The opposition of the ideal and the real has given rise to two conflicting opinions. Some conceive of the ideal as something vague, an abstract, lifeless generality, without individuality. Others extol the natural, the imitation of the real in the most minute and prosaic details. Equal exaggeration! The truth lies between the two extremes.
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.
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:
1. The ideal, under the most elevated form, is the divine idea, the divine such as the imagination can represent it under sensuous forms; such is the Greek ideal of the divinities of Polytheism; such the Christian ideal in its highest purity, under the form of God the Father, of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Apostles, etc. It is given above all to sculpture and painting, to present us the image of it. Its essential characteristics are calmness, majesty, serenity.
2. In a degree less elevated, but more determined, in the circle of human life, the ideal appears to us, with man, as the victory of the eternal principles which fill the human heart, the triumph of the noble part of the soul over the inferior and passionate. The noble, the excellent, the perfect, in the human soul, is the moral and divine principle which is manifested in it, which governs its will, and causes it to accomplish grand actions; this is the true source of self-sacrifice and of heroism.
3. But the idea, when it is manifested in the real world, can be developed only under the form of action. Now, action itself has for its condition a conflict between principles and persons, divided as to interests, ideas, passions, and characters. It is this especially that is represented by poetry—the art par excellence, the only art which can reproduce an action in its successive phases, with its complications, its sudden turns of fortune, its catastrophe and its denouement.