Man is incapable of creating, of inventing. He can only approach nature, submissively, lovingly. For the rest, she will not disappear from his sight; he has but to look, she will let him see what by force of patience he has arrived at understanding—that only. And yet the part is beautiful! He is an equal of Prometheus, he, who has known how to ravish from nature the life we adore in the Venus of Melos.
Nothing will take the place of persevering study. To it alone the secret of life delivers itself. Give your life patiently, passionately to understanding life. What profit, if you come indeed to understand! You will be in the circle of joy forever.
To understand, to see—truly to see! Would one recoil before the necessary effort, before the indispensable apprenticeship, however long and laborious, if he foresaw the happiness of understanding?
To understand! It is—not to die!
For me the antique masterpieces are mingled in my memory with all the pleasures of my youth; or rather the Antique is my youth itself that rises again to my heart and hides from me my age. In the Louvre, of old, like saints to a monk in his cloister, the Olympian gods said to me all that a young man might usefully hear; later they protected and inspired me; after an absence of twenty years, I found them again with an indescribable joy, and I understood them. These divine fragments, these marbles, older than two thousand years, speak to me louder, move me more than human beings. In its turn may the new century meditate upon these marvels, and may it try to ascend to them through intelligence and love. It will owe to them its highest joys. Man may be the forger of his happiness.
The Antique and Nature are bound by the same mystery. The Antique—it is the human workman arrived at a supreme degree of mastery. But Nature is above him. The mystery of Nature is even more insoluble than that of genius. The glory of the Antique is in having understood Nature.
O, Venus of Melos, the prodigious sculptor that fashioned you knew how to make the thrill of that generous nature flow in you, the thrill of life itself—O, Venus, arch of the triumph of life, bridge of truth, circle of grace!
What splendour in your beautiful torso seated firmly on your solid legs, and in those half tones that sleep upon your breasts, upon your splendid belly, large like the sea! It is the rhythmic beauty of the sea without end.... You are in truth the mother of gods and of men.
The generative profile of that torso helps us to understand, reveals to us the proportions of the world. And the miracle is in this, that the assembled profiles, in the sense of depth, of length, and of width, express, by an incomprehensible magic, the human soul and its passions, and the character that shapes the heart of beings.
