58
PARTISAN REVIEW
ART IN THE SECOND EMPIRE
THE JOURNAL OF EUGENE DELACROIX.
Translated from the
French by Walter Pach. Covici-Friede.
$7.50.
The Journal of Delacroix offers perhaps the most complete glimpse
into the 19th century's aesthetic workings that has come down to us. For
this reason it may suggest a certain tedium and banality, particularly to
those attuned to the contemporary outlook. On nearly every page will
appear one of those incredible aesthetic judgments and attitudes toward
society that we are still trying to forget. Page 215 offers an example:
"In the evening went to see Mme. Jaubert. Saw portraits and Persian
drawings which caused me to repeat what Voltaire says somewhere,
more or less like this: there are vast countries where taste has never
penetrated; they are those countries of the Orient in which there is no
society, where women are degraded, etc. All the arts are stationary there.
In these drawings there is neither perspective nor any feeling for what
is really painting, that is, a certain illusion of projection. The figures are
motionless, the poses awkward, etc."
Yet the picture is so complete that the various sections of the book,
which often seem as irrelevant as a piece isolated from a puzzle, become
full of meaning in their context. For Delacroix was a man of the world
to an extent that makes our artists seem provincial. He mingled freely
with the bourgeois society of the Second Empire. Many of the important
figures were his intimate friends. He attended the opera and the con-
certs, he read the books of the period, and he commented on everything
he saw and heard. Above all, despite fame and flattery, he retained an
astonishing humility. He devoted pages to the exaltation of Raphael,
Rubens, Correggio, as magicians he never could hope to approach. With
his own work he is sometimes "pleased," at other times his opinion is
very modest. "Tuesday, Dec. 30, 1823....
Meanwhile I have sold my
wretched
Ivanhoe
to M. Coutan, the collector of Scheffer's work. Poor
man! and he says he will buy others from me." And in criticism he takes
infinite pains to record the dicta of his friends, usually putting them
forward as the final comment.
Typical of the Romantic era is Delacroix's slowness to mature. The
Journal falls roughly into two halves; the first section includes the yean
1822-53, the second (longer and more complete) from 1853-63. The
first comprises largely unfelt generalizations-tedious panagyrics on the
greatness of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rubens-alternating with attempts
to pursue some pulchritudinous waitress who had served him at a
friend's dinner. His celebrated trip to Morocco in 1832 makes one of
the dullest portions of the book; most of it are jottings for future illus-
trations. It has long been the fashion for critics to look upon this ex·
cursion as a turning-point in Delacroix's career; but unhappily he
