinning the lion. This is how it had happened. The Arab was working in a little field near a wood;--a wood is always a bad neighbour in Algeria;--a slave woman was sitting twenty paces from him, with his child. Suddenly, the woman uttered a cry ... A lion was by her side. The Arab flew for his gun, but the woman shouted out to him--

"Let me alone!"

I am mistaken, it was not a slave woman, but the mother who called out thus. He let her alone. She took her child, put it between her knees and, turning to the lion, she said to it, shaking her fist at the animal--

"Ah, you coward! to attack a defenceless woman and child! You think to terrify me; but I know you. Go and attack my husband instead, who is down there with a gun ... Go, I tell you! You dare not; you wretch! It is you who are afraid! Go, you jackal! Off with you, you wolf, you hyæna! You have a lion's skin on your back but you are no lion!"

The lion withdrew, but, unfortunately, it met the Arab's mother, who was bringing him his dinner. It leapt on the old woman and began to eat her. At the cries of his mother the Arab ran up with his gun, and, whilst the lion was quietly cracking the bones and flesh with its teeth, he put the muzzle of his gun into the animal's ear and killed it outright. In conclusion, the Arab did not seem to be any the sadder for being an orphan, or in better spirits for having killed a lion. Vernet told me this whilst putting the finishing touches to his picture, which ought to be completed by now.

Delaroche worked in a very different way; he led no such adventurous life; he had not too much time for his work. With Delaroche, work is a constant study and not a game. He was not a born painter, like Vernet; he did not play with brushes and pencils as a child; he learnt to draw and to paint, whilst Vernet never learnt anything of the kind. Delaroche is a man of fifty-six, with smooth hair, once black and now turning grey, a broad bare forehead, dark eyes fuller of intelligence than of vivacity, and no beard or whiskers. He is of middle height, well-set up, even to gracefulness; his movements are slow, his speech is cold; words and actions, one clearly feels, are subjected to reflection, and, instead of being spontaneous, like Vernet's, only come, so to speak, as the result of thought. Just as Vernet's life is turbulent, emotional and, like a leaf, carried unresistingly by the wind that blows, so the life of Delaroche, of his own free will, was tranquil and sedentary. Every time Delaroche went a journey,--and he went very few, I believe,--it was necessity which compelled him to leave his studio: it was some real, serious, artistic business which called him away. Wherever he goes, he stays, plants himself down and takes root, and it costs him as much pain to go back as it did to come. No one could less resemble Vernet in his method of working than Delaroche. Vernet knows all his sitters through and through, from the aigrette on the schako to the gaiter-buttons. He has so often lived under a tent, that its cords and piquets are familiar objects to him; he has seen and ridden and drawn so many horses, that he knows every kind of harness, from the rough sheep-skin of the Baskir to the embroidered and jewel-bespangled saddle-cloths of the pacha. He has, therefore, hardly any need of preparatory studies, no matter what his subject may be. He scarcely sketches them out beforehand: _Constantine_ cost him an hour's work; the _Smala_, a day. Furthermore, what he does not know, he guesses. It is quite the reverse with Delaroche. He hunts a long time, hesitates a great deal, composes slowly; Vernet only studies one thing, the locality; this is why, having painted nearly all the battlefields of Europe and of Africa, he is always riding over hill and dale, and travelling by rail and by boat.

Delaroche, on the contrary, studies everything: draperies, clothing, flesh, atmosphere, light, half-tones, all the effects of Delaroche are laboured, calculated, prepared; Vernet's are done on the spur of the moment. When Delaroche is pondering on a picture, everything is laid under contribution by him: the library for engravings, museums for pictures, old clothes' shops for draperies; he tires himself out with making rough sketches, exhausts himself in first attempts, and often puts his finest talent into a sketch. A certain feeling of laboriousness in the picture is the result of this preparatory fatigue, which, however, is a virtue and not a fault in the eyes of industrious people.

Like all men of transition periods Delaroche was bound to have great successes, and he has had them. During the exhibitions of 1826, 1831 and 1834, everyone, before venturing to go to the Salon, asked, "Has M. Delaroche exhibited?" But from the period, the intermediate year, in which he united the classical school of painting with the romantic, the past with the future, David with Delacroix, people were unjust to him, as they are towards all who live in a state of transition. Besides, Delaroche does not exhibit any longer; he scarcely even works now. He has done one composition of foremost excellence, his hemicycle of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and that composition, which, in 1831, was run after by the whole of Paris and annoyed most artists. Why? Has Delaroche's talent become feebler since the time when people stood in rows before his pictures and fought in front of his paintings? No, on the contrary, he has improved; he has become more elevated and masterly. But, what would you expect! I have compared Paul Delaroche with Casimir Delavigne, and the same thing happened to the poet as to the painter; only, with this difference, that the genius of the poet had decreased, whilst that of the painter not only did not remain stationary, but went on progressing constantly. At the present time, one needs to be among the most intimate of the friends of Delaroche to have the right to enter his studio. Besides, he is not even any longer in Paris: he is at Nice; he is said to be ill. Hot sun, beautiful starlit nights, an atmosphere sparkling with fireflies, will cure the soul, and then the body will soon be cured!...

There is no sort of physical resemblance between Delacroix and his two rivals. He is like Vernet in figure, almost as slender as he, very neat and fashionable and dandified. He is fifty-five years old, his hair, whiskers and moustache, are as dark as when he was thirty; his hair waves naturally, his beard is scanty, and his moustache, a little bristly, looks like two wisps of tobacco; his forehead is broad and prominent, with two thick eyebrows below, over small eyes, which flash like fire between the long black eyelashes; his skin is brown, swarthy, mobile and wrinkled like that of a lion; his lips are thick and sensual, and he smiles often, showing teeth as white as pearls. All his movements are quick, rapid, emphatic; his words are pictures, his gestures speaking; his mind is subtle, argumentative, quick at repartee; he loves a discussion, and is ever ready with some fresh, sparkling, telling and brilliant hit; although of an adventurous, fanciful, erratic talent, at the same time he is wise, temperate in his use of paradox, even classical; one might say that Nature, which tends to equilibrium, has posed him as a clever coachman, reins well in hand, to restrain those two fiery steeds called imagination and fancy. His mind at times overflows its bounds; speech becomes inadequate, his hand drops the brush, incapable of expressing the theory it wishes to uphold, and seizes the pen. Then those whose business it is to make phrases and style and appreciate the value of words are amazed at the artist's facility in constructing sentences, in handling style, in bringing out his points; they forget the _Dante_, the _Massacre de Scio_, the _Hamlet_, the _Tasso_, the _Giaour_, the _Evêque de Liège_, the _Femmes d'Alger,_ the frescoes of the Chamber of Deputies, the ceiling of the Louvre; they regret that this man, who writes so well and so easily and so correctly, is not an author. Then, immediately, one remembers that many can write like Delacroix, but none can paint as he does, and one is ready to snatch the pen from his hand in a movement of terror.

Delacroix holds the middle course between Vernet and Delaroche as regards rapidity of working: he works up his sketches more carefully than the former, less so than the latter. He is incontestably superior to both as a colourist, but strikingly inferior in form. He sees the colour of flesh as violet, and, in the matter of form, he sees rather the ugly than the beautiful; but his ugliness is always made poetical by deep feeling. Entirely different from Delaroche, he is attracted by extremes. His struggles are terrible, his battles furious; all the suppleness and strength and extraordinary movements of the body are drawn on his canvas, and he even adds thereto, like a strange varnish which heightens the vivid qualities of his picture, a certain automatic impossibility which does not in the least disconcert him. His fighters seem actually to be fighting, strangling, biting, tearing, hacking, cleaving one another in two and pounding one another about; his swords are broken in two, his axes bloody, his heaps of bodies damp with crushed brains. Look at the _Bataille de Taillebourg_, and you will have an idea of the strength of his genius: you can hear the neighing of the horses, the shouts of men, the clashing of steel. You will find it in the great gallery of Versailles; and, although Louis-Philippe curtailed the canvas by six inches all round because the measurement had been incorrectly given, mutilated as it is, dishonoured by being forced into M. Fontaines' Procrustes' bed, it still remains one of the most beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful, of all the pictures in the whole gallery.

At this moment, Delacroix is doing a ceiling at the Hôtel de Ville. He leaves his home at daybreak and only returns to it at night. Delacroix belongs to that rugged family of workers which has produced Raphael and Rubens. When he gets home, he takes a pen and makes sketches. Formerly, Delacroix used to go out into society a great deal, where he was a great favourite; a disease of the larynx has compelled him to retire into private life. Yesterday I went to see him at midnight. He was in a dressing-gown, his neck wrapped in a woollen cravat, at work close to a big fire, which made the temperature of the room 30°.[1] I asked to see his studio by lamplight. We passed through a corridor crowded with dahlias, agapanthus lilies and chrysanthemums; then we entered the studio. The absence of the master, who had been working at the other end of Paris for six months, had made itself felt; yet there were four splendid canvases, two representing flowers and two fruit. I thought from a distance that these were pictures borrowed by Delacroix from Diaz. That was why there were so many flowers in the anteroom. Then, after the flowers, which to me were quite fresh, I saw a crowd of old friends hanging on the walls: _Chevaux anglais qui se mordent dans une prairie_, a _Grèce qui traverse un champ de bataille au galop_, the famous _Marino Faliero_, faithful companion of the painter's sad moods, when he has such moods; and, last, by itself, in a little room at the side of the great studio, a scene from _Goetz von Berlichingen._ We parted at two o'clock in the morning.

[1] 30° Cent.=85° Fahr.