s bullied, and the bully was such a
redoubtable giant that it took somebody with the grit and genius of
Delacroix to tackle him, but tackle him he did. The story of the fight,
which is a long and glorious one, is so admirably told in Madame Bussy's
life of Delacroix, that I have obtained permission to give the essence
of it in her own words.

In the Salon of 1822 was exhibited Delacroix's picture of _Dante and
Virgil_, which is now in the Louvre, and evoked the first of those
clamours of abuse which were barely stilled before the artist's death.
For nearly thirty years all French painters, with the exception of Gros
and Prudhon; had shown themselves unquestioning disciples of the school
founded by Jacques Louis David, whose masterful character and potent
personality had reduced all art to a system; and Delacroix himself spoke
of him with sympathy and admiration. The chief dogma of David's school
was that the nearest approach to the _beau ideal_ permitted to the human
race had been attained by the Greeks, and that all art must conform as
closely as possible to theirs. Unfortunately, the chief specimens of
Greek art known at that time were those belonging to a decadent
period--neither the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo were accessible
before 1816--so that the works from which they drew their inspiration
were without character in themselves, or merely the feeble and
attenuated copies of ancient Rome. In the pictures of this school,
accordingly, we find only the monotonous perfection of rounded and
well-modelled limbs, classical features and straight noses. Colour, to
the sincere Davidian, was a vain and frivolous accessory, serving only
to distract attention from the real purpose of the work, which was to
aim at moral elevation as well as at ideal beauty. Everything in the
picture was to be equally dwelt upon; there was no sacrifice, no
mystery. "These pictures," says Delacroix, "have no epidermis ...they
lack the atmosphere, the lights, the reflections which blend into an
harmonious whole, objects the most dissimilar in colour."

By the untimely death of Gericault, whose _Raft of the Medusa_ had
already caused a flutter in 1819, Delacroix was left at the head of the
revolt against this pseudo-classicism; and amid the storm that greeted
the _Dante and Virgil_ it is interesting to find Thiers writing of him
in the following strain:--"It seems to me that no picture [in the Salon]
reveals the future of a great painter b