oward 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.

Proudhon, who represented the Protagorean school among us, humoring his
whim, produced a work on art. In this he declares that he has very
little gift in aesthetics, and asserts himself a dialectician, and we
cannot deny his power in logic while he regards things from a proper
stand-point. Very well! Proudhon challenged the Academy "to indicate a
_method_"--with even more reason might he have said _law_ of aesthetics.

Shall we, at last, find among the true critics of French literature any
synthetic basis which may guide us in all branches of art? What do I
find in "The Poetic Art," by Boileau, the great authority of the
Augustan age,--rhetoric, beautiful verses, full of excellent counsel? I
find there wisely arbitrated rules, a sieve through which it would be
well to pass the works of our own times, including the verdicts which
distribute the glory.

But the means of putting into