In the first place, the ideal may be, in fact, something external and accidental, an insignificant form or appearance, a common existence. But that which constitutes the ideal, in this inferior degree, is the fact that this reality, imitated by art, is a creation of spirit, and becomes then something artificial, not real. It is an image and a metamorphosis. This image, moreover, is more permanent than its model, more durable than the real object. In fixing that which is mobile and transient, in eternizing that which is momentary and fugitive—a flower, a smile—art surpasses nature and idealizes it. But it does not stop here. Instead of simply reproducing these objects, while preserving their natural form, it seizes their internal and deepest character, it extends their signification, and gives to them a more elevated and more general significance; for it must manifest the universal in the individual, and render visible the idea which they represent, their eternal and fixed type. It allows this character of generality to penetrate everywhere, without reducing it to an abstraction. Thus the artist does not slavishly reproduce all the features of the object, and its accidents, but only the true traits, those conformable to its idea. If, then, he takes nature as a model, he still surpasses and idealizes it. Naturalness, faithfulness, truth, these are not exact imitation, but the perfect conformity of the form to the idea; they are the creation of a more perfect form, whose essential traits represent the idea more faithfully and more clearly than it is expressed in nature itself. To know how to disengage the operative, energetic, essential and significant elements in objects,—this is the task of the artist. The ideal, then, is not the real; the latter contains many elements insignificant, useless, confused and foreign, or opposed to the idea. The natural here loses its vulgar significance. By this word must be understood the more exalted expression of spirit. The ideal is a transfigured, glorified nature. As to vulgar and common nature, if art takes it also for its object, it is not for its own sake, but because of what in it is true, excellent, interesting, ingenuous or gay, as in _genre_ painting, in Dutch painting particularly. It occupies, nevertheless, an inferior rank, and cannot make pretensions to a place beside the grand compositions of art.