Have the historians and critics of the Greek philosophy discovered that which I vainly sought in its initiators,—­a law of aesthetics? This is a question to be answered.

Winkelmann, in his “History of Art,” says:  “The fine arts, in their rise and decadence, may be likened unto great rivers which, at the point of fullest greatness, break up into innumerable tiny streams and are lost in the sands.”  Still following this imagery, he compares “Egyptian art to a fine tree whose growth is stopped by a sting; Etruscan art to a torrent; Greek art to a limpid stream.”

Now, the law of life of trees, streams or torrents, is not identical with that which governs the unity of a human life.

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 aesthetics 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 aesthetics.

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.