But art?... Beauty?... Yes, those are mighty words; they are, probably, mightier than those which I have mentioned above. The Venus of Melos, for example, is more indubitable than the Roman law, or than the principles of 1789. Men may retort—and how many times have I heard these retorts!—that beauty itself is also a matter of convention, that to the Chinese it presents itself in a totally different manner from what it does to the European.... But it is not the conventionality of art which disconcerts me; its perishableness, and again its perishableness,—its decay and dust—that is what deprives me of courage and of faith. Art, at any given moment, is, I grant, more powerful than Nature itself, because in it there is neither symphony of Beethoven nor picture of Ruysdael nor poem of Goethe—and only dull-witted pedants or conscienceless babblers can still talk of art as a copy of Nature. But in the long run Nature is irresistible; she cannot be hurried, and sooner or later she will assert her rights. Unconsciously and infallibly obedient to law, she does not know art, as she does not know liberty, as she does not know good; moving onward from eternity, transmitted from eternity, she tolerates nothing immortal, nothing unchangeable.... Man is her child; but the human, the artificial is inimical to her, precisely because she strives to be unchangeable and immortal. Man is the child of Nature; but she is the universal mother, and she has no preferences: everything which exists in her bosom has arisen only for the benefit of another and must, in due time, make way for that other—she creates by destroying, and it is a matter of perfect indifference to her what she creates, what she destroys, if only life be not extirpated, if only death do not lose its rights.... And therefore she as calmly covers with mould the divine visage of Phidias’s Jupiter as she does a plain pebble, and delivers over to be devoured by the contemned moth the most precious lines of Sophocles. Men, it is true, zealously aid her in her work of extermination; but is not the same elementary force,—is not the force of Nature shown in the finger of the barbarian who senselessly shattered the radiant brow of Apollo, in the beast-like howls with which he hurled the picture of Apelles into the fire? How are we poor men, poor artists, to come to an agreement with this deaf and dumb force, blind from its birth, which does not even triumph in its victories, but marches, ever marches on ahead, devouring all things? How are we to stand up against those heavy, coarse, interminably and incessantly onrolling waves, how believe, in short, in the significance and worth of those perishable images which we, in the darkness, on the verge of the abyss, mould from the dust and for a mere instant?
XVI
All this is so ... but only the transitory is beautiful, Shakspeare has said; and Nature herself, in the unceasing play of her rising and vanishing forms, does not shun beauty. Is it not she who sedulously adorns the most momentary of her offspring—the petals of the flowers, the wings of the butterfly—with such charming colours? Is it not she who imparts to them such exquisite outlines? It is not necessary for beauty to live forever in order to be immortal—one moment is sufficient for it. That is so; that is just, I grant you—but only in cases where there is no personality, where man is not, liberty is not: the faded wing of the butterfly comes back again, and a thousand years later, with the selfsame wing of the selfsame butterfly, necessity sternly and regularly and impartially fulfils its round ... but man does not repeat himself like the butterfly, and the work of his hands, his art, his free creation once destroyed, is annihilated forever.... To him alone is it given to “create” ... but it is strange and terrible to articulate: “We are creators ... for an hour,”—as there once was, they say, a caliph for an hour.—Therein lies our supremacy—and our curse: each one of these “creators” in himself—precisely he, not any one else, precisely that ego—seems to have been created with deliberate intent, on a plan previously designed; each one more or less dimly understands his significance, feels that he is akin to something higher, something eternal—and he lives, he is bound to live in the moment and for the moment.[33] Sit in the mud, my dear fellow, and strive toward heaven!—The greatest among us are precisely those who are the most profoundly conscious of all of that fundamental contradiction; but in that case the question arises,—are the words “greatest, great” appropriate?
XVII
But what shall be said of those to whom, despite a thorough desire to do so, one cannot apply those appellations even in the sense which is attributed to them by the feeble human tongue?—What shall be said of the ordinary, commonplace, second-rate, third-rate toilers—whoever they may be—statesmen, learned men, artists—especially artists? How force them to shake off their dumb indolence, their dejected perplexity, how draw them once more to the field of battle, if once the thought as to the vanity of everything human, of every activity which sets for itself a higher aim than the winning of daily bread, has once crept into their heads? By what wreaths are they lured on—they, for whom laurels and thorns have become equally insignificant? Why should they again subject themselves to the laughter of “the cold throng” or to “the condemnation of the dunce,”—of the old dunce who cannot forgive them for having turned away from the former idols; of the young dunce who demands that they shall immediately go down on their knees in his company, that they should lie prone before new, just-discovered idols? Why shall they betake themselves again to that rag-fair of phantoms, to that market-place where both the seller and the buyer cheat each other equally, where everything is so noisy, so loud—and yet so poor and worthless? Why “with exhaustion in their bones” shall they interweave themselves again with that world where the nations, like peasant urchins on a festival day, flounder about in the mud for the sake of a handful of empty nuts, or admire with gaping mouths the wretched woodcuts, decorated with tinsel gold,—with that world where they had no right to life while they lived in it, and, deafening themselves with their own shouts, each one hastens with convulsive speed to a goal which he neither knows nor understands? No ... no.... It is enough ... enough ... enough!
XVIII
... The rest is silence.[34] ...