and Saint
John of the Cross flourished there; then the mystical realism of its
painters produced some fiercely fervid works;" and Durtal recalled a
picture by Zurbaran he had seen and admired in the Gallery at Lyons,
Saint Francis of Assisi standing upright in a habit of grey serge, the
cowl over his head, his hands hidden in his sleeves.

The face looked as if it had been moulded or chiselled out of cinders;
the mouth was open, livid, below ecstatic eyes as white as if they had
been blinded. It was a wonder how this corpse, of which nothing was left
but the bones, could hold itself up; and terror came over the beholder
as he thought of the excessive maceration and overwhelming penances that
must have exhausted that frame and seamed that face.

This painting was the evident outcome of the relentless and terrible
mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, the art of the rack, the _delirium
tremens_ of divine intoxication here on earth; aye, but what a passion
of adoration, what a voice of love stifled by anguish found utterance in
this canvas.

As to the eighteenth century, it was not worth a thought; that century
was the age of the belly and the bath-room; as soon as art tried to
touch the Church it only made a washing-basin into a holy-water stoup.

In our own time, again, there is nothing to note.

Overbeck, Ingres, Flandrin--all sorry jades harnessed willy-nilly to
religious tasks by commissions from the pious. In the church of Saint
Sulpice Delacroix extinguishes all the feeble art that surrounds him,
but his sense of Catholic art is null.

In truth, faith is now dormant, and without that no mystical work is
possible!

At the present moment Signol is dead, but Olivier Merson is left;
vacuity all along the line. We need not take into account the got-up
absurdities and paintings to puzzle Rosicrucian simpletons; nor, again,
the feeble imagery of the wealthy idlers or the worthy youths who fancy
that if they paint a woman larger than life, that makes her mystical.
Silence would befit the subject, only that, unluckily, a well-meaning
publisher was struck by the idea of mobilizing the clerical forces to
hail James Tissot as an evangelical painter. His Life of Christ is one
of the least religious works conceivable, for, in fact, it might be
regarded as a hesitating paraphrase of the Life of Jesus as narrated by
that cheerful apostate and terrible jester, Renan.

The firm of Mame has completed this artist's treason by