LENZ
41
every individual; all that varies is the thickness of the shell which
this vein must penetrate. All one needs for these things is eyes and
ears in one's head. "Yesterday, as I was walking along the edge of
the valley, I saw two girls sitting on a stone; one of them was fasten–
ing her hair, the other was helping her. Her golden hair hung down;
a grave, pale face, and yet so young, and the black dress and the
other one so anxiously busying herself. The finest, most intimate pic–
tures of the German school can hardly give us an idea of what this
scene was like. Sometimes one would like to be a Medusa's head, so
as to be able to transform such a group into stone and show it to
people. The girls got up, destroying this fine composition; yet as they
were descencling between the rocks a new picture was made. The
most beautiful pictures, the richest harmonies group and dissolve.
Only one thing remains: an unending loveliness that moves from one
form to another, eternally undone, eternally changing. Of course one
can't always hold on to it, put it into art galleries or bars of music
and then fetch the old and the young, let boys and old men chatter
about it and be filled with delight. One must love human nature
in order to penetrate into the peculiar character of any individual;
nobody, however insignificant, however ugly, should be despised; only
then can one understand human kind as a whole. The most undis–
tinguished face can make a deeper impression than the mere percep–
tion of abstract beauty, and one can allow one's characters to emerge
from one's own mind without copying in any of the externals, with–
out adding details in which one feels no life, no muscles, no pulsations
beating in response to one's own."
Kaufmann objected that in the real world he would never find
the prototype for an Apollo Belvedere or a Madonna by Raphael.
"What does it matter?" Lenz replied; "I must confess that they make
me feel quite dead. When I'm in a state of great mental activity they
could, perhaps, make me feel something, but then I should be doing
most of the work. Best of all I like that poet and that visual artist
who can reproduce nature for me with the greatest degree of truth–
fulness, so that I can feel his creation; everything else puts me off. I
prefer the Dutch painters to the Italian, because they're the only ones
I can grasp. I know only two pictures, and those by Dutch or Flemish
painters, that have given me an impression comparable to that of the
New Testament: one of them, I don't know who painted it, is Christ
