Two extremes are equally dangerous--a lifeless ideal, or the absence of the ideal. Either we copy the model, and are wanting in true beauty, or we work _de tete_, and fall into an ideality without character. Genius is a ready and sure perception of the right proportion in which the ideal and the natural, form and thought, ought to be united. This union is the perfection of art: _chefs-d'oeuvre_ are produced by observing it. It is important, in my opinion, to follow this rule in teaching art. It is asked whether pupils should begin with the study of the ideal or the real. I do not hesitate to answer,--by both. Nature herself never offers the general without the individual, nor the individual without the general. Every figure is composed of individual traits which distinguish it from all others, and make its own looks, and, at the same time, it has general traits which constitute what is called the human figure. These general traits are the constitutive lineaments, and this figure is the type, that are given to the pupil that is beginning in the art of design to trace. It would also be good, I believe, in order to preserve him from the dry and abstract, to exercise him early in copying some natural object, especially a living figure. This would be putting pupils to the true school of nature. They would thus become accustomed never to sacrifice either of the two essential elements of the beautiful, either of the two imperative conditions of art. But, in uniting these two elements, these two conditions, it is necessary to distinguish them, and to know how to put them in their place. There is no true ideal without determinate form, there is no unity without variety, no genus without individuals, but, in fine, the foundation of the beautiful is the idea; what makes art is before all, the realization of the idea, and not the imitation of such or such a particular form.