“After Rembrandt,” Durtal went on, “there is an irremediable decay of religious feeling in painting.  The seventeenth century has not left a single picture in which there is a genuine stamp of manly devotion; excepting, indeed, in Spain at the time when Saint Theresa 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.