There was besides the profound artistic erudition another stumbling-block to simplicity of style and unity of conception.  Moreau began by imitating both Delacroix and Ingres.  Now, such a precedure is manifestly dangerous.  Huysmans speaks with contempt of promiscuity in the admiration of art.  You can’t admire Manet and Bastien-Lepage—­“le Grevin de cabaret, le Siraudin de banlieue,” he names the gentle Bastien; nor ought you to admire Manet and Moreau, we may add.  And Huysmans did precisely what he preached against.  Moreau was a man of wide intellectual interests.  Devoid of the creative energy that can eject an individual style at one jet, as a volcano casts forth a rock, he attempted to aid nature by the process of an exquisite selection.  His taste was trained, his range wide—­too wide, one is tempted to add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral eyes without the breath of life—­contemporary life—­yet charged with its author’s magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange feverish beauty, as Flaubert’s Salammbo is beautiful, in a remote, exotic way.

However, it is not fair to deny Moreau human sympathies.  There are many of his paintings and drawings, notably the latter, that show him as possessing heart.  His handling of his medium though heavy is never timid, and at times is masterly.  Delacroix inspired many of his landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his female figures.  You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands.  Some critics have discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements strain our notion of eclecticism.  Certainly Moreau studied Bellini, Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and distinction of any of them.  His colour, too, is often hard and cold, though not in the sumptuous surfaces of his fabrics; there Venetian splendour is apparent.  He can be fiery and insipid, metallic and morbid; his Orientalism is at times transposed from the work of his old friend the painter Chasseriau into the key of a brilliant, if pompous rhetoric.

THE MOREAU MUSEUM

This herculean attempt at reassembling many styles in a unique style that would best express a certain frozen symbolism was the amiable mania his life long of Moreau.  He compelled the spirits to come to his bidding.  The moment you cross the threshold of his house the spell begins to work.  It is dissipated by the daylight of Paris, but while you are under the roof of the museum you can’t escape it.  Nor is it as with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman’s delirious fancy.  Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a “literary” painter, it is literature