Delacroix was not in love with life; he did not seek and find nature; he followed in her footsteps only in books. He was essentially an illustrator; apart from Victor Hugo he is not to be thought of. The Romantics performed a duty of gratitude when, with fanatical violence, they carried him triumphantly through his detractors. He is their henchman with the brush; he fights with them and for them. They only act according to the rules of chivalry when they protect him. His magic colouring is not to be contested, although it is often gaudy and theatrical. But out of his “Hamlet with the Gravediggers,” his “Medea,” his “Bride of Abydos,” his “Abduction of Rebecca” (“Ivanhoe”), a dreary waste stares us in the face, which would be hardly bearable if we did not happen to know the poems from which Delacroix drew his subjects. We must put life into his dead pictures by what we remember of our reading. Delacroix stops at the externals. We have to add soul and passion. After the men of 1830 came, on the one side, the neat painters of the Empire, of whom Meissonier is the best type; on the other, the naturalists with Courbet, the impressionists with Manet and Monet; and so the development went on to the confused struggles of this moment. That period of the July Revolution was felt by its contemporaries as an age of storm and stress in art. On us later-born children it has the effect of halcyon days, the full, rapturous life and sunny joys of which the present generation longs for in vain. VII THE TRIUMPH OF A REVOLUTION THE REALISTS In the last years of the Empire and the first of the Republic, great things occurred on the sacred hill of Montmartre, on the summit of which the Church of the Sacred Heart had not yet supplanted the Muses and Graces. A group of painters, diminishing in number, yet brave as lions, and pugnacious, arose in defence and attack against the official art of the _Académie_, the _École des Beaux Arts_, and the _Salon_, which was still an institution of the State. Their palette was a battle-shield, their brush a lethal weapon for cutting and thrusting, their easel a barricade. Uproar was what they painted, and plunder and carnage were the subjects of their conversation in endless beer and tobacco sessions. They wanted to massacre the old idols in oil-painting, and the tyrants of the plastic arts now become twaddlers. No more painting by tinker, plumber, or chimney-sweep! No soot in place of air! No Dutch dolls in tin armour, with volunteer firemen’s brass helmets on their gingerbread heads! On the contrary, an honest rendering of phenomena of light and colour from actual observation, sincerity, open air, and impression.