Venus. To the Venus of Melos

Modelled by the sea, which is the reservoir of all the forces, you enchant us and you sway us by that grace and by that calm which strength alone possesses, and you bestow on us your serenity. It prevails like the charm of melodies powerful and deep.

What triumphant amplitude! What vigorous shadows!

From the boundaries of the two worlds’ throngs come to contemplate you, venerated marble; and the twilight deepens in the room that you may be more clearly seen, shining alone, while the silent hours pass, heavy with admiration.

Still you hear our clamours, immortal Venus! Having loved your contemporaries, you belong to us, now, to all of us, to the universe. The twenty-five centuries of your life seem only to have consecrated your invincible youth. And the generations, those waves of the ocean of the ages, to you, victorious over time, come and come again, attracted and recalled irresistibly. Admiration is not spent as a marble wears away.

To the poets, to the seekers, to the quiet artists, in the heart of the city’s tumult, you give long moments of refuge. Mutilated, you remain entire to their eyes. If the ravages of time have been permitted, it is only that a trace may continue of their profane effort and of their impotence.

You are not a vain and sterile statue, the image of some unreal goddess of the Empyrean. Ready for action, you breathe, you are a woman: and that is your glory. You are goddess only in name; the mythological nectar does not run in your veins. What is divine in you is the infinite love of your sculptor for nature. More ardent and above all more patient than other men, he was able to lift a corner of the veil too heavy for their idle hands.

And you are not, moreover, a mosaic of admirable shapes. There are no admirable shapes, but the shapes that agree, those that summon and presuppose one another according to the irrefutable logic of harmonious necessity, those that borrow life from one another. Yours gather in an indivisible whole, and it is the calm torrent of life that passes over you, that torrent whence you have sprung, naked and one.

Collected beauties could never have attained this unity. One detail that harmonized not with all the others, the least variance between the profiles, and the work of art would be destroyed, a useless thing, a senseless construction, renounced by the light, and doomed to all the poverties, to all the discords. This would be fatally the lot of even a clever assemblage, of even perfect pieces, chosen from different marbles.

But you, you live, you think, and your thoughts are those of a woman, and not of I know not what superior being, foreign, imaginary, artificial. You are made only of truth; and it is of truth alone that your omnipotence is born. There is nothing strong, there is nothing beautiful outside of the truth.

Your truth is within reach of everyone: it is woman, whom each one thinks he knows, the intimate companion of men; yet nobody has seen her, the wise not more than the simple. And the trees, who looks at them? The light has no spectators.

Nevertheless, except through confining oneself to the observation of reality, constant, scrupulous, and ever more profound, no one can accomplish anything. There are people who say to you, “The Ideal.” If this word is not void of meaning, it signifies only a stupidity. The Ideal! The Fantasy! But the realities of nature surpass our most ambitious fancies. Our thought is but an imperceptible point in nature. The part does not embrace, does not dominate the whole.