union here? ... I do not find what I
seek, Lisaveta. I find the flock and the congregation that are
familiar to me, a gathering of the early Christians, as it were: people
with awkward bodies and fine souls, people who are always falling down,
so to speak--you understand--and for whom poetry is a gentle vengeance
upon life; never any but sufferers, yearners, paupers, never one of
those others, the blue-eyed ones, Lisaveta, who have no need of
intellect!...

"And in the last analysis, would it not show a lamentable lack of
logic, if one were glad to have it otherwise? It is inconsistent to
love life, and none the less to endeavor constantly with every possible
device to drag it over to your side, to win it over to the finesses and
melancholies, the entire diseased nobility of literature. The realm of
art is waxing, and that of health and innocence is waning on earth. One
should preserve as carefully as possible the little that is left of it,
nor try to seduce into poetry those who much prefer to read books about
horses with instantaneous photographs in them.

"For, after all, what sight is more pitiful than life making an attempt
at art? We artists despise no one more thoroughly than the dilettante,
the red-blooded man, who thinks he can be an artist occasionally and on
the side. I assure you, this kind of disdain is one of my own most
personal experiences. I find myself in company in an aristocratic
house, we eat, drink, and converse, and understand each other
perfectly, and I feel glad and grateful to be able to disappear for a
time among harmless and regular people as a normal man.
Suddenly--this has happened to me--an officer rises, a lieutenant, a
handsome, well-built fellow, of whom I should never have suspected an
action unworthy of his honorable dress, and begs in unambiguous words
for permission to communicate to us a few verses which he has
manufactured. With a smile of consternation the permission is given
him, and he carries out his purpose, reading his composition
from a slip of paper which he has till then kept hidden in his
coat-tail,--something about music and love;--in short, as deep in
feeling as it is ineffective. Now in the name of all the world: a
lieutenant! One of the lords of the earth! _He_ surely doesn't need
it!... Well, the result is inevitable: long faces, silence, a little
artificial applause, and the profoundest discomfort round about. The
first spiritual fact of which I become conscious