But art?... beauty?... Yes, these are words of power; they are more
powerful, may be, than those I have spoken before. Venus of Milo is, may
be, more real than Roman law or the principles of 1789. It may be
objected--how many times has the retort been heard!--that beauty itself
is relative; that by the Chinese it is conceived as quite other than the
European's ideal.... But it is not the relativity of art confounds me;
its transitoriness, again its brevity, its dust and ashes--that is what
robs me of faith and courage. Art at a given moment is more powerful,
may be, than nature; for in nature is no symphony of Beethoven, no
picture of Ruysdäel, no poem of Goethe, and only dull-witted pedants or
disingenuous chatterers can yet maintain that art is the imitation of
nature. But at the end of all, nature is inexorable; she has no need to
hurry, and sooner or later she takes her own. Unconsciously and
inflexibly obedient to laws, she knows not art, as she knows not
freedom, as she knows not good; from all ages moving, from all ages
changing, she suffers nothing immortal, nothing unchanging.... Man is
her child; but man's work--art--is hostile to her, just because it
strives to be unchanging and immortal. Man is the child of nature; but
she is the universal mother, and she has no preferences; all that exists
in her lap has arisen only at the cost of something else, and must in
its time yield its place to something else. She creates destroying, and
she cares not whether she creates or she destroys--so long as life be
not exterminated, so long as death fall not short of his dues.... And so
just as serenely she hides in mould the god-like shape of Phidias's Zeus
as the simplest pebble, and gives the vile worm for food the priceless
verse of Sophokles. Mankind, 'tis true, jealously aid her in her work of
of slaughter; but is it not the same elemental force, the force of
nature, that finds vent in the fist of the barbarian recklessly smashing
the radiant brow of Apollo, in the savage yells with which he casts in
the fire the picture of Apelles? How are we, poor folks, poor artists to
be a match for this deaf, dumb, blind force who triumphs not even in her
conquests, but goes onward, onward, devouring all things? How stand
against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly, unceasingly moving
upward? How have faith in the value and dignity of the fleeting images,
that in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out of dust for an
instant?