[In the following essay, Porter analyzes the introspective aspects of Delacroix's Journal, evaluating what these deeply personal writings say about the author's artistic aesthetic, the role of conflict in his art, and self-identification.]

On September 3, 1822, Eugène Delacroix began the journal which he would keep, punctuated by several long interruptions, for the next forty-one years. At the very outset he declared “je l'écris pour moi seul”,¹ and this disclaimer of a desire to make his inner life available to the public is largely true. Much of the Journal consists of an intensely private meditation on his habits of mind and work, an account of fears and anxieties, an analysis of struggle and urgings towards greatness, and a not-always convincing attempt to assure himself that his art has been adequate compensation for the deprivations of family and sustained love. Delacroix's leading American critic notes that “The focus of his life was inward, its drama loaded inside his own consciousness … he was essentially an isolated and atypical figure.”² That journal is not merely a record of shifting attitudes, values and a private consciousness; nor of evolving patterns of thought. It is largely a trying out of emotional flux, as if its pages offered sanctuary free of censorship from within or without for the investigation of a complex, and often self-contradictory sensibility.

In 1837 Théophile Thoré exclaimed feverishly about Delacroix: “Endowed with an impressionable, nervous, intuitive, and melancholic constitution, a nature open to passions and sorrows alike, he suffers every quiver and quake that human beings can experience.”³ Inside the Journal Delacroix could experiment with his life, without an obligation to structure acts and feelings into coherent order. Of course all journals, even Boswell's (which we know were written in part with the intention of conferring retroactive narrative design), are to some extent fragmentary productions, their form dictated by arbitrary considerations of calendar and not by psychological rhythms. But Delacroix's Journal is particularly given to changes in mood, rapid shifts in ideas, and almost willful inversions of belief. The sensibility we witness is one both delighted in and horrified by such alternations, a self-judgment as ambivalent as the attitudes submitted for that judgment.

Several times Delacroix voices his desire to be a writer, especially a poet. Delacroix's ideal writer would not bother overmuch with form or “composition.” “Il est bon et à propos d'écrire les idées quand elles viennent, même si vous n'êtes pas occupé d'un travail suivi pour lequel ces idées puissent venir à propos. Mais toutes ces réflexions prennent la forme du moment” (III, p. 390). His major writing project was to be a Philosophical Dictionary of the Fine Arts; its attraction lay in the work's absence of sequence, theme, plan or transitional passages. Progress and development were anathema to him, too tight a rein on spontaneity and immediacy. But the Dictionary was left incomplete; even this fragmentary form was beyond him, significantly confined to a few sporadic passages in the Journal. A painting, he suggests, can be taken in at a glance, but a book is “comme un édifice” (III, p. 222) with many rooms that must be visited in some sequence; it is too much to be perceived at once.

Delacroix's conception of written self-revelation dictated that autobiography proper yield to journalizing, the form that resists fixing personality or creating an illusion of permanence. The pioneer of French self-consciousness becomes a kind of model: “Faut-il absolument faire un livre dans toutes les règles? Montaigne écrit à bâtons rompus … Ce sont les ouvrages les plus intéressants” (I, p. 439). Delacroix's desire to capture what he calls “tracings” of an original idea, that is to say, one's earliest, pre-formed and amorphous conceptions of self, moves him away even from “son idéal encore mal débrouillé” (I, p. 251) to re-presentations that avoid too absolute a self-definition. It is not surprising that early in his career he chose to paint himself as Hamlet—that figure of doubts and self-questionings—and he continued to paint and to print a series of lithographs of Hamlet. Of course the Journal took a back seat to his main vocation as artist; but if writing did not exactly compete with painting for his attention it complemented his art insofar as it relied on similar principles of creativity. “L'exécution du peintre ne sera belle qu'à la condition qu'il se sera réservé de s'abandonner un peu” (I, p. 252). Much of his painting has the quality of improvised performance, as if the seeming dash and spontaneity of the technique—what Jean Clay calls the “incoercible physical drive”⁴—is the appropriate instrument to capture the headlong rush and volatile energy of the subject matter. Not unlike Leonardo, fascinated and dismayed by the power of natural process and the destructive ravages of time, Delacroix too is affected by change and chaos, but the source of turbulence is closer at hand: passing moments can sweep away pleasure, but “a vivid imagination” can also obliterate our thoughts; even writing them down does not preserve them but renders them unrecognizable, for the inevitable lapse of memory between the garnering and the expression of an insight destroys all attempts at continuity.

This emphasis on fluidity and amendment corresponds to Delacroix's insistence that the Journal is a private affair. He is his own audience, appreciating or excoriating his shifts of mood, sometimes exhorting and guiding himself through the pathways of action or mental process. Inevitably he discovers he cannot form himself into solidity or consistency. Occasionally he states his recognition that our ideas change: “Qu'un homme de talent … ne craigne pas de se contredire” (II, p. 130); then at other times he expresses his surprise at his own inconsistency, as if the discovery itself is as much a jolt as the inconsistent actions. “Quelle mobilité, que celle de mon esprit! Un instant, une idée dérange tout, renverse et retourne les résolutions les plus avancées” (I, p. 21). This revelation comes in 1822 from a young man of 24, but at age 59 he is still fascinated by the process: “Combien le pour et le contre se trouvent dans la même cervelle! On est étonné de la diversité des opinions entre hommes différents; mais un homme d'un esprit sain conçoit toutes les possibilités …” (III, p. 313). Throughout the Journal he expresses an awareness that the human subject stands in danger of disintegration. This is less an abstract philosophical observation than a matter for personal concern, even severe anxiety. Memory goes, thoughts elude him, fragmentation is our curse, and Delacroix addresses the issue with a mixture of dread and intrigue. The Journal is a forum for these musings, or more precisely a haven where he can debate with himself the problem of a shifting, unstable identity.

The Journal is preoccupied with discussions of aesthetics and Delacroix's own creative process, as well as of pigment and line. But even here we feel a continuity between painter and anxious autobiographer. His diatribes against realism, for example, correspond to his assertions of his own uniqueness, and his resistance to being fixed in a single mold. “Pour que le réalisme ne soit pas un mot vide de sens, il faudrait que tous les hommes eussent le même esprit, la même façon de concevoir les choses” (III, p. 379). Just as an artist's “spirit” and “mind” guide his hand and eye, dictate what he sees and makes, so Delacroix affirms his individualism—inconsistent and contradictory, opposed to generalizing and universalizing trends. To have his own story, to make it up and tell it in his own way, is to be an original. The terms “âme,” “génie,” “sentiment” and “imagination” ring throughout the Journal, always with the implication of specificity and particularity. Realism, in his mind, ought to give way to the corrective and constructive act of imagination, which bridles at attempts merely to reproduce or imitate. And so we have Delacroix's famous insistence on quick sketches, rough impressions, restless figures, a gathering of barely comprehensible lines, improvisation, “cette première vue passionnée sur son sujet” (I, p. 251) and impulsive brush strokes that dramatize work more in process than completed. Numerous passages argue for unfinished works of art, which retain “toutes les heureuses négligences qui sont la passion de l'artiste” (II, p. 157) or “l'ébauche d'une pensée” (II, p. 324) which sustains its primoriginal feeling and does not enclose “l'imagination dans un cercle et lui défend d'aller au delà” (II, p. 164). The Journal posits a self as much in movement and as girational as his many paintings that emphasize swirling energy, unstable balance points and propulsive forces. Baudelaire stresses the point of Delacroix's restless, kinetic self-assertion when he writes in his eulogy of the painter: “Tout lui était énergie, mais énergie dérivant des nerfs et de la volonté” (p. 40).⁵

Delacroix is comfortable with an autobiographical form that eschews consecutive narrative design. Against the regular and quotidian beat of time he presents a figure neither unfolding nor progressing nor evolving, but rather preoccupied with momentary states of being and fleeting impressions. Autobiography is a process of wrestling with his own vacillating mind. Boswell's protest against the possibility of autobiographical “realism” might indeed apply to Delacroix.

I find it is impossible to put upon paper an exact Journal of the life of Man. External circumstances may be marked. But the variations within, the workings of reason and passion, and what perhaps influence happiness most, the colourings of fancy, are too fleeting to be recorded.⁶

These momentary flashes of subjectivity have the effect of challenging the reader to create a whole figure from the discrete, disparate images. Thus by a paradox of reader-engagement, despite or perhaps because of the very privacy and fragmentation of the Journal, its insistent interiority and non-consecutive design, Delacroix appears to solicit our understanding. This is a subtle issue, because he does not speak directly to a reader; in fact it is not clear to him there will be any reader at all. Yet what he claims for the relation between painter and viewer can apply to journalist and reader. “Je me suis dit cent fois que la peinture … n'était que le prétexte, que le pont entre l'esprit du peintre et celui de spectateur” (II, p. 12). Delacroix finds that painting, what he calls a silent art, offers a mysterious reality that, if effective, holds us in rapt attention. Paintings draw us from ourselves, and we are moved to seek them out. Books, on the other hand, hold us at bay, force themselves upon us, are insistent and often devious or wearisome. His conception of the Journal is more like that of painting: devoid of “enchaînement et … transitions” (II, p. 464), diffident, tangible yet elusive and elliptical, seductive.

If the reader is drawn into the mind of the journalist, as he might be pulled into the vortex of the paintings, it is partly that Delacroix has staged himself as a variety of characters. Critics have long held that Delacroix projects himself into many of the characters (and even animals) he painted or sketched: Hamlet, Faust, Sardanapalus, the Giaour, Jacob, lions, tigers. Despite his assertions of heroic individualism (“Il faut absolument que … [les artistes] arrivent, non pas à mépriser tout ce qui n'est pas eux, mais à dépouiller complètement ce fanatisme presque toujours aveugle, qui nous pousse tous à l'imitation des grands maîtres” (III, p. 96), Delacroix often identifies himself with poets (especially Dante, Shakespeare, Byron and Scott), musicians (Paganini, whom he painted as a mesmerizing presence, a true inventor, a man with a natural genius for his art [III, p. 126], not unlike the figure he himself wished to project), and painters (Michelangelo and Titian). Delacroix looks to these artists for inspiration, and, preoccupied as he is with his own sense of destiny, links his fate with theirs. This “staging” occurs throughout the Journal, not just in the paintings; over and over he asserts his desire to be like Byron or Dante, even like a jungle cat.⁷

The desire to identify with other creators is powerful in Delacroix, as if he needs them for inspiration and validation. There is also something of a competitive strain, that he seems to recognize. The perceived danger in utilizing others' self-image for his own (e. g., the Byronic libertarian, dandy, rogue and hero) is that the gesture suggests dependence as well as appropriation. Delacroix is torn between urging imitation of predecessors and at the same time resistance to authority and preconceived systems. There is a brief line in an early entry which captures this ambivalence. Delacroix has been talking about the inspiration of Byron and also about the impulse to have one's work approved by others. He then states that “c'est de vivre dans l'esprit des autres qui nous enivre.” (I, p. 120). Are the “others” those who respond to your work, or precursor artists who inspire and influence your work? They are both, for though Delacroix seeks to escape from the commonplace and to attain a heroic and original greatness in keeping with Romantic striving and the assertion of individual power, he achieved that goal in part through the absorption of others' visions. Originality and “deference to tradition,” according to Frank Trapp the twin hallmarks of Delacroix's creativity, have their analogues in the Journal in the tendency on one hand to display a forceful personality and assert a greatness unmediated by the pressures of traditional form, subject matter or convention; and on the other hand, to efface the accusations of imperiousness and rebellion, and retire into solitude, isolation and loneliness.⁸ Several statements written in the spring of 1824 capture this impulse and its origins: “… il faut en revenir à la solitude, mais vivre sobrement” (I, p. 77). “Tout est intéressé pour moi, dans la nécessité de me renfermer davantage dans la solitude” (I, p. 80). “Je voudrais identifier mon âme avec celle d'un autre” (I, p. 100). “Ce qui fait le tourment de mon âme, c'est sa solitude” (I, p. 119).

The common image of Delacroix, reinforced by Baudelaire's extravagant assertions of the painter's volcanic energy, imagination of the infinite, passionate love of passion, tiger-like intensity and the “Molochism” of the work, is that of the possessed and demonic genius, whose art is without precedent and utterly solipsistic. But in these passages from the Journal, personality is partnered with tradition, and claims for originality are tempered by an awareness that his inspiration is somewhat indebted to others.

Toi qui sais qu'il y a toujours du neuf, montre-le-leur dans ce qu'ils ont méconnu … Fais leur croire qu'ils n'avaient jamais entendu parler du rossignol et du spectacle de la vaste mer et de tout ce que leurs grossiers organes ne s'entendent à sentir, que quand on a pris la peine de sentir pour eux d'abord. Que la langue ne t'embarrasse pas; si tu cultives ton âme, elle trouvera jour pour se montrer; elle se fera un langage qui vaudra bien les hémistiches de celui-ci et la prose de celui-là. Quoi! vous êtes original, dites-vous, et cependant votre verve ne s'allume qu'à la lecture de Byron et Dante, etc! Cette fièvre, vous la prenez pour la puissance de produire, ce n'est plutôt qu'un besoin d'imiter … Eh! non c'est qu'ils n'ont pas dit la centième partie de ce qu'il y a à dire; c'est qu'avec une seule des choses qu'ils effleurent, il y a plus de matières aux génies nouveaux qu'il n'y a … [gap in the manuscript] … et que la nature a mis en dépôt dans les grandes imaginations funestes, plus de nouveautés à dire sur ses créations, qu'elle n'a créé de choses (I, p. 121).

Ce qui fait les hommes de génie ou plutôt ce qu'ils font, ce ne sont pas les idées neuves, c'est cette idée, qui les possède, que ce qui a été dit ne l'a pas encore été assez.

(I, p. 118)

Trapp characterizes these words as a “mixture of bravado, self-justification, and insecurity,”⁹ and while “insecurity” seems a bit excessive, there is surely a nervous anxiety hedged round with self-dramatizing by one who claims he can extract anything from the usable past and make it his own.

Delacroix's preoccupation with greatness (“La gloire n'est pas un vain mot pour moi. Le bruit des éloges m'enivre d'un bonheur réel” [I, p. 103]) is genuine; but his stress on models enhances his ties to tradition and qualifies the usual notion of romantic subjectivity. In fact his search for exemplars and avatars is quite consistent with his sense of destiny and daring; the process of identification—with Byron when Delacroix is young, with Titian when he is old—endows him with power. Autobiographers sometimes perceive models as blocking figures, adversaries in a struggle which forces them to achieve a more autonomous identity. One thinks here of those famous fathers, James Mill and Hermann Kafka. But Delacroix, often without a focused, coherent image of himself, finds his identity partly embedded in that of others: “Recueille-toi profondément devant ta peinture et ne pense qu'au Dante” (I, p. 113).

The single-minded quest in Delacroix's Journal is for fame and greatness. He notes on three separate occasions Stendhal's advice to him: “Ne négligez rien de ce qui peut vous faire grand” (I, p. 411); and again: “Il faut donc être hors de soi, amens, pour être tout ce qu'on peut être” (II, pp. 15-16). From the start we see restlessness and struggle.

Dispositions fugitives, qui me venez presque toujours le soir. Doux contentement philosophique, que ne puis-je te brider! Je ne me plains pas de mon sort. Il me faut goûter plus encore de ce bon sens qui se risque aux choses inévitables.

Ne réservons rien de ce que je pourrais faire avec plaisir pour un temps plus opportun … Vain mortel, tu n'es borné par rien, ni par ta mémoire qui t'échappe, ni par les forces de ton corps qui sont minces, ni par la fluidité de ton esprit qui lutte contre ces impressions, à mesure qu'elles t'arrivent. Il y a toujours au fond de ton âme quelque chose qui te dit: “Mortel tiré pour peu de temps de la vie éternelle, songe que tes instants sont précieux. Il faut que ta vie te rapporte à toi seul tout ce que les autres mortels retirent de la leur.”

(I, p. 90)

If there is any clearly dominant self, it is characterized by a combative, aggressive stance—he refers to writing and painting as a battle. We sense a man driven to excel, to transcend the mundane and to struggle against the resistance of nature and the inertia of desolation. Two passages capture this commitment to struggle:

il faut, je le vois, que mon esprit brouillon s'agite, défasse, essaye de cent manières, avant d'arriver au but dont le besoin me travaille dans chaque chose. Il y a un vieux levain, un fond tout noir à contenter. Si je ne me suis pas agité, comme un serpent dans la main d'une pythonisse, je suis froid.

(I, pp. 112-13)

Ce qu'il y a de plus réel en moi, ce sont ces illusions que je crée avec ma peinture. Le reste est un sable mouvant.

(I, p. 64)

The sheer physicality of the images suggests a visceral struggle to extricate himself before he goes under; and the act of battling against confining forces testifies to both his determination and his power. Elsewhere Delacroix speaks of “un combat continu” (I, p. 128) to raise oneself above the level of the common herd; conscience as well as desire for fame dictates this pursuit, which, significantly, he likens to “transes de réveiller ce lion qui sommeille, dont les rugissements ébranlent tout votre être!” (I, p. 128). Fierce combat marks such paintings as La chasse aux lions, La chasse aux tigres, La lutte de Jacob et de l'ange, and Combat de Giaour et du Pacha, where Delacroix gives concrete form to his journalistic meditations on individual energy in danger of being harnessed by civilization, recalcitrant nature or the sheer grinding process of time.

Trapp notes that Delacroix not merely identified himself with the big cats who, in his paintings of hunts, seem less the prey than the aggressors; Delacroix often drew and painted those animals at menageries when he was recovering from an illness, as though to gain strength from the beasts, symbolically absorbing their grace, power, energy and beauty.¹⁰ Yet here again we have a problem about identity. In one of the great passages of the Journal Delacroix seeks to be “[le] vrai homme … le sauvage [qui] s'accorde avec la nature comme elle est” (I, p. 435), but as an artist he is vulnerable to nature itself.

Sitôt que l'homme aiguise son intelligence, augmente ses idées et la manière de les exprimer, acquiert des besoins, la nature le contrarie en tout. Il faut qu'il se mette à lui faire violence continuellement; elle, de son côté, ne demeure pas en reste. S'il suspend un moment le travail qu'il s'est imposé, elle reprend ses droits, elle envahit, elle mine, elle détruit ou défigure son ouvrage; il semble qu'elle porte impatiemment les chefs-d'œuvre de l'imagination et de la main de l'homme.

(I, p. 435)

These passages raise a question about Delacroix's conception of his own nature: does he view himself as the savage whose fury is akin to that of the amorality of nature itself; or instead the civilized man of talent and enlightened imagination, at the mercy of nature? I raise this issue because once more the willed striving for the unattainable and what Wylie Sypher describes as the “imperialism of romantic painting, by which [critics] mean this subjecting the world to a temperament,”¹¹ are no guarantee that the artist will be able or even willing to portray himself with coherence, focused attention and an unwavering set of values, beliefs and images.

Elizabeth Bruss succinctly states the case for discontinuity in autobiography when she argues that “the ‘story’ the autobiography tells is never seamless, and often it is not a story at all but a string of meditations and vignettes—fractional events that may be painful or joyous in their partial disinterment, irrepressible or simply casual in their transient spontaneity.”¹² This is not to deny the person behind this disjunction, one whose very preoccupation with mutability, multiplicity and fragmentation validates the importance of self-exploration, the commitment to subjective truth, and ultimately the need for some patterns, however tentative they may be. Woven into Delacroix's discussions of art, music, literature, salon culture, philosophy and daily life is a constant thread of self-examination. Indeed the pledge to self-knowledge is the most important exercise of self he can imagine, the very occupation that elevates will over fate.

On a droit de s'étonner en voyant une foule de gens stupides ou au moins médiocres, qui ne semblent vivre que pour végéter, que Dieu ait donné à ses créatures la raison, la faculté d'imaginer, de comparer, de combiner, etc., pour produire si peu de fruits. La paresse, l'ignorance, la situation où le hasard les jette, changent presque tous les hommes en instruments passifs des circonstances. Nous ne connaissons jamais ce que nous pouvons obtenir de nousmêmes. (…) Le Connais-toi toi-même serait donc l'axiome fondamental de toute société, où chacun de ses membres ferait exactement son rôle et le remplirait dans toute son étendue.

(I, p. 316)

But even the impulse to self-analysis is no guarantee of coherence or artful self-construction.

Often Delacroix is an enigma to himself. “Je suis un homme. Qu'est-ce que: Je? qu'est-ce qu'un homme?” (I, p. 62). To be sure, the puzzlement here arises out of the death of his friend and mentor Géricault, especially the inexplicability of the other's early demise. But the questions sound the knell of a tolling theme in the Journal: how can the self be known, even to itself, when it is so various? There is a constant interrogative mood throughout the Journal, elicited not merely by the complexity of the world but also by the imponderable nature of the observing self.

J'ai deux, trois, quatre amis: eh bien! je suis contraint d'être un homme différent avec chacun d'eux, ou plutôt de montrer à chacun la face qu'il comprend. C'est une des plus grandes misères que de ne pouvoir jamais être connu et senti tout entier par un même homme; et quand j'y pense, je crois que c'est là la souveraine plaie de la vie: c'est cette solitude inévitable à laquelle le cœur est condamné.

(I, p. 38)

Delacroix sees his lack of focus as the reason for a lessening of artistic productivity, yet he takes a kind of pleasure in following the alternations of his roving and impressionable mind. The virtue of such an “esprit vagabond” (I, p. 86) is that he can draw upon the inspiration of the moment—what he calls his “génie”—rather than on plans which might stultify his imagination. Fear of self-contradiction is a mark of the derivative. The inevitability of opposing traits ironically guarantees that we will seldom applaud even the state for which we have yearned: achieving a goal yields misery; misfortune yields happiness. “il arrive … souvent [à l'homme] de s'ennuyer dans la prospérité et même de s'y trouver très malheureux” (II, p. 390).

Fascination or torment or both? Even the answer to such a query itself elicits contradiction. At times Delacroix urges spontaneity, at times he fears acting on impulse. Sometimes strong will, consistency and deliberation are more important than inspired ambiguity; then again, resignation to the “arrêts de la sévère nature” (I, pp. 268-69) and “l'harmonie générale” (I, p. 269) of things takes precedence over instinctive human desire. Ultimately his own extremes of mood become the very taproot of his creativity.

Delacroix's great painting La Mort de Sardanapale (1827) exhibits this diversity of mood and feeling in a powerful way. One might be tempted to identify Delacroix with Sardanapalus as the archetype of the misunderstood, romantic isolato, the man who, as Delacroix says about himself, lives utterly in his own mind, projecting his interior scenarios into reality or into art. The king reposes on his bed with almost bored detachment and fatalistic resignation, watching the execution of his commands to have his favorite concubines slaughtered, his treasures destroyed, and the entire bed chamber consumed in a funeral pyre. While the most terrible violence is enacted in front of him—women are raped, stabbed and hanged, a horse is killed, a servant bears a cup of poison, and flames are beginning to engulf the room—the king looks on wearily. He is the center of calm amidst a scene of sadism, erotic frenzy and destructive power. Contemptuous of morality, disillusioned with vanity and yet the instigator of savage deeds, he embodies the spirit of contradictoriness.¹³ Just as the Journal suggests diametrically opposed states of being, mood swerves and the amazed discovery that achieving a desired state of affairs creates an immediate wish for its contrary, so Sardanapalus dreams of tranquility, peace and disengagement even as he seemingly revels in the sensuous, violent, gaudy splendor that suddenly grows stale.

La Mort de Sardanapale dramatizes contrariety and disjunction, in the sense that the king is calm as he gazes on turbulence, his form that of poised stillness surrounded by whirling, frenzied energy. The painting also suggests Delacroix's fascination with and fear of transience, as well as the dual desire to hold onto life in all its richness and to condemn life lived outside the mind. Intense feeling and passion go side-by-side with the desire for aloofness and consolation. The very impurity of the work, its sense of despair and calm, eroticism and death, worldliness and transcendence, links it to Delacroix's tendency to extremism and polarity. Those moments in which Delacroix conceives “toutes les possibilités … tous les points de vue” (III, p. 313) often focus on a vision of mankind or individual caught in a cycle of greatness and misery, which offers proof of “la faiblesse de l'homme, aussi bien que la singulière puissance de son génie” (II, p. 461). The painting renders that resignation to fatality and the inevitability of defeat as well as a transcendence of it through the imposition of a heroic will. Delacroix's duality regarding submission to suffering and resistance to authority figures here, as well as his religiously inspired stoicism that he could oppose to his interest in social affairs.

These divergent impulses might be subsumed under the categories of struggle against natural process and harmony with it. Delacroix's body of work can be divided into subjects which represent a fierce encounter of conflicting forces, and those expressing a calm and graceful portrayal of idealized life. The latter grouping would include many of his “oriental” subjects, especially Noce juive au Maroc and Les Femmes d'Alger and several Odalisques, all of which represent what Delacroix called images of a “classical” culture, timeless, dream-like, antique. The former is far more common, what we think of as quintessential Delacroix: Combat de Giaour et de Pacha, Chevaux se battant, Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger, La lutte de Jacob et de l'ange, and La chasse aux lions—all of these canvasses dramatize violence, brutality and anguished contention, sometimes with rival figures, sometimes with nature, sometimes within the subject himself. Delacroix believed he owed his creative power to the struggle to overcome weakness, indolence or sheer inertia, and defined himself as one in ceaseless conflict with himself. He may have urged a stoical resignation to the irresistible actions of “[les] arrêts de la sévère nature” (I, pp. 268-69), but he sought to resist any force that threatened to constrain or vitiate his energy.

A crucial Journal entry stresses the notion of painting as both draining and energizing, but finally an act which, in its turmoil, gives him the vitality expressed in the subject matter that mirrors the process itself.

… heureuse vie! Compensation céleste de mon isolement prétendu! Frères, pères, parents de tous les degrés, amis vivant ensemble se querellent et se détestent plus ou moins sans un mot que trompeur.

La peinture me harcèle et me tourmente de mille manières à la vérité, comme la maîtresse la plus exigeante; depuis quatre mois, je fuis dès le petit jour et je cours à ce travail enchanteur, comme aux pieds de la maîtresse la plus chérie; ce qui me paraissait de loin facile à surmonter me présente d'horribles et incessantes difficultés; mais d'où vient que ce combat éternel, au lieu de m'abattre, me relève; au lieu de me décourager, me console et remplit mes moments, quand je l'ai quitté? Heureuse compensation de ce que les belles années ont emporté avec elles; noble emploi des instants de la vieillesse qui m'assiège déjà de mille côtés, mais qui me laisse pourtant encore la force de surmonter les douleurs du corps et les peines de l'âme!.

(III, p. 425)

The struggle between resignation and resistance to natural process characterizes much of the Journal, resistance usually triumphing over tendencies to lapse into melancholy or despair. The Journal affirms a beneficial strife, itself the very stuff of imaginative inspiration.

Conflict permeates the Journal, involving such issues as Delacroix's love of women versus his need to remain ascetic and unbothered by what he felt to be a distraction from creative intensity; or his desire to behave as erudite social man, versus the impulse to be more private and work-centered, ambition “renfermée dans ces murs” (III, p. 425). Goethe caught the spirit of Delacroix's ambivalence when, regarding the plates for Faust—which Goethe greatly admired—he commented on the artist: “Delacroix seems to have felt at home here and roamed freely, as though on familiar ground, in a strange fusion of heaven and earth, the possible and the impossible, between the coarsest and the most delicate.”¹⁴ Delacroix did not so much choose one mode or another, but mined the dialectic for the subject matter of the paintings (often the struggle is inconclusive; the fury of the process more important than the nature of the outcome). “The possible and the impossible”: the Faustian problem distilled to the issue of resignation to reason or rebellion against complacency. The paintings focus either on a moment of choice (the subject deliberates on a drastic course of action, as in Médée contemplating the murder of her children), or on a moment whose conclusion will decide an action, though all is momentarily in suspension (the swordpoint rush of Combat de Giaour et du Pacha). Delacroix finds in that choice the generating impulse of the work, whose drama consists of the enigma of choice or the uncertainty of outcome. In the Journal Delacroix enjoys dramatizing the act of indecision, keeping a close watch on his fluctuating impulses, recording not merely the moments of lived experiences but also the reflections evoked by the act of autobiography.

O folie! folie! folie qu'on aime et qu'on voudrait fuir. Non, ce n'est pas le bonheur! C'est mieux que le bonheur, ou c'est une misère bien poignante. Malheureux! Et si je prenais pour une femme une véritable passion! Mon lâche cœur n'ose préférer la paix d'une âme indifférente à l'agitation délicieuse et déchirante d'une passion orageuse. La fuite est le seul remède. Mais on se persuade toujours qu'il sera temps de fuir, et l'on serait au désespoir de fuir, même son malheur.

(I, pp. 36-37)

This emphasis on process seems to characterize both painting and writing; in the writing Delacroix attempts to catch his thought at the emotional cresting point without necessarily establishing a logic or context to validate it.

One reason for Delacroix's shifts to emotional extremes is that he gives free play to his imagination, “qui fait mes douleurs et mes joies” (I, p. 27). When, during a rainy trip to Dieppe he comes down with a cold and is confined to his hotel room, Delacroix knows how to overcome his fate: “heureusement, mon imagination ne laisse pas de voyager” (II, p. 104). The Journal is filled with imperatives urging himself to live in the imagination and not in material reality. Delacroix distinguishes between accuracy and truth; his goal is to find “le côté frappant et poétique” (II, p. 246) of the subject, a more substantial and authentic representation. Only such a process can lead to new creations. “mon exactitude consisterait … à n'indiquer fortement que les objets principaux, mais dans leur rapport d'action nécessaire avec les personnages” (II, p. 106). Ultimately the imagination is an instrument of compensation. Delacroix envisions it coming forcefully into play when anxieties and suffering dominate our lives. What he seeks is just that portion of uncertainty that allows for the free play of mind or the “main puissante” of the artist which “dispose et établit, ajoute ou supprime, et en use ainsi sur des objets qui sont siens” (II, p. 343).

There is a strain of self-laceration in the Journal that runs parallel to prayers for achievement and greatness. Hamlet's moral revulsion at his own actions may figure here. Occasionally Delacroix's curious rhetoric signals this bifurcation of self: “En entrant, je me vis dans la glace et je me fis presque peur de la méchanceté de mes traits” (I, p. 124). Whenever he tracks evil or horror in the world, he does not hesitate to include himself. A fear of failure and a sense of disillusionment run through the Journal, a darker view emphasizing the loss of physical powers and memory, “le vide insupportable” (I, p. 368), and a horror of losing his reason altogether. On two occasions he speaks of Baudelaire's translation of Poe, whose explorations of the fantastic delight Delacroix; still, “nous ne pouvons, nous autres, perdre à ce point l'équilibre, et la raison doit être dans tous nos écarts” (III, p. 138). And in the next paragraph Delacroix retreats from his caveat against both heroic overreaching and realism: “cette continuité dans l'horrible ou l'impossible rendu probable est pour nous un travers d'esprit. Il ne faut pas croire que ces auteurs-là aient plus d'imagination que ceux qui se contentent de décrire les choses comme elles sont” (III, p. 138). There is an attraction to passion and a need to exert control at the same time, lest he fall prey to incoherence and irrationality. He notes that Baudelaire identifies Poe's “sentiment d'idéal si singulier et se plaisant dans le terrible” (III, p. 150) with Delacroix's own work, and this insight obviously disturbs the painter.

The Journal juxtaposes the desire to transcend the familiar and the comfortable with a more cautious stance. Interestingly these modes of romantic self-assertion and acceptance of naturalism's force of circumstances do not divide neatly and predictably into the entries of young man and older man respectively, but are mixed throughout. The caution results from an uneasiness about the inevitability of defeat and loss. Delacroix is gloomy about even finding a cushion for the fall: he contemplates a precarious dependence upon his fellow men, but one's dearest friends and lovers are unable to provide sustained comfort, for “they have their own cross to bear.” There is not even solace from within, for the “[les] passions qu'il trouve chez lui sont les tyrans les plus cruels qu'il ait à combattre et on peut ajouter que leur résister, c'est résister à sa nature même” (I, p. 326).

Baudelaire early on remarked about the “Molochism” of Delacroix's work, citing the devastation, massacres, conflagrations, slaughters, rapes and carnage in the painting: “Toute cette oeuvre, dis-je, ressemble à un hymne terrible, composé en l'honneur de la fatalité et de l'irrémédiable douleur.”¹⁵ Even in more tender works, the critic notes, a bitter feeling inevitably enters. Delacroix's dark view of human nature seems to spring not just from personal anxieties and a fear of death, but from an absolute horror that the mind and spirit will always fall victim to the body, “ce cadavre vivant,” “son tyran,” “cette ridicule fenêtre [dont la] … lorgnette gauchie et terne gâte tous les jugements de l'autre, dont la bonne foi naturelle se corrompt, et qui produit souvent d'horribles fruits” (I, p. 126).

If there is an obsession that runs throughout the long span of the Journal it is this endangerment of the will before contingency and the external forces which range against the self, especially the forces of time. An autobiographer following the course of the life from a retrospective view might regard time as an element which is a shaping medium of that life and provides the possibilities for a patterning of events as well as a concomitant narrative fiction to structure those events. A journalist following the life as it unfolds day-by-day might regard time as a sporadic and brutal succession of reminders that the individual is up against a pitiless, corrosive force. In one passage Delacroix describes a horde of ants overcoming a struggling beetle, in which the battle is envisaged in Homeric terms; he goes away and returns to find no trace of the combatants. This scene becomes an icon of natural decay as well as violence, and can be likened to numerous passages lamenting the destruction of man's work in the face of our own savage instincts or the process of temporal corruption. Delacroix is fascinated and horrified by natural upheaval (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) and regards them as evidence of the untrustworthiness of time. Our creative powers are violated by all change, which Delacroix can never perceive as progress, but rather as the move to barbarism and catastrophe. All time brings melancholy reminders: New Year's Day evokes sadness about passing time, not hope; age brings the stilling of passion and strength; memories do not comfort but are painful reminders that the past is irretrievable. Even the act of keeping the Journal brings the realization that time signifies decay and that writing is a feeble substitution for experience. “Ces brimborions, écrits à la volée, sont tout ce qui me reste de ma vie, à mesure qu'elle s'écoule” (II, p. 310).

Nevertheless, despite this revelation and the discontinuous nature of the Journal there is a consistent self underlying the fragmentary entries. It arises, initially, from the sheer pleasure of self-expression. When Delacroix took up his Journal again in January, 1847, after a lapse of 23 years (not counting the brief notebooks he kept during his Moroccan journey in 1832), it was after a day at the Natural History Museum among the exotic animals.

il me semblait que mon être s'élevait au-dessus des vulgarités ou des petites idées ou des petites inquiétudes du moment … les tigres, les panthères, les jaguars, les lions! D'où vient le mouvement que la vue de tout cela a produit chez moi? De ce que je suis sorti de mes idées de tous les jours qui sont tout mon monde, de ma rue qui est mon univers. Combien il est nécessaire de se secouer de temps en temps, de mettre la tête dehors, de chercher à lire dans la création, qui n'a rien de commun avec nos villes et avec les ouvrages des hommes.

(I, pp. 237-38)

Then he remarks on his renewed occupation as journal-keeper.

J'écris ceci au coin de mon feu, enchanté d'avoir été, avant de rentrer, acheter cet agenda, que je commence un jour heureux. Puissé-je continuer souvent à me rendre compte ainsi de mes impressions. J'y verrai souvent ce qu'on gagne à noter ses impressions et à les creuser, en se les rappelant.”

(I, p. 239)

The energy of the animals and the power he appropriates from them get expressed in the renewed act of writing about himself. I would argue that identifying himself with the animals gives rebirth to the writing and announces both a revolt against limitations and a recognition that those limitations exist and cannot be ignored. Writing no less than painting dramatizes a sense of life and energy as well as death and destruction. In the same week that he began the new Journal, Delacroix entered a long description of Rubens' Lion Hunt, describing the painting with such terms as “affreux désordre”(I, 244), “grimace horrible” (I, p. 244), “action … énergique” (I, p. 245), “mouvement … variété” (I, pp. 244-45), and employing such verbs as s'élancer, s'enfoncer, labourer, and se retourner. The language suggests the baroque power and strength, and the dynamics of willed force, that Delacroix admires and that become images of his own identity in the Journal.

Delacroix was aware of this process of identification between self and world; objects spoke to him, and when reproduced in a work of art became bridges between the world and the imagination of the observer.

Je crois fortement que nous mêlons toujours de nous-mêmes dans ces sentiments qui semblent venir des objets qui nous frappent. Il est probable que ces ouvrages ne me plaisent tant que parce qu'ils répondent à des sentiments qui sont les miens; et puisque, quoique dissemblables, ils me donnent le même degré de plaisir, c'est que le genre d'effet qu'ils produisent, j'en retrouve la source en moi … Ces figures, ces objets, qui semblent la chose même à une certaine partie de votre être intelligent, semblent comme un pont solide sur lequel l'imagination s'appuie pour pénétrer jusqu'à la sensation mystérieuse et profonde dont les formes sont en quelque sorte hiéroglyphe. …

(II, pp. 252-53)

We perceive external phenomena, or rather the sensations elicited by those phenomena, in ourselves, and Delacroix's urge to write about the self comes out of this discovery. The Journal is full of such relations, not always consciously acknowledged, when the inner and the outer life are unified or at least made identical. For Delacroix autobiography appears to consist largely of such identifications; it may be that the Journal, in a way that is unavailable to a continuous, analytical narrative, lends itself to that process, for instead of concentrating on a developmental pattern, a gradually unfolding myth to explain the evolution of personality, Delacroix uses the disjunctive sequence to explore different sides of himself.

Now willful and powerful, now self-judging; now a practitioner of apocalyptic longings, now one reconciled to work as the sole balm for disappointments and losses, Delacroix makes authenticity a matter of impulse, and the willingness to shift grounds both about external matters and about one's own mind. The need to avoid absolutes is a sign that a restless, uncontained imagination is at work: “il faut, je le vois, que mon esprit brouillon s'agite, défasse, essaye de cent manières, avant d'arriver au but dont le besoin me travaille dans chaque chose” (I, p. 112). His fear of inertia may be linked to a sense of destiny—he will achieve glory and power if he is never still. There are moments when security, peace and stability are attractive, but ultimately he moves toward a restless and unconstrained power. The tranquility of the harem world simply cannot suffice. Writing, as much as his dominant mode in painting, becomes a form of energy for Delacroix.

Baudelaire declared that Delacroix painted his dreams in a savage act of mastery over the external world; his driving principle, says the poet, is that a picture should “reproduire la pensée intime de l'artiste, qui domine le modèle, comme le créateur la création.”¹⁶ Delacroix struggles to destroy repressive forces, anything that signifies a limitation of autonomy. Writing and art are the two actions that must guarantee “genius” over impersonal powers. His painting is filled with figures crushed and broken by human savagery or an indifferent nature; and his Journal is filled with a lament for such contending forces as time and predators.

The violence of the clashes between horse and lion, horse and tiger, or lion and armed rider all express the double-natured aspect of Delacroix's romanticism. On one hand we have the expression of unleashed will (synonymous with instinct), and on the other the agony of defeat and despair. Interestingly Delacroix refers to his era as “un siècle sans pudeur et sans frein” (II, p. 123), identifying the abuse of power with the horse free from all restraint. Delacroix knew that unchecked, limitless energy was both an illusion and a dangerous dream, for it refused to recognize what cannot be. Not that he accepts the impasse without strain, but he seems to hold the position that, to quote Elizabeth Bruss on another autobiographer: “Writing may be the only way of experiencing despair without capitulating to it …”¹⁷ Delacroix attacks Schubert, “les rêveurs, les Chateaubriand … les Lamartine” as “point vrai[s],” full of vague longings, “tristesse perpétuelle … amour malade” (I, p. 415). Only through contention and struggle, in short through work, could he reach fulfillment.

This comes close to sublimation, and if any proof is needed, it is provided by a letter written to George Sand on 12 January 1861: “Rien ne me charme plus que la peinture; et voilà que par-dessus le marché elle me donne une santé d'homme de trente ans; elle est mon unique pensée, et je n'intrigue que pour elle, tout à elle, c'est-à-dire que je m'enfonce dans mon travail …”¹⁸ Here is the display of mind and will over death, but just barely. Harold Bloom, describing the Romantic predicament, claims that “the way between the mental errors of reductiveness and expansiveness is the path of invention, the finding of what will suffice through an act of discovery that is also a making.”¹⁹ This comes very close to Delacroix's precarious way, and it is not far from the most famous observation by Delacroix's first and best critic: “On eût dit un cratère de volcan artistement caché par des bouquets de fleurs.”²⁰

Notes

1. Journal de Eugène Delacroix, Vols. I-III (Paris: Plon, 1893), I, p. 1. All subsequent citations appear in parentheses in the text.

2. Frank Anderson Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), pp. xvii-xviii.

3. Quoted in Jean Clay, Romanticism, tr. Daniel and Craig Owen (New York: Verdome Press, 1981), p. 156.

4. Ibid., p. 153.

5. Charles Baudelaire, La vie et l'œuvre d'Eugène Delacroix (Paris: G. Crès et Cie., 1927). All subsequent citations appear in parentheses in the text.

6. Quoted in Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 61.

7. For example, in the following passage from the Journal, Delacroix takes a position exactly like that of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, whose resigned, fatalistic and world-weary demise he painted in 1827. As the armies of his enemies are about to storm his palace, the king, stoical and imperturbable, ends his dissolute life by commanding the destruction of his wives, concubines, and worldly goods. Here is the Journal entry: “L'homme domine la nature et en est dominé. Il est le seul qui non seulement lui résiste, mais en surmonte les lois, et qui étende son empire par sa volonté et son activité. Mais que la création ait été faite pour lui, c'est une question qui est loin d'être évidente. Tout ce qu'il édifie est éphémère comme lui; le temps renverse les édifices, comble les canaux, anéantit les connaissances et jusqu'au nom des nations. Où est Carthage? où est Ninive?” (II, p. 459).

8. Trapp, op. cit. p. 26.

9. ibid., p. 342.

10. ibid., p. 204.

11. Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York: Random House), 1962, p. 44.

12. Bruss, op. cit., p. 164.

13. Jack J. Spector, Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 59.

14. Quoted in Tom Prideaux, The World of Delacroix: 1798-1863 (New York: Time, Inc., 1966), p. 81.

15. Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 324.

16. ibid., p. 59.

17. Bruss, op. cit., p. 83.

18. Ecrits d'Eugène Delacroix, vol. 2 (Paris: Plon, 1942), p. 76.

19. The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 337.

20. Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 321.