The subject is taken from Dante's "Inferno," and represents the poet
and his companions and guide standing in a bark conducted by Phlegyas,
while around them appear on the surface of the water the writhing
bodies of the condemned, among whom Dante recognizes certain
Florentines.]

I have used the term audacious in speaking of Delacroix, and
circumstances forced him to justify the epithet. Yet to a student of
his work, and still more of his character as revealed in his writings
(his recently published letters and the few articles published during
his life in the "Revue des Deux-Mondes"), he would appear to have been
by nature prepared to receive the full academic tradition, and
only because of what appeared a violation of the tradition _as he
understood it_, to have arrayed himself in violent opposition: a
situation which rendered him in work and in life contradictory to his
natural instinct. It is the old story of the defect of system. Even
the most cunningly devised cannot make a place for all the many
manifestations of temperamental activity. Like Géricault, a pupil of
Guérin, Delacroix found in his master and in the general spirit of
the school an insistence on the letter of the classic law to which his
richly endowed nature could not bend, and was thus forced to rebel;
whereas a more elastic application of received principles would have
found him an enthusiastic adherent. In this way he missed acquiring
the technical mastery over form, which proved a stumbling block to him
through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life
which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable
in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest,
most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and
at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a