But to what end?
Why prove—picking out, too, and weighing
words, smoothing and rounding off phrases—why
prove to gnats that they are really gnats?
But art?... beauty?... Yes, these are words of
power; they are more powerful, may be, than those
I have spoken before. Venus of Milo is, may be,
more real than Roman law or the principles of 1789.
It may be objected—how many times has the
retort been heard!—that beauty itself is
relative; that by the Chinese it is conceived as quite
other than the European’s ideal.... But
it is not the relativity of art confounds me; its
transitoriness, again its brevity, its dust and ashes—that
is what robs me of faith and courage. Art at
a given moment is more powerful, may be, than nature;
for in nature is no symphony of Beethoven, no picture
of Ruysdael, no poem of Goethe, and only dull-witted
pedants or disingenuous chatterers can yet maintain
that art is the imitation of nature. But at the
end of all, nature is inexorable; she has no need to
hurry, and sooner or later she takes her own.
Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to laws, she
knows not art, as she knows not freedom, as she knows
not good; from all ages moving, from all ages changing,
she suffers nothing immortal, nothing unchanging....
Man is her child; but man’s work—art—is
hostile to her, just because it strives to be unchanging
and immortal. Man is the child of nature; but
she is the universal mother, and she has no preferences;
all that exists in her lap has arisen only at the
cost of something else, and must in its time yield
its place to something else. She creates destroying,
and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys—so
long as life be not exterminated, so long as death
fall not short of his dues.... And so just as
serenely she hides in mould the god-like shape of Phidias’s
Zeus as the simplest pebble, and gives the vile worm
for food the priceless verse of Sophokles. Mankind,
’tis true, jealously aid her in her work of
of slaughter; but is it not the same elemental force,
the force of nature, that finds vent in the fist of
the barbarian recklessly smashing the radiant brow
of Apollo, in the savage yells with which he casts
in the fire the picture of Apelles? How are we,
poor folks, poor artists to be a match for this deaf,
dumb, blind force who triumphs not even in her conquests,
but goes onward, onward, devouring all things?
How stand against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly,
unceasingly moving upward? How have faith in
the value and dignity of the fleeting images, that
in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out
of dust for an instant?
