Delaumosne

“ Augustine, the beautiful is the lustre of the good.
Finally, what is art? It is the beautiful in the harmonies of nature. Galen, when he had finished his work on the structure of the human body, exclaimed: "Behold this beautiful hymn to the glory of the Creator!"
What, then, is the true, the beautiful, the good? We might answer, it is God. Then virtue and the glory of God should be the one end of the orator, of the good man. A true artist never denies God.
Eloquence is a means, not an end. We must not love art for its own sake, that would be idolatry. Art gives wings for ascent to God. ”

“ But agnostic man labors in vain. He cannot escape the mysteries which surround him on every hand, like a gulf in which reason is inevitably lost so soon as it ceases to seek the light.
Man stumbles at every turn against the efforts of a stronger reason than his own,--the Supreme Reason before which, nilly nilly, his must bow and confess the insanity of its judgments.
Logic is not, to reason, a sure guide; and even where it feels its foothold most strong, it sometimes trips, to the disgrace of the good opinion it had of its own infallibility. ”

“ If in looking at a woman I clasp my hands and at the same time raise my shoulders, there is no longer any doubt as to the feeling that attaches me to her, and instinctively every one will say: "He loves her truly;" but if, preserving the same attitude in the same situation, the same facial expression, the same movement of the head, I happen to withhold the action of the shoulder, instantly all love will disappear from my expression and nothing will be left to that attitude but a sentiment vague and cold as falsehood. ”

“ The charcoal-burner's faith would never have taught him that captivating grace, that supreme elegance of gesture and attitude, which made him matchless. Nor did theology and dogma teach him the moving effects which made people declare that he performed miracles, and led several writers (Henry de Riancey, Hervet) to say: "That man is not an artist, he is art itself!" And Fiorentino, a critic usually severe and exacting, wrote: "This master's sentiment is so true, his style so lofty, his passion so profound, that there is nothing in art so beautiful or so perfect!" ”

“ And, further, if it be incontestable, that man cannot transgress the laws of his nature without wronging his intelligence and his happiness, even his strength and beauty, how shall art merit our love and homage if its power be exerted to excite inferior faculties and subversive passions? Are not poise and harmony the best conditions of existence for the human organism? That which Plato demanded for the Beautiful in favor of the True--namely, splendor--Delsarte demanded also of art in favor of the Good. His thought is summed up in this formula, "Man is the object of art." ”

“ The true aim of art is to move, to interest and to persuade. Emotion, interest and persuasion are the first terms of art. Emotion is expressed by the voice, by sounds; interest, by language; persuasion is the office of gesture.
To inflection belongs emotion through the beautiful; to logic, interest through the truth; to plastic art, persuasion through the good.
Gesture is more than speech. It is not what we say that persuades, but the manner of saying it. The mind can be interested by speech, it must be persuaded by gesture. If the face bears no sign of persuasion, we do not persuade. ”

“ Gesture is the direct agent of the soul, while language is analytic and successive. The leading quality of mind is number; it is to speculate, to reckon, while gesture grasps everything by intuition,--sentiment as well as contemplation. There is something marvelous in this language, because it has relations with another sphere; it is the world of grace.
An audience must not be supposed to resemble an individual. A man of the greatest intelligence finding himself in an audience, is no longer himself. An audience is never intelligent; it is a multiple being, composed of sense and sentiment. ”

“ And as one flower excels others and pleases us by the beauty of its colors, so the orator must excel, and please by the brilliant shades of his diction. It is as impossible to give renown to a monotonous and colorless orator as to a faded, discolored flower. Would you give to the phenomena of your organism this beautiful corolla of the flower of your garden, throw your glance upon nature.
Nature speaks to the eye through an enchanting variety of colors, and these colors in turn teach man how he may himself speak to the eyes. ”

“ Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or singer, caterers to perverted tastes?
In sculpture what is more displeasing than a distorted figure, which aimed at grace and is become a caricature? Affectation is in the arts the equivalant of sophistry in logic, of the false in morals, of hypocrisy in religion. It is not extravagant to assume that affectation, being a falsity, an active lie, is a torture to the spirit which perceives it, and a wrong to the honest souls who endure it. It should be, therefore, for twofold cause, banished without pity from the realm of æsthetics. ”

“ If he is singing serious opera, the oval of his face lengthens, the lines become more fixed, his cheeks shrink, his forehead is lighted up and his eye flashes with inspiration; the pallor of profound emotion pervades his features, the somewhat gross proportions of his figure are disguised by the firmness of his pose and the juvenile precision of his gesture.
The part of Robert the Devil is one of those in which Delsarte best developed the resources and suppleness of his genius. Robert is the son of a demon, but his mother was a saint. He loves with sincere love ”

“ Between this nature, which we hear and see and touch, and that nature which the artist feels, imagines, and to which he aspires, Delsarte has placed a ladder whose base is among us, and whose summit is lost in the infinite spaces of fiction and poesy. By this ascent into the realm of liberty, of personality and of genius, the elect of æsthetics shall mount and gain, and, still maintaining their relations with the Real, shall bring down to us the glorious trophies of their art. ”

“ We can judge of the sincerity of the friend who grasps our hand. If he holds the thumb inward and pendant, it is a fatal sign; we no longer trust him. To pray with the thumbs inward and swaying to and fro, indicates a lack of sacred fervor. It is a corpse who prays. If you pray with the arms extended and the fingers bent, there is reason to fear that you adore Plutus. If you embrace me without elevating the shoulders, you are a Judas.
What can you do in a museum, if you have not acquired, if you do not wish to acquire the science of gesture? ”

“ Do you know how to go to work to be pathetic, dignified, comic, or familiar, to represent the clemency of Augustus or the drunkenness of a coachman?' In a word, he teaches the vocalist or actor the laws of this language, of this eloquence which nature places in our eyes, in our gestures, in the suppressed or expansive tones of our voice, in the accent of speech. He teaches the actor, or, to speak more properly, the man, to know himself, to manage artistically that inimitable instrument which is man himself, all of whose parts contribute to a harmonious unity. ”

“ Of what use to man would be a phonetic apparatus always rendering the same sound? Delivery is a sort of music whose excellence consists in a variety of tones which rise or fall according to the things they have to express. Beautiful but uniform voices resemble fine bells whose tone is sweet and clear, full and agreeable, but which are, after all, bells, signifying nothing, devoid of harmony and consequently without variety. To employ always the same action and the same tone of voice, is like giving the same remedy for all diseases. ”

“ This dazzling mystery is the universal criterion of all truth; it is the science of sciences, which is self-defining and whose name is Trinity.
Here we foresee an objection to which we must first reply. Some will be surprised that a system declared to be infallible should rest upon a mystery; they will ask what a mystery can have to do with a purely didactic question. Patience! You shall see that it cannot be otherwise. Nothing is more evident than light, yet light is a mystery, the most obscure of all mysteries. Thus light escapes the eye and it does not see that by means of which it sees. ”

“ They have been shown to you in their weakness and in their strength. The times and manners amid which they lived have been painted for you in more or less imaginary colors. I propose something better than all this.
I offer you a work superior even to those sciences which have been described to you; superior to all which the genius of a Michael Angelo or a Raphael could conceive; a work in comparison with which all the magnificences of science and of art must pale. I propose that you should contemplate yourselves!
Nothing is so unfamiliar to man as himself. ”

“ There was never seen more complete absorption, more complete forgetfulness of self in humble fervor. It was far more touching than all the types of sensual beauty, with pink and white and perfumed skins--with delicate limbs, in disagreeable attitudes!
This is, yet once again, due to the fact that sentiment is stronger than sensualism; and because the artist's skill, taking the place of beauty in his subject, becomes genuine æsthetic beauty: so much so that, looking at old age and ugliness--as represented by Bonnat,--the spectator is enchanted and applauds--the success of the work! ”

“ Now, let others in the blindness of proud reason, forget this truth, which they contest even by opposing to it the quibbles for which free-thinkers are never at a loss, and to escape the confusion which they inevitably derive from the ill-studied work of the Supreme Artist. Let them venture to attribute to it their own darkness. For my part, I shall not thereby lose my conviction that all which seems to me disordered or contradictory in the expression of the facts which I question, is only apparent and only exist in my own brain. ”

“ However skilful the artist may be in the reproduction of form and the handling of color, he will always be far inferior to nature if his soul has never heard the inner murmur of all those mysteries of the sensitive, and I will venture to say, spiritual life, contained in forests, waterfalls and ravines. Lacking this initiation, he will play the cold and flavorless part of one who tells a twice-told tale; for it is in landscape especially, that talent consists in revealing the painter's own feeling. ”

“ Thus the things discovered to him cause him such surprise that he never fails to beat his brow when he sees them, as if to prove that he is not the author of their discovery, and that he was far from foreseeing anything like what has been shown to him; and that there may be no possible mistake in the interpretation of the gesture, he invariably accompanies it by the phrase: "What a fool I am!" All will admit that if a man really believed himself the author of his discovery, he takes a very inopportune time to declare his impotence and his stupidity so distinctly. ”

“ Nothing better than that the condition of priority should exist between diverse styles and opposite schools; but why strive to institute comparison between a synthetic idea and the absence of synthesis and idea, between certain proportions and harmony and the absence of proportion and harmony, between a style and the absence of style? Whatever the subject and whatever the mode of treating it, the intelligence of the artist should always be visible in his work. ”

“ Thus, Delsarte, superior to his science, has shown us the artist in full possession of all that he has acquired, and the inmost charm of that which is revealed to him. In execution he proved this truth: If talent may be born of science, it is genius which distinguishes the highest personalities, and to merit the title of high artistic personality one must contain in himself an essence indescribable, unutterable, which constitutes the aureole of grand brows, and the sign luminous of great works of art. ”

“ Now, if there be more science, more genius in the production of a violet or a worm than is revealed by all the combined powers of science and of art, how much admiration should we not feel at the sight of all the splendors which God has spread broadcast in the privileged work wherein He was pleased to reveal his own image! But a light inaccessible to the vain demonstrations of your sciences constantly removes this mysterious image from your gaze. ”

“ I then understood all the power, all the fertility given by an acquaintance with the laws that regulate the nature of man, and in how much even genius itself may be rendered sterile by ignorance of those laws which simple observation would make them acquainted with. But, I thought, my discovery is not complete, for if, thanks to it, I have succeeded in proving that all these pictures of death are false, true only as representing sleep, it is, on the other hand, impossible for me to prove in how far those figures live, in which the painter aims to represent life. ”

“ If instinct did not lead us to retroact, to examine an object unexpectedly offered to our gaze, each surprise would expose us to error.
Now we must retroact to see an object as a whole and not expose ourselves to error, and then, too, does not the love which a creature inspires within us naturally extend to the medium which surrounds him, and in this way does it not seem as if all that touched him partook of his life and thus acquired some title to our contemplation? ”

“ The celebrated Nourrit said to him: "I have given you my vote for the first prize, and my children shall have no singing-master but you."
"Courage," said Madame Malibran, pressing his hand. "You will one day be a great artist."
But Delsarte knew that without a voice he must renounce the stage, and yielding to the inevitable, he gave up the role of the actor to assume the functions of the professor. After his own shipwreck upon a bark without pilot or compass, he summoned up courage to search into the laws of an art which had hitherto subsisted only upon caprice and personal inspiration. ”

“ It knows why each passion produces each accent: 'because the accent is the modulation of the soul,' and why a given emotion produces a given expression of the face, gesture and attitude of the body."
When we allow that "the classifications of the manifestations of art are made according to those of the human faculties," do we not also allow that they are derived from one law?
Thus the fiat lux ("let there be light") is pronounced. Art departs from chaos, escapes from anarchy; it acts no longer only for the so-called artist, but also for the actor and singer, whom we are now to consider. ”