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?