"But you don't write only for the public; you have your own ideal of art!"
"It's such a barren notion, that principle. All very fine when you're quite young: then it's delightful to swagger a bit with that ideal of art; you go in for it then as another goes in for sport or a cultivated palate.... Art really isn't everything. It's a very beautiful thing, but, properly speaking, it oughtn't to be an aim in life. Artists combine a great deal of pretentiousness with what is really a small aim."
"But, Lot, the influence they exercise ..."
"With a book, a painting, an opera? Even to the people who care about it, it's only an insignificant pleasure. Don't go thinking that artists wield great influence. All our arts are little ivory towers, with little doors for the initiate. They influence life hardly at all. All those silly definitions of art, of Art with a capital A, which your modern authors give you—art is this, art is that—are just one series of exaggerated sentences. Art is an entertainment; and a painter is an entertainer; so is a composer; so is a novelist."
"Oh, no, Lot!"
"I assure you it is so. You're still so precious in your conception of art, Elly, but it'll wear away, dear. It's an affectation. Artists are entertainers, of themselves and others. They have always been so, from the days of the first troubadours, in the finest sense of the word. Make the sense of it as fine as you please, but entertainers they remain. An artist is no demigod, as we picture him when we are twenty-three, like you, Elly. An entertainer is what he is; he entertains himself and others; usually he is vain, petty, envious, jealous, ungenerous to his fellow-entertainers, puffed up with his principles and his art, that noble aim in life; just as petty and jealous as any one else in any other profession. Then why shouldn't I speak of authors as entertainers? They entertain themselves with their own sorrows and emotions; and with a melancholy sonnet or a more or less nebulous novel they entertain the young people who read them. For people over thirty, who are not in the trade, no longer read novels or poems. I myself am too old to write for young people. When I write now, I have the bourgeois ambition to be read by my contemporaries, by men getting on for forty. What interests them is actual life, seen psychologically, but expressed in concrete truths and not reflected in a mirage and poetized and dramatized through fictitious personages. That's why I'm a journalist and why I enjoy it. I like to grip my reader at once and to let him go again at once, because neither he nor I have any time to spare. Life goes on. But to-morrow I grip him again; and then again I don't want to charm him any longer than I grip him. In our ephemeral lives, this, journalism, is the ephemeral and the true art, for I want the form of it to be frail but chaste.... I don't say that I have got so far myself; but that is my artistic ideal...."
"Then will you never write any more novels?"
"Who can say what he will or will not do again? Say it ... and you do something different all the same. Who knows what I shall be saying or doing in a year's time? If I knew Grandmamma's inner life, I should perhaps write a novel. It is almost history; and, even as I take an interest in the story of our own time, in the anticipation of our future, so history has a great charm for me, even though history depresses humanity and human beings and though our own old folk depress me. Grandmamma's life is almost history: emotions and events of another period...."
"Lot, I wish you would begin to work seriously."
"I shall start working as soon as we are in Italy. The best thing, Elly, is not to think of setting up house yet. Not with Mamma and also not by ourselves. Let us go on wandering. When we are very old it will be time enough to roost permanently. What draws me to Italy is her tremendous past. I try to reach antiquity through the Renascence, but I have never got so far and in the Forum I still think too much of Raphael and Leonardo."