We must indeed be a slow and narrow-minded race to be so easily pleased and satisfied with what is. How is it that the worldly audience has not yet called out, "Curtain," has not yet demanded the next act, with other beings than mankind, other manners, other pleasures, other plants, other planets, other inventions, other adventures?
Is it possible no one has yet felt a loathing for the sameness of the human face, of the animals which by their unvarying instincts, transmitted in their seed from the first to the last of their race, seem to be but living machinery; a hatred of landscapes eternally the same, and of pleasures never varied?
Console yourself, it is said, by the love of science and art.
But is it not evident that we are always shut up in ourselves, without ever being able to quit ourselves, for ever condemned to drag the chains of our wingless dream.
All the progress obtained by our cerebral effort, consists in the ascertainment of material facts by means of instruments ridiculously imperfect, which however make up in a certain degree for the inefficiency of our organs. Every twenty years, some unhappy inquirer, who generally dies in the attempt, discovers that the atmosphere contains a gas hitherto unknown, that an imponderable, inexplicable, unqualifiable force can be obtained by rubbing a piece of wax on cloth; that amongst the innumerable unknown stars, there is one that has not yet been noticed in the immediate vicinity of another, which had not only been observed, but even designated by name for many years. What matter?
Our diseases are due to microbes? Very well. But where do those microbes come from? and the diseases of these invisible ones? And the suns, whence do they come from?
We know nothing, we understand nothing, we can do nothing, we foresee nothing, we imagine nothing, we are shut up, imprisoned in ourselves. And there are people who marvel at the genius of humanity!
Art? Painting consists in reproducing with colouring matter monotonous landscapes, which seldom resemble nature; in delineating men, and striving without ever succeeding, to give the aspect of living beings. Obstinately and uselessly one struggles to imitate what is; and the result is a motionless and dumb copy of the actions of life, which is barely comprehensible even to the educated eye that one has sought to attract.
Wherefore such efforts? Wherefore such a vain imitation? Wherefore this trivial reproduction of things in themselves so dull? How petty!
Poets do with words what painters try to do with colours. Again, wherefore?