After this digression, forced upon me by recent scholastic quarrels, let us return to Delsarte.

I have given the reasons for his doctrine in other chapters; this doctrine will gain strength when I show what I have gathered from his science, since science and law mutually testify for each other; since all art, acquiring fresh vigor from its source, law, and enlightened by the aid of these same formulae, must bear the impress of truth, beauty and goodness.

Even where color occupies in painting the place attributed to outline in sculpture, there are in these two manifestations of mental images—­and in spite of the synthetism peculiar to painting,—­striking similitudes.

As regards physical manifestations, both these arts should seek truth—­which does not mean literal exactness,—­and all that has been said of simplisme, in regard to sculpture, is perfectly applicable to that part of painting which treats of the human figure.  Science and law lay down the same rules for both,—­save for the differing modes of execution.

It is another matter when it is a question of representing nature as a whole, and under less limited forms:  seas, mountains, the atmosphere and broad plains—­landscapes of vast extent,—­subjects forbidden to sculpture even more exclusively than simple compositions of several figures, which are seldom successful in sculpture.  For if sculpture sometimes makes a group, if it is used to decorate monuments and tombs, it offers nothing analogous to those magnificent phases of nature which we find on the canvases of the great masters.

Delsarte, who from the laws of mimetics deduced for painters means of expressing correctly every impression and emotion which man can feel, taught nothing in regard to this special field of the landscape artist, who is not subject to the conditions of the actor, sculptor or orator.  But, if this aspect of art—­save in cases where figures are introduced—­does not come under the head of certain statements of our science, not having to imitate attitude, gesture or voice—­in a word, anything proceeding from the human organism,—­it is, perhaps more closely than elsewhere, allied to the innovator’s law:  to that law which prompts the artist to respond to the psychical aspirations of his fellowmen, and demands that in satisfying the senses, he should also arouse or inspire the thought and feeling of beauty.

Thus the painter of nature, as much of a reality as man, but a reality in its own way, if he desires to make nature understood and loved, must give it the stamp of his own ideas, his own feelings, his own impressions.

Why should I care to be shown trees and waters, valleys and mountains, if the tree does not tell me of the coolness of its shade, if the water does not reveal the peace of the deep lake, if I cannot divine the rippling of the brook, if the valley does not make me long to plunge into its depths!  Why recall to me the mountain, if its curves do not rouse in my mind any ideas of grace, elegance and majesty,—­if its peaks do not make me dream of the Infinite!