"Ah!" he cried, "you are going too far, and embrace my paradox too warmly. I am only pleading, and want you to reply."
"I reply, then, that a sonnet of Petrarch has its relative beauty, which is equivalent to the beauty of the water of Vaucluse; that a fine landscape of Ruysdael has a charm which equals that of this evening; that Mozart sings in the language of men as well as Philomel in that of birds; that Shakspeare delineates passions, emotions, and instincts as vividly as the actual primitive man can experience them. This is art and its relativeness—in short, feeling."
"Yes, it is all a work of transformation! But suppose that it does not satisfy me? Even if you were a thousand times in the right according to the decrees of taste and esthetics, what if I think Petrarch's verses less harmonious than the roar of the waterfall, and so on? If I maintain that there is in this evening a charm that no one could reveal to me unless I had felt it myself; and that all Shakspeare's passion is cold in comparison with that I see gleaming in the eyes of a jealous peasant who beats his wife, what should you have to say? You must convince my feeling. And if it eludes your examples and resists your proofs? Art is not an invincible demonstrator, and feeling not always satisfied by the best definition."
"I have really nothing to answer except that art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof; that the preëxisting fact of the proof is always present to justify or contradict the demonstration, which nobody can make successfully unless he examine the proof with religious love."
"So the demonstration could not do without the proof; but could the proof do without the demonstration?"
"No doubt God could do without it; but, although you are talking as if you did not belong to us, I am willing to wager that you would understand nothing of the proof if you had not found the demonstration under a thousand forms in the tradition of art, and if you were not yourself a demonstration constantly acting upon the proof."
"That is just what I am complaining of. I should like to rid myself of this eternal irritating demonstration; to erase from my memory the teachings and the forms of art; never to think of painting when I look at a landscape, of music when I listen to the wind, or of poetry when I admire and take delight in both together. I should like to enjoy everything instinctively, because I think that the cricket which is singing just now is more joyous and ecstatic than I."
"You complain, then, of being a man?"
"No; I complain of being no longer a primitive man."
"It remains to be known whether he was capable of enjoying what he could not understand."