Chapter 40

The Recitation of Fables.

Some years before his death Delsarte substituted for his concerts, lectures in which he explained his scientific doctrines and his philosophy of art. He also supplied the place of song by the recitation of certain fables selected from La Fontaine. He was not less perfect in this style than in the interpretation of the great rôles of tragedy and grand lyric poems; but it must be acknowledged, that under this new guise, his talent could not display itself in all its amplitude; save for the facial expression which gave the lessons of the apologue a variety of outline of which La Fontaine himself perhaps never dreamed ... and in spite of the fine and scholarly accent which he could give to all those clever beasts, he was, on many points, deprived of his power and his prestige: how endow a lion with the proud poses of Achilles; and lend the foolish grasshopper the satanic charm of Armida?

Instead of noble or terrific attitudes, his gesture was confined to a few movements of forearm or hand; of his fingers, when the intentions were more subtle, more refined ... Still it was always most pleasant to hear him. It was Delsarte restrained, but not diminished. If you did not recover in his speaking voice that sort of enchantment with which his slightly-veiled tone pierced the soul, his accent remained so pure, so intelligent, that you were none the less ravished.

When, in the fable of _The Two Pigeons_, he said:

"Absence is the greatest of ills, ... Not so for you, cruel one!"

He discovered shades, hitherto unknown, with which to paint reproach mingled with grief. And when he said:

"_The ant ... is not a lender!..._"

A more affirmative and striking sense of the character attributed to our thrifty friend, was detached from this delay, filled up by a negative movement of the narrator's head.

If Delsarte had limited himself in his lectures, to teaching men by means of the menagerie, which was a sly burlesque of the courtiers of Louis XIV., perhaps he might have made idolatrous partisans there as elsewhere; but it seems as if in the exposition of his theory, he posed rather as a censor than a teacher; he delighted in baffling the mind by paradoxes. By annexes superimposed and ill-blended with his system, he sometimes compromised those scientific truths whose splendor bursts forth when they are freed from heterogeneous accessories. We cannot otherwise explain the resistance of certain minds, distinguished otherwise, to the recognition in him of the artist who excited the enthusiasm of all the most competent critics and brilliant amateurs.