attempted, at all costs, to give a perfectly rationalistic exposition of Christian theology. Auguste Comte manufactured a caricature of Catholicism, in which he had retained only the administrative, hierarchical, and disciplinary machinery of that Church; his attempt obtained success only with those people who like to laugh at the simplicity of their dupes. In the course of the nineteenth century, Catholicism recovered strength to an extraordinary degree because it would abandon nothing; it even strengthened its mysteries, and, what is very curious, it gains ground in cultivated circles where the rationalism which was formerly in fashion at the University is scoffed at.[1]
(3) The old claim made by our fathers that they had created a science of art or even that they could describe a work of art in so adequate a manner that the reader could obtain from a book an exact aesthetic appreciation of a picture or of a statue, we look upon nowadays as a perfect example of pedantry. Taine's efforts in the direction first mentioned are very interesting, but only as regards the history of the various schools. His method gives us no useful information about the works themselves. As for the descriptions, they are only of value if the works themselves are of small aesthetic value, and if they belong to what is sometimes called literary painting. The poorest photograph of the Parthenon conveys a hundred times as much information as a volume devoted to the praise of the marvels of this monument; it seems to me that the famous Prière sur l'Acropole, so often praised as one of the finest passages in Renan, is a rather remarkable example of rhetoric, and that it is much more likely to render Greek art unintelligible to us than to make us admire the Parthenon. Despite all his enthusiasm for Diderot
- ↑ Pascal protested eloquently against those who considered obscurity an objection against Catholicism, and Brunetière was right in looking upon him as being one of the most anticartesian of the men of his time (Études critiques, 4ᵉ série, pp. 144–149).
