complished by Delsarte in his career as
artist and scholar.

I was the better able to understand these two opposing
elements--religiousness and strength of understanding--because, if I
gave in my entire adhesion to the innovator in the arts, he did not find
me equally docile in what concerned the theosophic part of his doctrine.
Hence, discussions which illustrated the subject. I speak in presence of
his memory as I did before him, with perfect frankness and simplicity
of heart; taking care not to offend the objects of his veneration, but
examining without regard to his memory, as without prejudice, the
influence which his convictions exerted upon his intellectual
conceptions, his ideas, his character, his talent--in a word, his life,
in so far as it may concern a sketch which lays no claim to be a
complete biography.

Now, it is from the point of view of art itself that I ask the following
questions: Was Delsarte a devout Catholic? Was he orthodox?

Devout? He gloried in it, he insisted on it; I will not say that he
_affected_ minute daily acts of devotion, for that word would not accord
with the spontaneity of his nature; but he accented his demonstrations,
he spoke constantly of his religion. Without any intention to wrong the
serious side of his religious feelings, it seemed to be a bravado put on
for the incredulous, a toy which he converted into a weapon.

Orthodox? He made it his boast, and he certainly intended to be so; he
loved, in many circumstances, to show his humility of heart. His faith,
he used to say, "was the charcoal-burner's faith."

And yet, the charcoal-burner would have been strangely puzzled if he had
had to sustain the ceaseless contests which the artist accepted or
provoked from philosophers and free-thinkers; and, perhaps, no less
frequently, from his fellow-religionists, and the priests themselves.

With the former, it was a mere question of dogmatic forms or of the
necessity for some form of religion; with the latter, he entered upon a
more peculiarly theological order of ideas, such as the attributes
proper to each of the three divine persons, and other mystical subjects.

Here, as elsewhere, Delsarte brought to bear his personality, his stamp,
his breadth of comprehension.

I once asked him what some called _Dominations_ might represent, in the
celestial classification? He replied: "If any one or anything forces
itself upon our mind, takes active possession of our soul, do we not