The word Art is more comprehensive in that which it expresses, than the word True. Art completes itself by its other elements, the Beautiful and the Good.  Plato, and the philosophers in general, treated of truth from the stand-point of philosophy rather than of art.  Still the great Athenian seemed to believe in a sort of celestial museum, where the artist, penetrating by intuition, was inspired by a vision, more or less clear, of the masterpieces of divine conception.

Delsarte approached in a certain sense this very idea, but his doctrine of the True in art, although depending upon the mystic basis of a holy Trinity, brought forth developments both rational and scientific which leave far behind the Platonic hypothesis.

In the system of Delsarte it is no longer a vague ideal dimly perceptible, which must guide the artist in the execution of his work, for the innovator says expressly that “the divine thought is written in man himself.”  It is therefore at the command of every one who seeks truth to make it manifest in art.  In the new system, man being at once the artist and object of art, literary men, sculptors and painters proceed from a basis ever to be observed and studied, to rise from the True to the Ideal.  Here the flight must be more rapid and, above all, less deceptive than the purely mystic fancy of Plato.

We shall see in considering the Beautiful in the arts, that far from giving rise to arbitrary and fantastic conceptions, the great ideal must become, according to the science and method of the master,—­the aggrandizement and the harmony of the faculties of the human being.

The Good.

The Good Sanctifies the Soul.

What is the Good in art?  Here again the philosophical standard bars the way and demands priority.  What, then, is Good independent of varied feelings and of all the varied and contradictory interests of human subjectivity which encumber it in the minds of the multitude of thinking people?

The Good, after this elimination, is reduced or rather elevated to one simple idea, so general and requisite is it.  The Good seems to be that which can give to the greatest number of beings, existing in the universe (conformably to their hierarchy), the greatest sum of happiness and perfection, considering, for humanity, the importance of the mutual relations of the faculties.  If this be true of the Good in life, is not a way clearly traced for art, whose mission is to embellish existence?  And, further, if it be incontestable, that man cannot transgress the laws of his nature without wronging his intelligence and his happiness, even his strength and beauty, how shall art merit our love and homage if its power be exerted to excite inferior faculties and subversive passions?  Are not poise and harmony the best conditions of existence for the human organism?  That which Plato demanded for the Beautiful in favor of the True—­namely, splendor—­Delsarte demanded also of art in favor of the Good.  His thought is summed up in this formula, “Man is the object of art.”  Man, being artist, becomes the agent of aesthetics.  Man, in his humanity, is the goal toward which should tend all the efforts and experiments of the art-moralizer.