Like Aristotle, Winkelmann states clearly the principle that man is the measure of all things, but he does not follow up the consequences; he reaches no scientific demonstration upon any point. Far from establishing the existence of a law of æsthetics among the Greeks, he simply remarks upon the extreme simplicity of their beginnings, and shows by what gropings they came from Hermes to the most perfect works of Phidias and Praxiteles.
Mengs states that "the first designs were of forms approaching human semblance;" and that the sciences and philosophy must of necessity have preceded the Beautiful in the arts. He thinks that the Greeks established the proportions of their figures by imitation of beautiful nature.
From these two commentators we have a history of the progression of the arts toward the Ideal. Mengs states that the Greeks and the Etruscans have given rules of proportion and style. But progression, proportion, style,--all of which proceeding from a fixed standard of beauty may guide artists--the perception even of the ideal which each one interprets in his own way--cannot be assimilated to that original law which carries in itself all the reasons of the concept, that which contains all conditions and means of a true execution,--individual even to the perfection of each type, general and varied as the infinite shades of nature.
In response to the allegation of Mengs, that "the sciences and philosophy must necessarily have preceded the Beautiful in the arts," I would call attention to the fact that celebrated artists--as Phidias and Zeuxis for example--had produced their works long before the dialogues between Socrates, Protagoras, Hippias and others, upon the True, the Good and the Beautiful. The great painter and the great sculptor could only have proceeded by the intuition of their genius, knowing nothing of a law of æsthetics.
In that which remains to us of antiquity, I find nothing which implies such an application of the human organism to the arts as that whose discovery, promulgation, exemplification and teaching we owe to Delsarte.
M. Eugène Véron, writer of our day, and author of remarkable works on art, far from recognizing among the Greeks a law of æsthetics, 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 preëminent, 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 æsthetics 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.