The Breviary of Aesthetic 47
definitions which arouse the revolt of the poetic and artistic
sense, which loves each work for itself, for what it is, as a liv-
ing creature, individual and incomparable, and knows that
each work has its individual law. Hence has arisen tire disa-
greement between the affirmative judgment of artistic souls
and the negative one of professional critics, between the
negation of the former and the affirmation of the latter; and
the professional critics pass for pedants, not without good
reason, although artistic souls are in their turn “disarmed
prophets”—that is, incapable of reasoning and of deducing
the correct theory immanent in their judgments, and of op-
posing it to the pedantic theory of their adversaries.
That correct theory is precisely an aspect of the concep-
tion of art as intuition, or lyrical intuition; and, since every
work of art expresses a state of the soul, and the state of the
soul is individual and always new, the intuition implies in-
finite intuitions, which it is impossible to place in pigeon-
holes as kinds, unless these be infinite pigeonholes, and there-
fore not pigeonholes of kinds, but of intuitions. And since, on
tire other hand, individuality of intuition implies individu-
ality of expression, and a picture is distinct from another
picture, not less than from a poem, and picture and poem
are not of value because of the sounds that beat the air and
the colours refracted by the light, but because of what they
can tell to the spirit, in so far as they enter into it, it is use-
less to have recourse to abstract means of expression, to con-
struct the other series of kinds and classes: which amounts
to saying that any theory of the division of the arts is with-
out foundation. The kind or class is in this case one only, art
itself or the intuition, whereas single works of art are infinite:
all are original, each one incapable of being translated into
the other (since to translate, to translate with artistic skill,
is to create a new work of art), each one uncontrolled by the