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The great difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible ideal. Scott and Géricault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem essentials, distinctly old-fashioned.
Flowers by Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon; Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of painting none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures.
Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary Scheffer, painted beside Géricault and Delacroix. Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his "Dante and Beatrice" and his "Temptation of Christ" are admirable only from the academic point of view.
The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon; the romanticism of Géricault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of those true Waldmenschen, Millet, Dupré, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who "painted music," Monticelli all these men might never have been born except for their possible impact upon the so-called "Batignolles" school.
The several schools of the old masters were represented by a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Corregio, a woman of Titan, an Adoration of Veronese, an Assumption of Murillo, a portrait of Holbein, a monk of Velasquez, a martyr of Ribera, a fair of Rubens, two Flemish landscapes of Teniers, three little "genre" pictures of Gerard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two specimens of Gericault and Prudhon, and some sea-pieces of Backhuysen and Vernet.
And as of late years we look on the stages of any evolution as less dependent on individuals than we used to, doubtless just as Luther was confirmed and supported on his way to the Council at Worms by the people calling on him from the house-tops not to deny the truth, Géricault was sustained and stimulated in the face of official obloquy by a more or less considerable æsthetic movement of which he was really but the leader and exponent.
"The Wreck of the Medusa" of Géricault is full of earnest, if niggling life. Delacroix has followed his own bent with such independent zeal as has made him the object of intense admiration to some, of bitter hatred to others. But Ary Scheffer has taken his rank at the head of the Spiritualist school, and has awakened a wider love and obtained a fuller appreciation than either of them.
When, twelve years earlier, Ingres' "Courtesan," and that of Sigalon, the "Medusa" of Gericault, the "Massacre of Scio" by Delacroix, the "Baptism of Henri IV." by Eugene Deveria, admitted by celebrated artists accused of jealousy, showed the world, in spite of the denials of criticism, that young and vigorous palettes existed, no such complaint was made.
There is an abundance of beautiful little phases of sentiment, pointedly expressed; there is a great deal of what one should call the picturesque of the morale; but few of its foundation ideas. I must except from these remarks the very strong and earnest painting of the Meduse, by Gericault, which C. has described.
He himself loved the "beau ideal" in all things; he loved the poetry of Lord Byron, the painting of Gericault, the music of Rossini, the novels of Walter Scott. "Every one to his taste, maman," he would say; "but your trey does hang fire terribly." "It will turn up, and you will be rich, and my little Bixiou as well."
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