The true artist feels and profoundly admires nature; but every thing in nature is not equally admirable. As we have just said, it has something by which it infinitely surpasses art--its life. Besides that, art can, in its turn, surpass nature, on the condition of not wishing to imitate it too closely. Every natural object, however beautiful, is defective on some side. Every thing that is real is imperfect. Here, the horrible and the hideous are united to the sublime; there, elegance and grace are separated from grandeur and force. The traits of beauty are scattered and diverse. To reunite them arbitrarily, to borrow from such a face a mouth, eyes from such another, without any rule that governs this choice and directs these borrowings, is to compose monsters; to admit a rule, is already to admit an ideal different from all individuals. It is this ideal that the true artist forms to himself in studying nature. Without nature, he never would have conceived this ideal; but with this ideal, he judges nature herself, rectifies her, and dares undertake to measure himself with her. The ideal is the artist's object of passionate contemplation. Assiduously and silently meditated, unceasingly purified by reflection and vivified by sentiment, it warms genius and inspires it with the irresistible need of seeing it realized and living. For this end, genius takes in nature all the materials that can serve it, and applying to them its powerful hand, as Michael Angelo impressed his chisel upon the docile marble, makes of them works that have no model in nature, that imitate nothing else than the ideal dreamed of or conceived, that are in some sort a second creation inferior to the first in individuality and life, but much superior to it, we do not fear to say, on account of the intellectual and moral beauty with which it is impressed. Moral beauty is the foundation of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art disengages it, and gives to it forms more transparent. On this account, art, when it knows well its power and its resources, institutes with nature a contest in which it may have the advantage. Let us establish well the end of art: it is precisely where its power lies. The end of art is the expression of moral beauty, by the aid of physical beauty. The latter is only a symbol of the former. In nature, this symbol is often obscure: art in bringing it to light attains effects that nature does not always produce. Nature may please more, for, once more, it possesses in an incomparable degree what makes the great charm of imagination and sight--life; art touches more, because in expressing, above all, moral beauty, it addresses itself more directly to the source of profound emotions. Art can be more pathetic than nature, and the pathetic is the sign and measure of great beauty.