Anne

“CAMILLE. I tell you, if they don’t get everything in wooden reproductions, in their theatres, concerts, art exhibitions, they won’t even listen. But if they get a ridiculous marionette and they can see the strings moving it up and down and they can see its legs creaking along in iambic pentameters, they say ‘What truth! What understanding of human nature, how profound!’ Take any tiny insight, any fatuous notion or tinpot aphorism, dress it up, and paint it in bright colours and parade it about for three acts ’til it gets married or shoots itself, and they cry ‘What idealism!’ If someone grinds out an opera which echoes the ebb and flow of human experience about as well as a clay pipe echoes a nightingale: ‘Such artistry!’ But then turn them out of the theatre into the street and, oh dear, reality is just too sordid. They forget God himself, they prefer his bad imitators. Creation is being newly born every minute, within them and all around them, glowing, a storm glittering with lightning: but they hear and see nothing. They go to the theatre, read poems and novels and praise the caricatures. To creation itself they say ‘How ugly, how boring’.
The Greeks warned us about literature with the story of Pygmalion’s statue, the stone come to life but unable to bear children.”
― Georg Büchner, Danton's Death