be silent in the other case; but besides the fact that for more or less right judgment one really does often require information, one should in any case, even if one could always do without the information, seek in vain in any building that which satisfies one’s longing for beauty more than a very short moment, because a building lacks movement. I think this also applies to sculpture and painting. Nature is movement. Growth, hunger, thought, feeling, they all are movement . . . rest is death! Without movement no pain, no joy, no emotion! You try to sit still without stirring, and you will find how quickly you make a spooky impression on everyone else and even on your own imagination. Even in seeing the most beautiful ‘living statues,’ one soon longs for the next number, however glorious may have been the initial impression. Now since our thirst for beauty 1s not slaked by one single glance of a beautiful thing, but is an imperative need for a series of successive glances, that is for the movement of the beautiful, we suffer from an unsatisfied craving in contemplating that class of art-works, and for this reason I maintain that a beautiful woman, unless she be a portrait-beauty without real movement, comes nearest to the ideal of the divine. We soon feel how great is the need for movement when a dancer, let her be Elsler or Taglioni, after a dance stands still on her left leg and grins at the public.”
“This does not count here,” said Verbrugge, “for this is absolutely ugly.”
“I agree. Yet she gives it as beautiful, and as the climax to all that preceded, in which there may in reality have been much beauty. She gives it as ‘the point’ of the epigram, as the ‘aux armes!’ of the Marseillaise which she has sung with her feet, as the whisper of the willows upon the grave of a love she has just lamented in dance. Oh, it’s repulsive! And that the spectators also, who usually, like all of us more or less, fashion their taste on custom and imitation, consider that movement as the most thrilling, is proved by the fact that then they burst into applause, as if they wished to say: All that preceded was certainly very fine also, but
