Perpetual Ripplets: Delacroix – The Journal

Yuko Otomo
May 2019

I love to read. There are many books that I enjoy reading it repeatedly. The Journal of Delacroix is one of them. I got the book long time ago. I don’t recall when exactly, but I remember how quite well. It was an after-the-rain kind of late afternoon when I had a fatal encounter with it on the sidewalk of the 6th Ave. near 8th St. in NYC. Unlike now, the sidewalk was crowded with many book-peddlers & occasionally you found some great books there. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (The Walter Pach translation with a new introduction by Robert Motherwell) (Viking Press, 1972) was one of those great finds. It was partially water-damaged, so, I got a super bargain price. It is a 762 pages big book. Soon I found out that Morton Feldman also loved this journal & that made me close to the book further.

Delacroix started it in 1822 when he was 24 & ended it in the last year of his life 1863. The book has 2 introductions, one short & another long. Both are fascinating. Motherwell’s introduction written specially for this Viking edition in 1971 is extremely moving. He talks of his personal history of the involvement with Delacroix. The artist was his topic in 1937/38 Harvard Univ. Graduate School of Philosophy seminar on “The Idea of Romanticism.” There was no English writing on Delacroix available then. He had to study the original in French. The episode of the loss of his notes & translation of Paul Signac’s D’Eugene Delacroix in the sea during WWII is heartbreaking & dramatic. Eventually, he abundant the scholarship for painting. But he kept being preoccupied with Delacroix as he states: “when not making art, with thinking of what it is.”  He expresses his dissatisfaction over this edition’s tone of the translation being too flat & not personal enough.  But he clearly acknowledges the importance of this book’s existence no matter how imperfect & humble. Originally published in 1937 (by Covici, Friede), then in 1948 (by Crown) & the copyright renewed in 1965, the book I have is the 3rd English Compass Edition by the Viking Press published in 1972.

The 2nd introduction of the book, written for the original 1937 publication by the translator Walter Pach himself, is also extremely fascinating. It helped me to be ready to jump into the massive journal, giving the summery of the era Delacroix lived. How he was one of the first to go outside of his national background to be a cosmopolitan thinker & practionner of art. Going thru it, I learned the background of the vital spirit of the Romantic era. How fascinating it is to trace back the first collective human consciousness reaching out to all directions to break through the damaging Industrial Revolution’s ill effects! Born into the height of the Romantic era & lived through it as it developed, Delacroix embodies the crucial sense of the pre-modern that eventually gives birth to the modernism. There are many fabulous episodes collected here in this introduction. One of my favorites is the one that 21 years old Odilon Redon & his younger musician brother been presented to Delacroix at a ball at the Hôtel de Ville where they followed Delacroix around to hear every word he said. After the ball, they kept following him, walking behind him to keep a distance not to disturb him, through the cobblestoned streets of Paris in the rainy night 2 years before the artist’s passing. The image of 21 years old Redon & 63 years old Delacroix being together conjours up so much emotions in me.

Portrait of Eugène Delacroix, 1818-1819, by Théodore Géricault

The massive journal gives the clear portrait of Delacroix as the artist/thinker. It also gives the fascinating view of the Romantic era he lived when many creative beings crisscrossed each other in daily bases. I enjoy connecting them who are scattered all over the geography & the time atlas of the history to see how they shared the moments, knowingly or unknowingly. Poe; Gericault; David, Baudelaire (who wrote a poem for the artist Les Praise in Les Fleurs du Mal & critical essay: The work & Life of Eugene Delacroix); his closest friend Chopin & George Sand whose portraits he painted; Gautier; Balzac; Goethe for whom he did the illustrations of Faust; Racine; Goya; Constable; Corot; Turner; Blake; Pussin; Bach, Mozert; Beethoven; Schubert; Schumann… the luminous names live ever so vividly in this journal which was reduced to the half of the original 1500 pages he started when he was 22 with the entry:

September 3, 1822

I am carrying out my plan, so often formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind. I am starting out in a good humor…

There are many impressive remarks of his written in this journal. My book has uncountable small stickers for references of interests. I’ll pick some of the examples here.

December 22 or 23, midnight, 1823

I return home with feelings of goodwill & resignation of fate. I passed the evening with Pierrert and his wife in their modest home. We resign ourselves poverty. In fact, when I complain of it, I am outside of myself, the outside of the state proper to me. One needs, for wealth, the kind of talent I don’t have at all, and when one hasn’t it all, there must be something else to supply the lack. Let us do everything calmly, let us react emotionally only to fine works of art or noble deeds. Let us work tranquilly and without haste. As soon as I begin to sweat and my blood to boil, beware. Cowardly painting is the painting of a coward…

Tuesday, January 27, 1824

This morning I got the letter at my studio announcing the death of my dear poor Géricault. I cannot get used to the idea. In spite of the certainty everyone must have had of losing him soon, it seems to me that we could almost conjure death away by keeping the idea out of our minds. But death did not forget its prey, and tomorrow the earth will hide the little that remains of him. What a different destiny so much bodily strength, so much fire and imagination, seemed to promise! Although he was not precisely my friend, this unhappiness pieces my heart. It made me leave my work and aint out everything that I have done…

Tuesday, April 13, 1824

Fleeting humors that almost always come to me in the evening. Sweet philosophical contentment, could I but stay you! I do not complain my lot. Yet, I need still more of that good sense that resigns itself of the inevitable. I must no longer keep for a more opportune time what I can do pleasurably now. What I shall have done cannot be taken from me. And as for the ridiculous fear of making things below one’s potential abilities… No, there is the root of the evil. There is the hiding-place of stupidity I must attack. Vain mortal, you are limited by nothing, neither by memory that eludes you, nor by the forces of your body, which are feeble, nor by the fluidity of your mind, which wars against these impressions as they reach you. Always, at the back of your soul, there is something that says to you, “Mortal, drawn from eternal life for a short time, think how precious these moments are. Your life must bring you everything other mortals draw from theirs.” But yet, I must know what I mean… I believe that everyone has really been more or less tormented by this.

& in the same entry, he lists what he spent for paints & canvases, breakfast & chestnuts.

Saturday, April 7, 1849

About half passed three, accompanied Chopin on his drive. Although fatigued, I was happy to be some use to him. The Avenue of the Champs-Elysées, the arch of the Etoile, the bottle of quinquina wine; being made to stop at the city limits etc.

During the day, he talked music with me, and that gave him new animation. I asked him what establishes logic in music. He made me feel what counterpoint and harmony are; how the fugue is like pure logic in music, and that to know the fugue deeply is tobe acquinted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music. I thought how happy I was to learn about all this – which is the despair of the common runs of musicians. The feeling gave me an idea of the pleasure in science that is experienced by philosophers worthy of the name. Thing is that true science is not what is ordinarily understood under the term, that is to say, a department of knowledge which differs from art…

April 6, 1856

Dinner at the house of M. Fould. For some days I have been reading with great interest Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Poe. In those conceptions, which really are extraordinary, which is to say extra-human, there is the fascination of the fantastic which is attributed to certain natures of the North or of some such region, but which is denied, very certainly, to the nature of us Frenchmen. Men of that type take their sole pleasure in what is outside of nature, or extra-natural: for our part, we cannot lose balance to such a degree. Reason always has to have its share in even the wildest things we do…

& it goes on & on. He kept writing them all through his adult creative life over 40 years. With an honest & intelligent empathy, its consistency is solid. What a rich reservoir of creative thoughts he had left for us to enjoy & to examine! Reading them, I am given such a tremendous pleasure as well as the best art education. But no matter what, I am clearly aware that I am invading his privacy.  I wonder if he ever imagined that his extremely personal world would get exposed to the public’s eyes in the future.

The journal of 1863 ends with:

June 22, 1863

The first merit of a picture is to be a feast to the eye. That is not to say that reason is not needed in it: in the case stands as with fine verses, all the reason in the world does not prevent their being bad, if they shock the ear. The saying is: to have an ear; not all eyes are fitted to savor the delicacies of painting. In many people, the eye is false or inert; they see the objects literally, of the exquisite they see nothing.

Eugène Delacroix, 1858, photo by Félix Nadar

Perpetual Ripplets: Eugène Delacroix, 6 rue de Furstenberg →

Yuko Otomo is a visual artist & a bilingual poet/writer of Japanese origin. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Genesis (Sisyphus Press), Small Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Hand of The Poet (UDP), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press) & FROZEN HEATWAVE: a poetry collaboration project with Steve Dalachinksy (Luna Bison Prods).

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