M. Eugene Veron, writer of our day, and author of remarkable works on art, far from recognizing among the Greeks a law of aesthetics, writes of Plato:  “He considered ideas as species of divine beings, intermediate between the Supreme Deity and the world.  Theirs is the power of creation and formation....  Matter unintelligent and self-formed is nothing, and realizes existence only through the operation of the idea which gives it its form.  Aristotle begins by rejecting all this phantasmagory of eternal and creative ideas.  He fills the abyss between matter and spirit.  God, pure thought and being preeminent, brings all into existence by his power of attraction which gives to all activity and life.”

We wander farther and farther from a law of aesthetics and its means of application as established by Delsarte.

Of all the writers who have thoroughly examined antique art, Victor Cousin would seem the one with whom Delsarte had most in common, if this eminent philosopher were not a contemporary of the master and had not attended his lectures, his artistic sessions and his concerts.  In his manner of treating art, this is often shown bywords and forms and flashes of instinctive reminiscence which recall the great school.  In his book, “The True, the Beautiful and the Good” (edition of 1858), the learned professor writes:  “The true method gives us a law to start from man to arrive at things.  All the arts, without exception, address the soul through the body.”

He is on the way, but his position embraces neither the starting-point, which is the law, nor any practical means toward an end.  For the rest, the nearer his propositions approach the law of Delsarte, the easier it becomes to establish the radical differences which separate them.  Delsarte does not say that “the law is to start from man to arrive at things,” but that “man uses his corporeal organs to manifest himself in his three constituent modalities,—­physical, mental and moral.”

It is very certain that works of art, like all concrete forms, can only be perceived by the senses.  Who does not know this?  But that which is most difficult to comprehend, is the just relation of cause to effect—­as to the faculty and its manifestation,—­and it is this which Delsarte discovered and made clear.  The one stated the action of art when perceived; the other, the necessities of the artist in order that art respond to the law.

I shall have more than once to render justice to Victor Cousin.  Inheritor of the Greek philosophers, he allows dialectics too great margin.  He wanders in his premises and arrives at his conclusions—­when he can. (Here, of course, I speak only of art.) In philosophy, Cousin, beginning with effects, from induction to induction, often arrives at causes and states some principles.  Delsarte, perhaps, proceeded thus while seeking to combine his discoveries, but this accomplished, he placed in the first line, synthesis, whence all emanates, and this focus of light radiating in all directions, illumines even to its farthest limit, the vast field of aesthetics.  Cousin, after all, claims neither for the Greeks nor for himself the discovery of a law.