"Romanticism comes from the fear of looking straight into the eyes
of truth," he said yesterday with regard to Balmont's poems. Suler
disagreed with him and, lisping with excitement, read very feelingly
some more poems.
"These, Liovushka, are not poems; they are charlatanism, rubbish, as
people said in the Middle Ages, a nonsensical stringing together of
words. Poetry is art-less; when Fet wrote:
'I know not myself what I will sing,
But only my song is ripening,'
he expressed a genuine, real, people's sense of poetry. The peasant,
too, doesn't know that he's a poet--oh, oi, ah, and aye--and there
comes off a real song, straight from the soul, like a bird's. These new
poets of yours are inventing. There are certain silly French things
called _articles de Paris_--well, that's what your stringers of verses
produce. Nekrassov's miserable verses, too, are invented from beginning
to end."
"And Béranger?" Suler asked.
"Béranger--that's quite different. What's there in common between the
French and us? They are sensualists; the life of the spirit is not as
important to them as the flesh. To a Frenchman woman is everything.
They are a worn-out, emasculated people. Doctors say that all
consumptives are sensualists."
Suler began to argue with his peculiar directness, pouring out a random
flood of words. Leo Nicolayevitch looked at him and said with a broad
smile:
"You are peevish to-day, like a girl who has reached the age when she
should marry but has no lover."