[1] Why harass with eternal designs a mind too weak to compass them? Why do we not, as we lie beneath a lofty plane-tree or this pine [drink while we may]? HOR., Odes III. ii. 11-14.—J.M.K.
[2] "All greatest sages of all latest ages
Will chuckle and slily agree,
'Tis folly to wait till a fool's empty pate
Has learnt to be knowing and free:
So children of wisdom, make use of the fools
And use them whenever you can as your tools."—J.M.K.
[3] It may be remembered that the cross was the gallows of the ancient world.—J.M.K.
[4] This may give us one of the reasons for the religiosity still happily prevailing in England and the United States.—J.M.K.
[FOURTH DIVISION.]
CONCERNING THE SOUL OF ARTISTS AND AUTHORS.
145.
The Perfect Should Not Have Grown.—With regard to everything that is perfect we are accustomed to omit the question as to how perfection has been acquired, and we only rejoice in the present as if it had sprung out of the ground by magic. Probably with regard to this matter we are still under the effects of an ancient mythological feeling. It still almost seems to us (in such a Greek temple, for instance, as that of Pæstum) as if one morning a god in sport had built his dwelling of such enormous masses, at other times it seems as if his spirit had suddenly entered into a stone and now desired to speak through it. The artist knows that his work is only fully effective if it arouses the belief in an improvisation, in a marvellous instantaneousness of origin; and thus he assists this illusion and introduces into art those elements of inspired unrest, of blindly groping disorder, of listening dreaming at the beginning of creation, as a means of deception, in order so to influence the soul of the spectator or hearer that it may believe in the sudden appearance of the perfect. It is the business of the science of art to contradict this illusion most decidedly, and to show up the mistakes and pampering of the intellect, by means of which it falls into the artist's trap.