The symbol is an image which represents an idea. It is distinguished from the signs of language in this, that between the image, and the idea which it represents, there is a natural relation, not an arbitrary or conventional one. It is thus that the lion is the symbol of courage; the circle, of eternity; the triangle, of the Trinity.
The symbol, however, does not represent the idea perfectly, but by a single side. The lion is not merely courageous; the fox, cunning. Whence it follows that the symbol, having many meanings, is equivocal. This ambiguity ceases only when the two terms are conceived separately and then brought into relation; the symbol then gives place to comparison.
Thus conceived, the symbol, with its enigmatic and mysterious character, is peculiarly adapted to an entire epoch of history, to oriental art and its extraordinary creations. It characterizes that order of monuments and emblems by which the people of the East have sought to express their ideas, and have been able to do it only in an equivocal and obscure manner. These works of art present to us, instead of beauty and regularity, a strange, imposing, fantastic aspect.
In the development of this form of art in the East, many degrees are noticeable. Let us first examine its origin.
The sentiment of art, like the religious sentiment or scientific curiosity, is born of wonder. The man who is astonished at nothing lives in a state of imbecility and stupidity. This state ceases when his spirit, freeing itself from matter and from physical wants, is struck by the spectacle of the phenomena of nature, and seeks their meaning, when it has the presentiment of something grand and mysterious in them, of a concealed power which is revealed there.
Then it experiences also the need of representing that inner sentiment of a general and universal power. Particular objects—the elements, the sea, rivers, mountains—lose their immediate sense and significance, and become for spirit images of this invisible power.
It is then that art appears; it arises from the necessity of representing this idea by sensuous images, addressed at once to the senses and the spirit.
The idea of an absolute power, in religions, is manifested at first by the worship of physical objects. The Divinity is identified with nature itself. But this rude worship cannot endure. Instead of seeing the absolute in real objects, man conceives it as a distinct and universal being; he seizes, although very imperfectly, the relation which unites this invisible principle to the objects of nature; he fashions an image, a symbol designed to represent it. Art is then the interpreter of religious ideas.
Such is art in its origin; the symbolic form is born with it. Let us now follow it in the successive stages of its development, and indicate its progress in the East before it attained to the Greek ideal.
That which characterizes symbolic art is that it strives in vain to discover pure conceptions, and a mode of representation which befits them. It is the conflict between the content and the form, both imperfect and heterogeneous. Hence the incessant struggle of these two elements of art, which vainly seek to harmonize. The stages of its development exhibit the successive phases or modes of this struggle.