All this is true,... but only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller;
and nature in the incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms is not
averse to beauty. Does not she carefully deck the most fleeting of her
children--the petals of the flowers, the wings of the butterfly--in the
fairest hues, does she not give them the most exquisite lines? Beauty
needs not to live for ever to be eternal--one instant is enough for her.
Yes; that may be is true--but only there where personality is not, where
man is not, where freedom is not; the butterfly's wing spoiled appears
again and again for a thousand years as the same wing of the same
butterfly; there sternly, fairly, impersonally necessity completes her
circle... but man is not repeated like the butterfly, and the work of
his hands, his art, his spontaneous creation once destroyed is lost for
ever.... To him alone is it vouchsafed to create... but strange and
dreadful it is to pronounce: we are creators... for one hour--as there
was, in the tale, a caliph for an hour. In this is our pre-eminence--and
our curse; each of those 'creators' himself, even he and no other, even
this _I_ is, as it were, constructed with certain aim, on lines
laid down beforehand; each more or less dimly is aware of his
significance, is aware that he is innately something noble, eternal--and
lives, and must live in the moment and for the moment.[1] Sit in the mud,
my friend, and aspire to the skies! The greatest among us are just those
who more deeply than all others have felt this rooted contradiction;
though if so, it may be asked, can such words be used as greatest, great?
[Footnote 1: One cannot help recalling here Mephistopheles's words
to Faust:--
'Er (Gott) findet sich in einem ewgen Glanze,
Uns hat er in die Finsterniss gebracht--
Und euch taugt einzig Tag und Nacht.'
--AUTHOR'S NOTE.]