"Do you know, sir, that I made your acquaintance in a very strange way? I was at the Herz Hall, at your concert. Your voice and singing so agitated me that I was forced to leave the room, feeling oppressed and almost faint."
This impressionable listener referred to a day memorable in the annals of the master. Delsarte--he sang certain airs written for women in Gluck's operas--had selected Clytemnestra's song:
"A priest, encircled by a cruel throng,
Shall on my daughter lay his guilty hand."
Just as this maternal despair reached its paroxysm, the artist raised both hands to his head and remained in the most striking attitude possible to overwhelming grief. Loud applause burst from every part of the hall; there was a frenzy, a delirium of enthusiasm. At the same time, a violent storm burst outside; the roaring thunder, the rain beating in floods upon the windows, the flashing lightning which turned the gas-lights pale, formed a tremendous orchestra for Gluck's music, and a fantastic frame for the sublime actor. Then, as if crushed by his glory, he prolonged that marvelous effect, and stood a moment as if annihilated by the frantic and tumultuous shouts of the audience.
Chapter XVII.
Delsarte's Inventions.
Delsarte always had his father's propensity to devote himself to mechanics that he might apply his knowledge of them to new things. When he felt his artistic abilities, not growing less, but their plastic expression becoming more difficult, owing to the cruel warnings of his departing youth, this tendency toward occupations more especially intellectual, became more marked.
It may be helpful here to note that a machine--that positive and most material of all things--is the thing whose creation requires force of understanding in the highest degree.
The brain, that living machine, lends its aid to the intellect; it represents the physical side; it is the spot where the work is carried on. Feeling has no part in the intellectual acts which work together in mechanical production,--mathematics playing the principal part,--it has no other share, I say, but to inspire certain persons with a passionate taste for abstract studies, which leads them toward useful and glorious discoveries.
Thus, this thought of Delsarte and Pierre Leroux seems to be justified: that, in no case, can man break his essential triplicity.
Delsarte, moreover, by changing the direction of his faculties, or rather by displacing the dominant, affirmed his freedom of will. If he did not always class himself with the strong, he still loved to reign over himself in the omnipotence of his will.