Through these innumerable effects, you judge of the importance of this essential character. It is this which art must bring forward into proper light, and if this task devolves upon art, it is because nature fails to accomplish it. In nature, this essential character is simply dominant; it is the aim of art to render it predominant. It moulds real objects, but it does not mould them completely: its action is restricted, impeded by the intervention of other causes; its impression on objects bearing its stamp is not sufficiently strong to be clearly visible. Man is sensible of this deficiency, and to remove it he has invented art.
Let us again take up Rubens' "Kermesse." These blooming merry wives, these roystering drunkards, these busts and visages of burly unbridled brutes, probably found counterparts in the carousals of the day. Over-nourished and exuberant nature aimed at producing such gross forms and such coarse manners, but she only half accomplished her task; other causes intervened to stay this excess of a carnal jovial energy. There is, at first, poverty. In the best of times, and in the best countries, many people have not enough to eat, and fasting, at least partial abstinence, misery, and bad air, all the accompaniments of indigence, diminish the development and boisterousness of native brutality. A suffering man is not so strong, and more sober. Religion, law, police regulations, and habits due to steady labor, operate in the same direction; education does its part. Out of a hundred subjects who, under favorable conditions, might have furnished Rubens with models, only five or six, perhaps, could be of any service to him. Suppose now that these five or six figures in the actual festivities which he might have seen were lost in a crowd of people more or less indifferent and common; consider again, that at the moment they came under his eye they exhibited neither the attitude, the expression, the gestures, the abandonment, the costume, or the disorder requisite to make this teeming excitement apparent. Through all these draw-backs nature called art to its aid; she could not clearly distinguish the character; it was necessary that the artist should supplement her.