The Jew and Other Stories eBook

All this is true,... but only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller; and nature in the incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms is not averse to beauty.  Does not she carefully deck the most fleeting of her children—­the petals of the flowers, the wings of the butterfly—­in the fairest hues, does she not give them the most exquisite lines?  Beauty needs not to live for ever to be eternal—­one instant is enough for her.  Yes; that may be is true—­but only there where personality is not, where man is not, where freedom is not; the butterfly’s wing spoiled appears again and again for a thousand years as the same wing of the same butterfly; there sternly, fairly, impersonally necessity completes her circle... but man is not repeated like the butterfly, and the work of his hands, his art, his spontaneous creation once destroyed is lost for ever....  To him alone is it vouchsafed to create... but strange and dreadful it is to pronounce:  we are creators... for one hour—­as there was, in the tale, a caliph for an hour.  In this is our pre-eminence—­and our curse; each of those ‘creators’ himself, even he and no other, even this I is, as it were, constructed with certain aim, on lines laid down beforehand; each more or less dimly is aware of his significance, is aware that he is innately something noble, eternal—­and lives, and must live in the moment and for the moment.[1] Sit in the mud, my friend, and aspire to the skies!  The greatest among us are just those who more deeply than all others have felt this rooted contradiction; though if so, it may be asked, can such words be used as greatest, great?

[Footnote 1:  One cannot help recalling here Mephistopheles’s words to Faust:—­

  ’Er (Gott) findet sich in einem ewgen Glanze,
   Uns hat er in die Finsterniss gebracht—­
   Und euch taugt einzig Tag und Nacht.’ 
                                        —­AUTHOR’S NOTE.]

XVII

What is to be said of those to whom, with all goodwill, one cannot apply such terms, even in the sense given them by the feeble tongue of man?  What can one say of the ordinary, common, second-rate, third-rate toilers—­whatsoever they may be—­statesmen, men of science, artists—­above all, artists?  How conjure them to shake off their numb indolence, their weary stupor, how draw them back to the field of battle, if once the conception has stolen into their brains of the nullity of everything human, of every sort of effort that sets before itself a higher aim than the mere winning of bread?  By what crowns can they be lured for whom laurels and thorns alike are valueless?  For what end will they again face the laughter of ‘the unfeeling crowd’ or ’the judgment of the fool’—­of the old fool who cannot forgive them from turning away from the old bogies—­of the young fool who would force them to kneel with him, to grovel with him before the new, lately discovered idols?