I hope to be pardoned this long digression, thinking it my duty to
protest against such a ludicrous method of treating French prosody; I do
so both in the name of aesthetics and as a part of my task as biographer
of Delsarte.[6]
Chapter III.
Was Delsarte a Philosopher?
If we consider philosophy in the light of all the questions upon which
it touches, the subjects which it embraces, we must answer "No;" but if
we concentrate the word within the limits of aesthetics, we may reply in
the affirmative. Did not Delsarte point out the origin of art, its
object and its aim?
Not that this master never exceeded the limits of his science and his
method. He had sketched out a "Treatise on Reason," and had begun to
classify the faculties of being, entering into the subject more
profoundly than the categories of Kant; but all this only exists in mere
outline, in a technology whose terms have not been weighed and connected
together by a solid chain of reasoning: logic has not uttered its final
word therein.
A separate volume would be required to give an idea of these _gigantic
sketches_, which must remain in their rudimentary state.
If Delsarte had finished his work, it would seem that he must have
leaned toward the scholastic method, now so much out of favor; but
certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything
that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of
mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only
afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical
faculties which have been called intuition, imagination, etc.
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