The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863

But while Delacroix worked in the same spirit and must be ranked in the same school, there were differences produced by the action of the so different social and intellectual influences under which he grew up. His nature was intensely imaginative, and so was preserved from the dwarfing effect of French rationalism and materialism: their clay could not hide his light or close his eyes, for imagination sees at all points and through all disguises, and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay. Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his contemporaries little else than cold propriety of form and color, studied negations of spontaneity and imaginative abandon; yet such was the force of his imagination, that these qualities, almost more than any other, characterize his conceptions: but the perpetual contact and presence of elements so uncongenial to his good genius produced their effects in a morbid sadness, in his feeling for subject, and in a gloomy tone of coloring, sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced children touched by the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone. No color has ever affected me like that of Delacroix,—his Dante pictures are the "Commedia" set in color, and palpitating with the woe of the damned.

His intellect was of that nobler kind which cannot leave the questions of the Realities; and conscious kindred with great souls passed away must have given a terrible reality to the great question of the future, the terror of which French philosophy was poorly able to dispel or lead to anything else than this hopeless gloom. His great picture of the plafond of the Salon d'Apollon, in the Louvre, seems like a great ode to light, in the singing of which he felt the gloom break and saw the tones of healthy life lighten in his day for a prophetic moment; but dispelled the gloom never was. What he might have been, bred in the cheerful, unquestioning, and healthy, if unprogressive faith of Venice, we can only conjecture, seeing how great he grew in the cold of Gallic life.

His health was, through his later life, bad; and for my own part, I believe that the same morbid feeling manifested in his art affected injuriously his physical life, aided doubtless by the excessive work which occupied all his available hours. For many years previous to his death he alternated between periods of almost unbroken labor, taking time only to eat and sleep, and intervals of absolute rest for days together. In his working fits, so deranged had his digestion become, he could take only one meal, a late dinner, each day, and saw no visitors except in the hour preceding his dinner.

Having gone to Paris to spend a winter in professional studies, I made an earnest application by letter to Delacroix to be admitted as a pupil to his atelier. In reply, he invited me to visit him at his rooms the next day at four, to talk with him about my studies, proffering any counsel in his gift, but assuring me that it was impossible for him to receive me into his studio, as he could not work in the room with another, and his strength and occupations did not permit him to have a school apart, as he once had.

At the appointed time I presented myself, and was received very pleasantly in a little drawing-room at his house in the Latin Quarter. His appearance, to me, was prepossessing; and though I had heard French artists speak of him as morose and bearish, I must say that his whole manner was most kindly and sympathetic, though not demonstrative. He was small, spare, and nervous-looking, with evident ill-health in his face and bearing, and under slight provocation, I should think, might have been disagreeable, but had nothing egoistic in his manner, and, unlike most celebrated artists, didn't seem to care to talk about his own pictures. After personal inquiries of my studies and the masters whom I knew and had studied, and most kindly, but appreciative criticism on all whom we spoke of, "Ah," said he, "I could not have an atelier (i.e. school-atelier) now, the spirit in which the young artists approach their work now is so different from that of the time when I was in the school. Then they were earnest, resolute men: there were Delaroche and Vernet," and others he mentioned, whose names I cannot remember, "men who went into their painting with their whole souls and in seriousness; but now the students come into the atelier to laugh and joke and frolic, as if Art were a game; there is an utter want of seriousness in the young men now which would make it impossible for me to teach them. I should be glad to direct your studies, but the work on which I am engaged leaves me no time to dispose of." I asked if I could not sometime see him working; but he replied that it was quite impossible for him to work with any one looking on.

I asked him where, to his mind, was the principal want of the modern schools. He replied, "In execution; there is intellect enough, intention enough, and sometimes great conception, but everywhere a want of executive ability, which enfeebles all they do. They work too much with the crayon, instead of studying with the brush. If they want to be engravers, it is all well enough to work in charcoal; but the execution of an engraver is not that of a painter. I remember an English artist, who was in Paris when I was a young man, who had a wonderful power in using masses of black and white, but he was never able to do anything in painting, much to my surprise at that time; but later I came to know, that, if a man wants to be a painter, he must learn to draw with the brush."

I asked him for advice in my own studies; to which he replied, "You ought to copy a great deal,—copy passages of all the great painters. I have copied a great deal, and of the works of almost everybody"; and as he spoke, he pointed to a line of studies of heads and parts of pictures from various old masters which hung around the room.

I am inclined to think that he carried copying too far; for the principal defect of his later pictures is a kind of hardness and want of thought in the touch, a verging on the mechanical, as if his hand and feeling did not keep perfectly together.

I regret much that I did not immediately after my interview take notes of the conversation, as he said many things which I cannot now recall, and which, as mainly critical of the works of other artists, would have been of interest to the world. I only remember that he spoke in great praise of Turner and Sir Joshua Reynolds. As his dinner-hour drew near, I took my leave, asking for some directions to see pictures of his which I had not seen; in reply to which, he offered to send me notes securing me admission to all the places where were pictures of his not easily accessible,—a promise he fulfilled a day or two after. I left him with as pleasant a personal impression as I have ever received from any great artist, and I have met many.

The works of Delacroix, like those of all geniuses, are very unequal; but those who, not having studied them, attempt to estimate them by any ordinary standard will be far from the truth in their estimate, and will most certainly fail to be impressed by their true excellence. The public has a mistaken habit of measuring greatness by the capacity to give it pleasure; but the public has no more ignorant habit than this. That is no great work which the popular taste can fully appreciate, and no thoroughly educated man can at once grasp the full calibre of a work of great power differing from his own standard. It took Penelope's nights to unweave the web of her days' weaving, and no sudden shears of untaught comprehension will serve to analyze those finer fabrics of a genius like Delacroix. Perhaps, owing to many peculiarities of his nature, showing themselves in unsympathetic forms in his pictures, he may always fall short of complete appreciation by the educated taste even,—and, indeed, to me he seems, of all the great colorists, the one least likely ever to win general favor, but not from want of greatness.

I have often heard his drawing spoken of as bad. It was not the drawing of a dessinateur, but there was method in its badness. I remember hearing a friend say, that, going into his studio one day, he found him just in the act of finishing a hand. He said, "It looks very badly drawn, but I have painted it three times before I could get it right Once I had it well drawn, and then it looked very badly; and now it suits me better than when it was well drawn." A neatly drawn figure would have made as bad an appearance in one of his pictures as a dandy in the heat and turmoil of a battle-field; yet, as they came, all the parts were consistent with the whole, reminding one of what Ruskin says of Turner's figures.

For vigor and dash in execution, and the trooping energy of some of his competitions, he reminds me more of Rubens than of any other; but his composition has a more purely imaginative cast than that of Rubens, a purer melody, a far more refined spiritualism. Nothing was coarse or gross, much less sensual. His was the true imaginative fusion from which pictures spring complete, subject to no revision. Between him and Turner there were many points of resemblance, of which the greatest was in a common defect,—an impulsive, unschooled, unsubstantial method of execution, contrasting strongly with the exact, deliberate, and yet, beyond description, masterly touch of Titian and most of his school. Tintoret alone shows something of the same tendency,—attributable, no doubt, to the late time at which he came into the method of his master. If Delacroix has none of the great serenity and cheerfulness of Titian, or the large and manly way of seeing of Veronese, he has an imaginative fervor and intensity we do not see in them, and of which Tintoret and Tiepolo only among the Venetians show any trace. Generations hence, Eugene Delacroix will loom larger above his contemporaries, now hiding him by proximity.

SYMPATHETIC LYING

If "all men are liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so that David's dictum hardly needs his apology of haste, it is a comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic; and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may put us on our guard. Sympathetic we think a better name than the unfortunate title of white, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue; and instead of protecting our virtue, may even expose us to practise them without remorse. Of laughing over them and making light of them, and calling them by various ludicrous synonymes, as fibs, and telling the thing that is not, there has been enough. We have a purpose in our essay, than which no preaching could be more sober. Our aim is to give for them no opiate, but to quicken the sense of their guilt, and their exceeding mischief, too; for, if Francis Bacon be right in declaring the lie we swallow down more dangerous than that which only passes through our mind, how seriously the wine-bibbing of this sweet poison of kindly misrepresentation must have weakened the constitution of mankind! Lying for selfish gain or glory, for sensual pleasure, or for exculpation from a criminal charge, is more gross, but it involves at once such condemnation in society, and such inward reproach, as to be far less insidious than lying out of amiable consideration for others, to shield or further kinsfolk or friends, which may pass unrebuked, or stand for an actual merit. Yet, be the motive what it may, there is a certain invariable quantity of essential baseness in all violation of the truth; and it may be feared our affectionate falsehoods often work more evil than our malignant ones, by having free course and meeting with little objection. "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for Him?" severely asks the old prophet of those who thought to cheat for their own set, as though it were in the cause of religion; and no godly soul can accept as a grateful tribute the least prevarication, however disinterested or devoted in its behalf. Indeed, no smart antithesis has been so hurtful as the overstated distinction between black lies and white. They are of different species, but have no generic difference. Charles Reade's novel, of "White Lies," in which the deceptions of love are so glorified, charming story as it is, will sap the character of whoever does not, with a mental protest, countermine its main idea. The very theory of our integrity is gone, if we do not insist on this. God has not so made the world that any perjury or cover of the facts is necessary to serve the cause of goodness. Commend it though English or German critics do, can we not conceive of a speech grander than the untruth which Shakspeare has put into the dying Desdemona's mouth?

Let us, then, examine some of the forms of sympathetic lying.

One of them is that of over-liberal praise. That a person is always ready to extol others, and was never heard to speak ill of anybody under the sun, appears to some the very crown of excellence. But what is the panegyric worth that has no discrimination, that finds any mortal faultless, or bestows on the varying and contradictory behaviors of men an equal meed? To what does universal commendation amount more than universal indifference? What value do we put on the lavish regard which is not individual, or founded on any intelligent appreciation of its object, but scattered blindly abroad on all flesh, as once thousands were vaguely baptized in the open air by a general sprinkling, and which any one can appropriate only as he may own a certain indeterminate section of an undivided township or unfenced common? To have a good word for everybody, and take exception to nothing, is to incapacitate one's self for the exquisite delight of real fellowship. We all know persons who seem a sort of social favorites on account of this gracious manner which they afford with such mechanical plenty. But what a dilution and deterioration their external quality of half-artificial courtesy becomes! It is handing round sweetened water, instead of tasting the juice of the grape. It is pouring from a pail, instead of opening a vial of sweet odors. This broadcast and easy approval lacks that very honesty which, in the absence of fineness, is the single grace by which it could be sanctified.

The same vice affects more public concerns. Of what sheer hypocrisy eulogistic resolutions upon officers leaving their posts in Church or State are too frequently composed! The men who are tired and want to get rid of their Representative or minister are so overjoyed at losing sight of him, that they can set no bounds to their thankful exaltation of his name! Truly they speed the parting guest, wish well to the traveller from their latitude, and launch with shouts the ship of his fortunes from their ways! They recommend him as a paragon of genius and learning to all communities or societies who want a service in his kind. How happy both sides to this transaction are expected to feel, and how willing people are sometimes to add to the soft words a solid testimonial of gold, if only thus a dismissal can be effected! But are not the reports of the committees and the votes of the meetings false coin, nowhere current in the kingdom of God, circulate as they may in this realm of earth? Nay, does not everybody, save the one that receives the somewhat insincere and left-handed blessing, read the formal and solemn record with a disposition to ridicule or a pitying smile?

How well it is understood that we are not to speak the truth, but only good, of the dead! How melancholy it is, that lying has come to be so common an epithet for the gravestones we set over their dust! How few obituaries characterize those for whom they are written, or are distinguishable from each other in the terms of their funeral celebrations of departed virtue! How refreshing, as rare, is any of the veritable description which implies real lamentation! But what a suspicion falls on the mourning in whose loquacity we cannot detect one natural tone! As if that last messenger, who strips off all delusions and appearances, should be pursued and affronted with the mockery of our pretence, and we could circumvent the angel of judgment with the sentence of our fond wishes and the affectation of our groundless claims! As if the disembodied, in the light of truth, by which they are surrounded and pierced, could be pleased with our make-believe, or tolerate the folly of our factitious phrase! With what sadness their purged eyes must follow the pens inditing their epitaphs, and the sculptors' chisels making the commonplaces of fulsome commendation permanent on their tombs! What vanity to their nicer ears must be the sonorous and declamatory orator's breath! Let us not offend them so. They will take it for the insult of perfunctory honor, not for the sympathy it assumes to be. Nothing but good of the dead, do you say? Nothing but truth of the dead, we answer. Do not disturb their bones; let them rest easy at last, is the commentary on all keen criticism of those who have played important parts in life, and whose influence has perhaps been a curse. No, we reply, their bones will rest easier, and their benedictions come to us surer, for our unaffected plain-dealing. The trick of flattery may succeed with the living. Those still in this world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!

But private conversation is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth, trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public sentiment. Such a paper as the London "Times," having nothing higher than avaricious commerce and national pride to consult, in a conspicuous centre of affairs has thus become the great weathercock of the world, splendidly gilded, lifted very high in the air, but, like some other stupid chanticleers, crowing at false signals of the dawn, and well called the "Times," as in its columns nothing eternal was ever evinced. Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility, blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of our private word. Through what manifold phases a good conversationist has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in Paul it never did, the fundamental consistency of principle which is the chief sign of spiritual life. The degree of elevation in the scale of being is marked by the approximation of the sight to a focus of unity. But, judging from the pictures they give us of their interior states, we might think many of our rational companions as myriad-eyed as naturalists tell us are some insects. Behold the wondrous transformation undergone by those very looks and features that give the natural language, as sentiments contrary to each other are successively presented, and Republican or Democrat, Pro-Slavery man or Abolitionist, walks up! In truth, a man at once kindly and ingenuous can hardly help in most assemblies coming continually to grief. He knows not what to do, to be at once frank and polite. The transverse beams of the cross on which he is crucified are made of the sincerity and amiability which in no company can he quite reconcile. Happy is he who has discovered beneath all pleasant humors the unity at bottom of candor with goodness, in an Apostle's clause, "speaking the truth in love"! No rare and beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when the encore took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in great cathedrals, and our lowest whispers like tones caught from angelic harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough. The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact, does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing, minding others' business, interfering with their relations, impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand, and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such discrete sentences—if we may use rhetorically a musical word—from your lips afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall kiss each other.