[p. 279]
|279| scape etc. because its animation contradicts the shape in which it immediately is – modern formalism of art – poetry of all things; longing of all, – not an external force – things are so in themselves, in the divine intuition – but this in-itself is the abstract, which is unequal to their existence – This purely intellectual beauty – this music of things – has the Homeric plastic as its opposite – the former unsensuous, the latter sensuous intuition – here not the form of the symbol, of meaning, it is only touched upon softly, from afar; – here the meaning itself is to come forth – but the shape is lost. Art is in this contradiction with itself – when it is self-standing, of having to be extended into allegory, and then it has vanished as individuality, and the meaning reduced into individuality, so the former is not expressed.
Art generates the world as spiritual and for intuition – it is the Indian Bacchus, who is not the clear spirit knowing itself, but inspired spirit – spirit enveloping itself in feeling and image, under which the terrible is hidden. – Its element is intuition – but this is immediacy, which is not mediated – this element is therefore inadequate to spirit. Art can therefore give its shapes only a limited spirit; – beauty is form, it is the deception of absolute liveliness, which suffices to itself, and would be closed and completed within itself. – This medium of finitude; intuition cannot grasp the infinite; it is only supposed infinity. This god as statue, this world of song which encloses heaven and earth, the universal essences in mythical individual form, and the singular essences, self-consciousness; – it is supposed, not true representation, – it is not necessity, – not the shape of thinking in it; – beauty is rather the veil which covers the truth than the presentation of it. – Or as form of liveliness, – the content does not correspond [to it], it is limited; the artist therefore often demands that the relation
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