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LOVE. HAPPINESS AND ART
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the innermost sap of our passions we must preserve m precious
flasks. These essences of ourselves must be reserved as sublime nour–
ishment for posterity. Who can tell how much is wasted every day in
emotional outpourings?
We marvel at the mystics, but what I have just said explains
their secret. Their love, like mountain streams, ran in a single bed-–
narrow, deep and steep; that is why it carried everything before it.
If
you seek happiness and beauty simultaneously, you will attain
neither one nor the other, for the price of beauty is self-denial. Art,
like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces,
mortify your flesh, roll in ashes, smear yourself with filth and spittle,
wrench out your poor heart! You will be alone, your feet will bleed,
an infernal disgust will be with you throughout your pilgrimage,
what gives joy to others will give none to you, what to them are
but pin-pricks will cut you to the quick, and you will be lost in
the hurricane with only beauty's faint glow visible on the horizon.
But it will grow, grow like the sun, its golden rays will bathe your
face, penetrate into you, you will be illumined within, ethereal, all
spiritualized, and after each bleeding the flesh will be less burden–
some. Let us therefore seek only tranquillity; let us ask of life only
an armchair, not a throne; only water to quench our thirst, not
drunkenness. Passion is not compatible with the long patience that
is a requisite of our calling. Art is vast enough to take complete
possession of a man. To divert anything from it is almost a crime:
it is a sin against the Idea, a dereliction of duty. But we are weak,
the flesh is soft, and the heart, like a branch heavy with rain,
trembles at the slightest tremor of the earth. We pant for air like
a prisoner, an infinite weakness comes over us, we feel that we are
dying. Wisdom consists in jettisoning the smallest possible part of
the cargo, that the vessel may keep safely afloat.
August 26, 1853
What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achieve–
ment of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or
our
anger, but to do as nature does- that is, fill us with wonderment.
The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are serene
in
aspect, incomprehensible. The means by which they act on us
