ee in a manner, for all the
queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living
interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him,
was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when
he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I
couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and
sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his
violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a
reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless
force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted
practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice)
would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such
encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then
no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed
the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one
of the rather bleak salles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to which access
was had from the quay. _There_ was reconstituted history if one would,
in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with
three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them
look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the
headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--not
less than in the noble indifference of Charles the First, compromised
king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as
if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the
thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English
lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight,
rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old
conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his
hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to
the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner;
and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less
of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the
ineffable,