I got up early in the morning and went to the river with L. N. to
bathe. L. N. works every day from breakfast till lunch. He seemed to me
to be in good spirits. In the morning at coffee he said:
“I feel as though I were nineteen or twenty.”
Yasnaya then used to be crowded and gay. Nearly all the children were
at home. All the young people played tennis and enjoyed themselves.
Occasionally L. N. would also play tennis. In the evening all used to
go out for long walks in the woods. L. N. always loved to find short
cuts, and would take us all into wonderful places in the forests. It
must be admitted that the ‘short-cuts’ nearly always made the walks
longer.
Once L. N. and myself were left far behind the others. L. N. said: “Let
us catch them up!” And for half a mile or three-quarters I, twenty-one
years old, and he, sixty-eight, ran neck and neck. On another occasion
his physical vigour struck me even more. Mikhail Lvovich was doing a
very difficult gymnastic exercise which he could not bring off. L. N.
looked and looked, could not stand it any longer, and said: “Let me
try,” and to the surprise of all present he at once did the exercise
better than his son.
When I was leaving Yasnaya and my carriage was waiting for me, L. N.
took my arm, led me aside, and said:
“I have been meaning all this time to tell you, and now as you are
going I shall tell you: however great a gift for music you may have,
and however much time and power you may spend on it, do remember that,
above all, the most important of all is to be a man. It is always
necessary to remember that art is not everything.... In your relations
with people it is necessary to try to give them as much as possible and
to take from them as little as possible. Forgive me for saying this,
but I did not want to say good-bye to you without having told you what
I think.”
Another of L. N.’s sayings at this time was: “The ego is the temporary
thing that limits our immortal essence. Belief in personal immortality
always seems to me a misunderstanding.”
“Materialism is the most mystical of all doctrines: it makes a belief
in some mythical matter, which creates everything out of itself, the
foundation of everything. It is sillier than a belief in the Trinity!”
1897
_Moscow, January 6th._ To-day I spent the evening at the Tolstois’. L.
N. was talkative. The conversation was on various topics, beginning
with the peasants and ending with the latest “decadent” movement in art.
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.
“Art is the expression of feeling, and the higher it is the greater
the public which it can draw to itself. Therefore the highest art must
reflect those states of mind which are religious in the best sense
of the word, as they are the most universal and typical of all human
beings.
“The majority of so-called works of art consist in a more or less
skilful combination of four elements: (1) borrowing--for instance,
the working out of some legend in a poem, of a song in music, etc.
Or unconscious borrowing--that is, an imitation now of one thing,
now of another, not intended by the author. (2) Embellishments:
pretty metaphors which cover up insignificant ideas, flourishes in
music, ornament in architecture, etc. (3) Effects: violent colours in
painting, accumulated dissonances, sharp crescendos in music, and so
on. Finally, (4) the interest--that is, the desire to surprise by the
novelty of the method, by the new combination of colours, etc. Modern
works of art are usually distinguished by these four qualities.
“The following are the chief obstacles which hinder even
very remarkable men from creating true works of art: first,
professionalism--that is, a man ceases to be a man, but becomes a poet,
a painter, and does nothing but write books, compose music, or paint
pictures; wastes his gift on trifles and loses the power of judging
his work critically. The second, also a very serious obstacle, is the
school. You can’t teach art, as you cannot teach a man to be a saint.
True art is always original and new, and has no need of preconceived
models. The third obstacle, finally, is criticism, which, as some one
has justly said, is made up of fools’ ideas about wise men.
“I know that my article will be received by most people as a series of
paradoxes, but I am convinced that I am right.”