24 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
same mediæval art which, where it is art, drives allegory
away from or resolves it in itself. This need for the solution
of allegorical dualism leads to the refining of the theory of
intuition, in so far as it is allegory of the idea, into the other
theory, of the intuition as—symbol; for the idea does not
stand by itself in the symbol, thinkable separately from the
symbolising representation, nor does the symbol stand by it-
self, representable in a lively manner without the idea sym-
bolised, The idea is all reduced to representation (as said
the æsthetieian Vischer, if to anyone belongs the blame of
the very prosaic comparison for so poetic and metaphysical
a theme), like a lump of sugar melted in a glass of water,
which exists and acts in every molecule of water, but is no
longer to be found as a lump of sugar. But the idea that
has disappeared, the idea that has become entirely repre-
sentative, the idea that we can no longer succeed in seizing
as idea (save by extracting it, like sugar from sugared
water), is no longer idea, and is only the sign that the unity
of the artistic image has not yet been achieved. Certainly
art is symbol, all symbol—that is, all significant; but symbol
of what? What does it mean? The intuition is truly artistic,
it is truly intuition, and not a chaotic mass of images, only
when it has a vital principle that animates it, making it all
one with itself; but what is this principle?
The answer to such a queston may be said to result from
the examination of the greatest ideal strife that has ever
taken place in the field of art (and is not confined to the
epoch that took its name from it and in which it was pre-
dominant): the strife between romanticism and classicism.
Giving the general definition, here convenient, and setting
aside minor and accidental determinations, romanticism asks
of art, above all, the spontaneous and violent effusion of the