ransgress 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.

The master maintained the possibility of reaching this end by two
opposing ways, not contradictory; _i.e._, the production of the
Beautiful under its physical, mental and moral forms; and by the
manifestation of the Ugly under the same forms, exhibiting what he
called the _hideousness of vice_. Immorality may be rendered poetical
and artistic, because of its being a corruption of the moral, often
preserving the imprint of its origin, even throughout its greatest
errors. Its agitation, its combats and its defeats interest the judgment
and the heart. The Ugly or unseemly, morally speaking, is the synonym of
vice.

The Ugly in the language of the arts has many diverse significations. It
is in these shades and variable proportions that it affects our subject,
but the depicting of repulsive things, foreign to morality, to
sentiment and to passion, has no right to exist in aesthetics. It may be
possible to cure a vice by showing its hideousness. But does this
warrant such exciting of the disgust of the senses? It is an outrage to
the worship of the Beautiful, without compensation of any kind.

There can be no advantage to humanity in exhibiting the hideousness of
disease or the monstrosities of certain natural phenomena! Open to them
the museums of comparative anatomy, but close the galleries consecrated
to the fine arts! There exist also monstrosities which are not included
in these categories; they present no moral danger, but are disagreeable
and repulsive to good taste. They consist of fantastic forms, in
accordance with the spirit of an inferior civilization, reminding one of
the misshapen and gigantic prehistoric animals, whose bones astound us,
and which disappeared from our globe that man might appear.

Among cultivated contem