Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume XV).djvu/339



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