"That depends on a man's character. It increases the loneliness of some men," replied the inventor, smiling in spite of what he was saying.
"You seem to me to be rather pessimistic," remarked the American.
"No, I am not pessimistic. I understand that a pessimist thinks life is worse than it is, but I see things just as they are; that is all. When I came to New York I was enthusiastic, too; I was an optimist. I saw life as it is not. But the mists have passed from before my eyes, and I see things just as they are."
AN IMPASSIONED CRITIC
He loves literature with an absorbing love, and is pained constantly by what he deems the chaos of art in the United States. The Americans seem to him to be trivial and immature in their art, lacking in serious purpose.
"It is a vast and fruitful land," he will say, "but there is no order and little sincerity as far as art is concerned. Your writers try to amuse the readers, to entertain them merely, rather than to give them serious and vital truth. Why is it that a race which is clever and progressive in all mechanical and industrial matters, which in such things has no overpowering respect for the past, is weighed down in art by a regard for all the literary ghosts of bygone times? Look at the books put forth in any one year in the United States! What a senseless hodgepodge it is! Variety of all kinds, historical novels, short stories, social plays, costume plays, bindings, illustrations, editions de luxe, new editions of books written in all ages alongside of the latest productions of the day. The Americans have great tact in most things. They are the cleverest people in the world, and yet they are very backward in literature.
"Indeed the whole Anglo-Saxon race, great economically and practically as it is, is curiously at sea and chaotic in all that pertains to literary art. There are men of genius, great artists among them, but they are artists only in part, fragmentarily, artists without being aware of it, with no consistent and clear understanding of what art is. Your great men are hindered by their environment. America and England are the most difficult countries in the world for real art to get a hearing, for all the people insist on being amused by their authors. They treat them as they do their actors, merely as public servants whose duty it is to amuse the public when it is tired. But art is a serious thing, instinct with sincerity, and should never be lightly approached either by the artist or the reader.
"Another indication of what I mean is the way you all talk about style over here, as if the style had anything to do with art. Some of the great Russian realists have no style, but they are great artists. There was a time when to write well was an exception, and people who did it were supposed to be great. Now so many write well that it constitutes no longer any particular distinction. Real art consists in the presentation of ideas in images, and in the power of seeing in images, and of reproducing imaginatively; what is thus seen is wholly independent of style. And, more, words often stand in the way of art. A man writes a pretty style. There may be no idea or image beneath it, but you Anglo-Saxons say: 'Ha! Here is a man with a style, a great artist!' But he is no artist. He is a mere decorator, trivial and empty. He doesn't seize earnestly upon life and tell the truth about it. Now and then, indeed, I see indications of real art in your writers—great images, great characters, great truth, but all merely in suggestion. You don't know when you do anything good, and most of you don't like it when you see it. You prefer an exciting plot to a great delineation of character. Sometimes you throw off, often in newspapers, something that indicates great talent, real art, but you cover it up with an indistinguishable mass of rubbish. You don't know what you are after. You have no method. Every writer goes his single way, confused, at cross purposes. There is no school of literature. Consequently, there is great loss of energy, great waste of material; great richness, but what carelessness, what deplorable carelessness, about the deepest and noblest and most serious things in life! I love you; I love you all; you are clever, good fellows, but you are children, talented, to be sure, but wayward and vagrant children, in the fields of art. Sincerity, realism, purpose and unity are what as a race you need, if you wish ever to have a consistent and genuine art.
"The Russian, the Frenchman, the German, knows what he wants. He is after the truth. He is serious about life. He doesn't try to dodge the facts for the sake of a little false cheerfulness and optimistic inanity."
Thus talks the Russian prophet. He is a robust, earnest man, who is trying to make head and tail out of contemporary English literature. He finds no great mainspring of impulse or principle behind it, but an infinite pandering to an infinitely diversified public taste. He thinks it is a kind of vaudeville of art, full of compromises, vulgar in its lack of principle. It makes him sad in much the same way that skepticism and profanity sadden a deeply religious person. Wisdom and truth he wants, and doesn't find them. What he finds is haste, greed, incompleteness and waste, and his soul abhors anything which takes away from the deepest nature of the soul. He is really a religious man, profound and sincere, sad at the wasteful, foolish lightness in art of the Anglo-Saxon world. Like his great countryman, Tolstoy, he writes stories, and, again like Tolstoy, as he grows older the more he sees in art and life which he would like to reform and deepen. Economy of the heart, soul and brain, the direction of them to a constant end—the feeling of the necessity of this is now an altruistic passion with this man. Like all reformers, he is sad, but, again like all reformers, he is robust and calm, self-sufficient.