But there are other subjects—a nature more elevated and more ideal. Art, at its culminating stage, represents the development of the internal powers of the soul, its grand passions, profound sentiments, and lofty destinies. Now, it is clear that the artist does not find in the real world, forms so pure and ideal that he may safely confine himself to imitating and copying. Moreover, if the form itself be given, expression must be added. Besides, he ought to secure, in a just measure, the union of the individual and the universal, of the form and the idea; to create a living ideal, penetrated with the idea, and in which it animates the sensuous form and appearance throughout, so that there shall be nothing in it empty or insignificant, nothing that is not alive with expression itself. Where shall he find in the real world, this just measure, this animation, and this exact correspondence of all the parts and of all the details conspiring to the same end, to the same effect? To say that he will succeed in conceiving and realizing the ideal, by making a felicitous selection of ideas and forms, is to ignore the secret of artistic composition; it is to misconceive the entirely spontaneous method of genius,—inspiration which creates at a single effort,—to replace it by a reflective drudgery, which only results in the production of frigid and lifeless works. It does not suffice to define the ideal in an abstract manner; the ideal is exhibited to us in the works of art under very various and diverse forms. Thus sculpture represents it under the motionless features of its figures. In the other arts it assumes the form of movement and of action; in poetry, particularly, it manifests itself in the midst of most varied situations and events, of conflicts between persons animated by diverse passions. How, and under what conditions, is each art in particular called upon to represent thus the ideal? This will be the object of the theory of the arts. In the general exposition of the principles of art, we may, nevertheless, attempt to define the degrees of this development, to study the principal aspects under which it manifests itself. Such is the object of those considerations, the title of which is, _Of the Determination of the Ideal_, and which the author develops in this first part of the work. We can trace only summarily the principal ideas, devoting ourselves to marking their order and connection. The gradation which the author establishes between the progressively determined forms of the ideal is as follows: