Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/200

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Max Havelaar
181

know what. This is tiresome; for one feels it necessary to have exactly sixty-three feet of admiration at hand not to be taken for a Turk or a bagman. You will tell me now, perhaps, that you keep your guide, when a printed one, in your pocket, and in the other case, order him to hold his tongue, or stand outside; but sometimes to arrive at a correct judgment, information is wanted; yet even if that could be dispensed with, we might seek in vain in some building or other for anything to gratify for more than a moment our passion for the beautiful, because there is nothing to move us. This also holds good, in my opinion, of sculpture and paintings. Nature is motion. Growth, hunger, thought, feeling, all these are examples of motion. . . . Stagnancy is death. Without motion there is no grief, no enjoyment, no emotion. Sit there motionless for a while, and you will see how soon you will make a ghostly impression on every one else; and even on your own imagination, At a tableaux vivants, one soon wants a new figure, however impressive the sight may have been at the commencement. As our taste for beauty is not satisfied with one look at anything beautiful, but needs a good many successive looks to watch the motion of the beautiful, we are dissatisfied when contemplating works of art, and therefore I assert that a beautiful woman, provided her beauty is not too still, comes nearest to the ideal of the divinity.

“How great is the necessity for motion that I speak of,