University of Virginia Library

XI

"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," he said, "are not

poems, they are charlatanism, rubbish, as people said in the middle ages, a nonsensical stringing together of words. Poetry is artless; when Fet wrote

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 those silly French things called articles de Paris — well, that's what your stringers of verses produce. Nekassov'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 Nikolaevich 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."