"Friedrich of Prussia said very truly: 'Everyone must save himself in his own way.' He also said: 'Argue as much as you like, but obey.' But when dying he confessed: 'I have grown weary of ruling slaves.' So-called great men are always terribly contradictory: that is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself. Yes, Friedrich was a strange man: among the Germans he won the reputation of being the best king, yet he could not bear them; he disliked even Goethe and Wieland."
"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."
"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."
The illness dried him up still more, burnt something out of him. Inwardly he seemed to become lighter, more transparent, more resigned. His eyes are still keener, his glance piercing. He listens attentively as though recalling something which he has forgotten or as though waiting for something new and unknown. In Yassnaya Polyana he seemed to me a man who knew everything and had nothing more to learn--a man who had settled every question.