I
do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a
given tint was true ever came; if only his fine instinct told him it was
lovely, he asked no question further,--and if he took a tint from
Nature, it was because it was lovely, and not because he found it in
Nature. _Our_ painter must see,--_their_ painter could feel; and in this
antithesis is told the whole difference between the times, so far as
color is concerned.
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.
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