se. An impression from beyond the world is
something entirely different; it is a shiver of delights which
are unknown here, and only anticipated, coming from a world
inaccessible to the senses. That such a world exists is shown by
the enormous poverty of this one, and the mad monotony of those
sources of pleasure which are contained in the world accessible
to human senses. A poet is so far a poet, an aesthete so far an
aesthete, as he is able, by intuition and unheard-of delicacy of
nerves, to burst into the world above the senses and to
experience the taste, or rather the odor, which goes before it.
For it is an absolute condition that the feeling should be hazy,
something in the nature of an odor; or, better still, the echo of
an odor. No key of a musical instrument is to be touched; no
definite features are to be drawn; the tone of mind alone is to
be produced. The baron's dwelling gave the tone of mind for
another world. He and his associates believed in another world,
beyond the earth and the grave; on the basis of the poverty and
commonness of the world before the grave--that is, in despair of
the case. For them it was not subject to doubt--that world, the
slight odors of which flew to them in moments when they were in
the tone of mind, was filled with perfect beauty, nothing but
beauty; a beauty which, in this world, even by itself alone,
raises men above the level of the rabble. If this beauty did not
exist, we should be justified in accepting Hartmann's theory of
the collective suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody
spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known
from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the
eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a
brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around
terribly fetid objects."

"Ah, no, my friend! No, no! That passes my power! In heaven's
name I beg you not to say another word!"

With this exclamation Arthur Kranitski, like a pike out of water,
struggled in the immensely deep cathedra; and, with his arms in
the air kept calling out:

"Terribly fetid objects! Bloody spittle! that is not poetry--it
is not even decent! And those shaggy flies whirling
around--that--No! I feel a nausea, which mounts to my throat. No,
my friends, I will never agree that that is poetry!"

His voice broke, so wounded was he in his aesthetic conceptions.
The young men laughed. That dear, honest Pan Kranitski