Indeed, when one speaks of Delacroix, the name of Rubens rises almost involuntarily to one's lips; and yet there is a profound difference between him and the great Flemish master. Rubens has the same passion, the same ever-active fancy; yet all his pictures rest in triumphant repose, while every one of Delacroix's seems to resound as with a cry of battle. Looking at Rubens' works you feel that he was a happy, healthy man; but by the time you have seen half a score of Delacroix's it is borne in upon you that the life of the artist was one of strife and suffering. Rubens was the very essence of strength, Delacroix was a sick man; the former full of fleshly joyous sensuality, the latter consumed by a feverish internal fire. His portrait of himself in the Louvre, with its pale forehead, its large dark-rimmed eyes, its lean, hollow face, its parchment-like skin stretched tightly over the bones, explains his pictures better than any critical appreciation. Delacroix was one of the _âmes maladives_, the spirits sick unto death, to whom Baudelaire addresses himself in his _Fleurs du Mal_. Delicate from his youth up, thoroughly nervous by nature, he prolonged his sickly existence throughout his life by sheer energy of will. Even in his childhood he passed through serious illnesses, and later on he suffered in turn from his stomach, throat, chest, and kidneys. Like Goethe in his old age, he felt well only when the temperature was high. He was short in stature. A leonine head, with a lion's mane, surmounted a body that seemed almost stunted. With his eyes flashing like carbuncles, and his disordered prickly moustache, his was the fascinating ugliness of genius. It was only by the strictest dieting in his quiet retreat at Champrosay that he prolonged his life for the last few years. In his youth he hovered like a butterfly from flower to flower; when grown old and hypochondriacal he withdrew into solitary retirement, work was the only medicine for diseased conditions of all kinds, to which he found himself daily more and more a victim. Only thus could this sickly man, doomed from his very birth, come to produce no less than two thousand pictures--a number all the more astonishing as Delacroix, even when his health permitted him to work at his easel, by no means possessed Rubens' sovereign facility of production. The fever of work alternated, in his case, with the extremest exhaustion. There was something morbid, nervous, over-excited in all he did. "Even work," he writes, "is merely a temporary narcotic, a distraction; and every distraction, as Pascal has said in other words, is only a method which man has invented to conceal from himself the abyss of his suffering and misery. In sleepless nights, in illness, and in certain moments of solitude, when the end of all things discloses itself in its utter nakedness, a man endowed with imagination must possess a certain amount of courage, not to meet the phantom half-way, not to rush to embrace the skeleton."