MUSEUMS
1033
important for the work they do in uniting mankind's efforts and
conserving its achievements.
All this is clearly apparent in a negative form whenever things
come to such a pass that forces otherwise sternly held in check find
themselves free to. oppose not this or that form of social order, but
order in general. In such times of disorder not only are prisons and
bastilles burned to the ground, but libraries and collections as well,
which the mob rightly looks upon as strongholds of tradition and
civilization. Indiscriminate iconoclasm is always a sign of the immi–
nent levelling-off of a high stage of civilization. In this connection,
there are a number of indications to warn us that the kettle is about
to boil. One such is the worship of fire, not as a source of illumination,
but as an incendiary means, fire in the form of the torch, fire as kero–
sene, as dynamite. But the infallible token of this disorder is the news
that graves have been broken into and corpses exposed to view in the
public squares. Such performances are not merely nasty whims in–
dulged in by debauched spirits, but an incitement against our very
humanity- for interment of the dead is the basis of the human con–
dition, and a man who can play pranks with it would stop at nothing.
Hence it is impossible to exaggerate the influence exercised by such
spectacles; the last moral restraints are thrown off; it is a vortex
reaching down to unspeakable depths.
Now and then , however, as in the case of a Burckhardt or a
vVinckelmann, we would seem to attach too great a value to the
preservation of the monuments of the past. In this very overestima–
tion an obscure pain is perhaps concealed, a secret lack of creativc
force. On the other hand it is just the bad painters, and particularly
the swindlers and the counterfeiters, who share the mob's hatred of
the great collections; beauty must vanish from off the earth so that
the hideous may find some tolerance for itself. On the whole, however,
this necessity of ours to collect and conserve resists any simple explana–
tion; it is one of those large themes in which opposites merge like the
elevations and depressions of a landscape.
(Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg)
