L. N. read aloud certain passages of Maeterlinck’s new play Aglavaine et Sélysette. His attitude to it is one of complete indifference.
L. N. reads aloud most wonderfully; very simply and at the same time with remarkable expression. Wonderful also is his capacity of telling in a few words the contents of a story. There is nothing superfluous, and a clear, definite picture is given.
April 22nd. At the Tolstois’.
Speaking of modern art, L. N. said:
“If an impressionist was asked to draw a hoop, he would draw a straight line ——; a child would draw a circle like this O” (L. N. made the circle with his finger on the table). “And the child is more in the right, because he naïvely represents what he sees, and the impressionist represents what may be a hoop or a stick or anything you like; in a word, he does not represent the characteristic properties of the thing, but only a symbol of it, a part, and that not always the most characteristic one.
“A really remarkable and powerful mind can look for a method of expressing his idea, and if the idea is strong he will find new methods of expressing it. But modern artists invent a technical method and then are on the look-out for an idea, which they arbitrarily squeeze into their method.
“The great mistake is that people have introduced into art the vague conception of ‘beauty,’ which obscures and confuses everything.... Art consists in this—when some one sees or feels something, and expresses it in such a form that he who listens, reads, or sees his work feels, sees, and hears the same thing in the same way as the artist. Therefore art can be of the highest quality, or indifferent, or, finally, simply hateful, but still it is art. The most immoral picture if it achieves its end is art, although it serves low ends.
“If I yawn, cry, or laugh, and infect another person by the same thing, that is not art, for I produce the impression by the fact itself; but, if a beggar, for instance, seeing that his tears affected you and you gave him money, should on the following day pretend to cry and should arouse pity in you, then that is art.”
August 2nd, 4 P.M. I have just had a long talk with L. N. on art. He was repeating the contents of his article on art which he is writing, and which he goes on working over and rewriting. In the course of it L. N. said:
“When art became the inheritance of a small circle of rich people, and left its main course, it entered the cul-de-sac in which we see it now.