“You are no—” Lisaweta said. … She was holding her spoon full of tea up to her mouth, and became rigid in this position.
“Well, yes … well, yes … come out of it, Lisaweta! I am not so, I tell you, with reference to living emotion. You see, the man of letters fails at bottom to understand that life may still go on living, that it is not ashamed of this, even after it has been expressed and ‘discharged.’ But see here, it goes on sinning undeviatingly, for all action is sin in the eyes of the mind. …
“I am near the end, Lisaweta. Listen to me. I love life—this is a secret. Take it and keep it—I have told it to no one else. People have said, people have even written and had printed, that I hate life, or fear or despise or shun it. I have enjoyed hearing this, it flattered me; but it is no less false for that reason. I love life. … You are smiling, Lisaweta, and I know why. But I beg you, don’t think what I am saying now is literature! Don’t think of Cesare Borgia or any drunken philosophy which has that for a slogan! He is nothing to me, this Cesare Borgia; I don’t put the least faith in him, and I will never, never understand how people can honour the extraordinary and the demonic as the ideal. No, ‘life’—as it stands in eternal contrast to the mind and art—not as a vision of bloody greatness and savage beauty, not as the irregular does it present itself to us irregular people; but the normal, the respectable, and the likable are the realm of our yearnings, they are life in all its seductive banality! That man is not an artist for long, my dear, whose last and deepest enthusiasm is for the refined, the eccentric, and the Satanic, who does not know the hankering after the harmless, simple, and living, after a little friendship, devotion, confidence, and human happiness—the stealthy and devouring hankering, Lisaweta, after the bliss of mediocrity! …
“A human friend! Will you believe that it would make me proud and happy to possess a friend among human beings? But up to now I have had friends only among demons, goblins, profound sorcerers, and spectres drunk with knowledge, which is to say, among men of letters.
“Occasionally I get on to some platform, find myself in a room facing people who have come to hear me. You see, then it happens that I notice myself looking around among the public, that I catch myself spying secretly through the auditorium, and asking myself, who is it that came to me, whose applause and thanks penetrate to me, with whom does my art I create an ideal union here? … I do not find what I am looking for, Lisaweta. I find the herd and the community that is well known to me, a gathering of the first Christians, you might say, people with unwieldy bodies and fine souls, people who always fall down, so to speak—you understand me, Lisaweta—people to whom poetry is a delicate revenge on life; always simply the sufferers and yearners and the poor, and never anyone of those others, the blue-eyed, Lisaweta, who have no need of the mind! …
“And, after all, would it not be a regrettable inconsistency to wish that things were different? It is absurd to love life and yet be striving with all your faculties to draw it on your side, to win it over to the delicacies and the melancholies, the entire sickly nobility, of literature. The realm of art is widening on this earth, and the realm of health and innocence is falling away. Whatever is still left, we preserve as carefully as possible, and we should not want to seduce people into poetry who would much rather look at the snapshots in books on horses!
“For, in conclusion—is there anything more miserable to look upon than life when it makes an attempt at art? We artists detest no one more basically than the dilettante, the man in life who thinks that he can also on occasion be an artist. I answer you, this kind of detestation is among my personal experiences. I happen to be out among society in some good house; we are eating, drinking, and chatting, we understand one another perfectly, and I feel cheerful and grateful that I am able to get lost for a while among harmless and regular people as one of them. Suddenly (this has happened to me) an officer rises, a lieutenant, a handsome and sturdy fellow whom I should never have thought capable of an act unworthy of his uniform, and asks in unmistakable words for permission to acquaint us with a short piece of verse which he has written. With a dismayed smile, we grant him this, and he carries out his program; taking a paper which he had up until now kept concealed in his coat pocket, he recites his work, something about music and love, in short, something just as deeply felt as it is ineffectual. But now I ask everyone: a lieutenant! A man of the world! He really didn’t have to do it! … Well, it turns out as it has to: long faces, silence, a little trumped-up applause, and the profoundest discomfiture on all sides. The first mental fact I became conscious of is that I feel myself involved in the blame for this disturbance which this unthinking young man has brought upon the company. And undoubtedly I too, in whose trade he has blundered, have mocking and distant glances directed towards me. But the second mental fact consists in this: that this man, for whose habits and character I had just been feeling the noblest respect, suddenly sinks, sinks, sinks in my eyes. … I am seized by a charitable sympathy. Along with a few
