a fragment from the diary of a dead artist

i

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ii

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iii

“it is enough,” i said to myself, while my feet, treading unwillingly the steep slope of the mountain, bore me downward toward the quiet river; “it is enough,” i repeated, as i inhaled the resinous scent of the pine grove, to which the chill of approaching evening had imparted a peculiar potency and pungency; “it is enough,” i said once more, as i seated myself on a mossy hillock directly on the brink of the river and gazed at its dark, unhurried waves, above which a thick growth of reeds lifted their pale-green stalks.... “it is enough!—have done with dreaming, with striving: ’tis high time to pull thyself together;{304} ’tis high time to clutch thy head with both hands and bid thy heart be still. give over pampering thyself with the sweet indulgence of indefinite but captivating sensations; give over running after every new form of beauty; give over seizing every tremor of its delicate and powerful pinions.—everything is known, everything has been felt over and over again many times already.... i am weary.—what care i that at this very moment the dawn is suffusing the sky ever more and more broadly, like some inflamed, all-conquering passion! what care i that two paces from me, amid the tranquillity and the tenderness and the gleam of evening, in the dewy depths of a motionless bush, a nightingale has suddenly burst forth in such magical notes as though there had never been any nightingales in the world before it, and as though it were the first to chant the first song of the first love! all that has been, has been, i repeat; it has been recapitulated a thousand times—and when one remembers that all this will so continue for a whole eternity—as though to order, by law—one even grows vexed! yes ... vexed!”

iv

eh, how i have suffered! formerly such thoughts never entered my head—formerly, in those happy days when i myself was wont to{305} flame like the glow of dawn, and to sing like the nightingale.—i must confess that everything has grown obscure round about me, all life has withered. the light which gives to its colours both significance and power—that light which emanates from the heart of man—has become extinct within me.... no, it has not yet become extinct—but it is barely smouldering, without radiance and without warmth. i remember how one day, late at night, in moscow, i stepped up to the grated window of an ancient church and leaned against the uneven glass. it was dark under the low arches; a forgotten shrine-lamp flickered with a red flame in front of an ancient holy picture, and only the lips of the holy face were visible, stern and suffering: mournful gloom closed in around and seemed to be preparing to crush with its dull weight the faint ray of unnecessary light.... and in my heart reign now the same sort of light and the same sort of gloom.

v

and this i write to thee—to thee, my only and unforgettable friend; to thee, my dear companion,[31] whom i have left forever, but whom i shall never cease to love until my life ends.... alas! thou knowest what it was that separated us. but {306}i will not refer to that now. i have left thee ... but even here, in this remote nook, at this distance, in this exile, i am all permeated with thee, i am in thy power as of yore, as of yore i feel the sweet pressure of thy hands upon my bowed head!—rising up for the last time, from the mute grave in which i now am lying, i run a mild, much-moved glance over all my past, over all our past.... there is no hope and no return, but neither is there any bitterness in me, or regret; and clearer than the heavenly azure, purer than the first snows on the mountain heights, are my beautiful memories.... they do not press upon me in throngs: they pass by in procession, like those muffled figures of the athenian god-born ones, which—dost thou remember?—we admired so greatly on the ancient bas-reliefs of the vatican....

vi

i have just alluded to the light which emanates from the human heart and illumines everything which surrounds it.... i want to talk with thee about that time when that gracious light burned in my heart.—listen ... but i imagine that thou art sitting in front of me, and gazing at me with thine affectionate but almost severely-attentive eyes. o eyes never to be forgotten! on whom, on what are they now fixed? who is receiving into his soul thy glance—that glance{307} which seems to flow from unfathomable depths, like those mysterious springs—like you both bright and dark—which well up at the very bottom of narrow valleys, beneath overhanging cliffs?... listen.

vii

it was at the end of march, just before the feast of the annunciation, shortly after i saw thee for the first time—and before i as yet suspected what thou wert destined to become to me, although i already bore thee, silently and secretly in my heart.—i was obliged to cross one of the largest rivers in russia. the ice had not yet begun to move in it, but it seemed to have swollen up and turned dark; three days previously a thaw had set in. the snow was melting round about diligently but quietly; everywhere water was oozing out; in the light air a soundless breeze was roving. the same even, milky hue enveloped earth and sky: it was not a mist, but it was not light; not a single object stood out from the general opacity; everything seemed both near and indistinct. leaving my kibítka far behind, i walked briskly over the river-ice, and with the exception of the beat of my own footsteps, i could hear nothing. i walked on, enveloped on all sides by the first stupor and breath of early spring ... and little by little augmenting with every step, with every{308} movement in advance, there gradually rose up and grew within me a certain joyous incomprehensible agitation.... it drew me on, it hastened my pace—and so powerful were its transports, that i came to a standstill at last and looked about me in surprise and questioningly, as though desirous of detecting the outward cause of my ecstatic condition.... all was still, white, sunny; but i raised my eyes: high above flocks of migratory birds were flying past.... “spring! hail, spring!”—i shouted in a loud voice. “hail, life and love and happiness!”—and at that same instant, with sweetly-shattering force, similar to the flower of a cactus, there suddenly flared up within me thy image—flared up and stood there, enchantingly clear and beautiful—and i understood that i loved thee, thee alone, that i was all filled with thee....

viii

i think of thee ... and many other memories, other pictures rise up before me,—and thou art everywhere, on all the paths of my life i encounter thee.—now there presents itself to me an old russian garden on the slope of a hill, illuminated by the last rays of the summer sun. from behind silvery poplars peeps forth the wooden roof of the manor-house, with a slender wreath of crimson smoke hanging above the white{309} chimney, and in the fence a wicket-gate stands open a crack, as though some one had pulled it to with undecided hand. and i stand and wait, and gaze at that gate and at the sand on the garden paths; i wonder and i am moved: everything i see seems to me remarkable and new, everything is enveloped with an atmosphere of a sort of bright, caressing mystery, and already i think i hear the swift rustle of footsteps; and i stand, all alert and light, like a bird which has just folded its wings and is poised ready to soar aloft again—and my heart flames and quivers in joyous dread before the imminent happiness which is flitting on in front....

ix

then i behold an ancient cathedral in a distant, beautiful land. the kneeling people are crowded close in rows; a prayerful chill, something solemn and sad breathes forth from the lofty, bare vault, from the huge pillars which branch upward.—thou art standing by my side, speechless and unsympathetic, exactly as though thou wert a stranger to me; every fold of thy dark gown hangs motionless, as though sculptured; motionless lie the mottled reflections of the coloured windows at thy feet on the well-worn flagstones.—and now, vigorously agitating the air dim with incense, inwardly agitating us, in a heavy{310} surge the tones of the organ roll out; and thou hast turned pale and drawn thyself up; thy gaze has touched me, has slipped on higher and is raised heavenward;—but it seems to me that only a deathless soul can look like that and with such eyes....

x

now another picture presents itself to me.—’tis not an ancient temple which crushes us with its stern magnificence: the low walls of a cosey little room separate us from the whole world.—what am i saying? we are alone—alone in all the world; except us two there is no living thing; beyond those friendly walls lie darkness and death and emptiness. that is not the wind howling, that is not the rain streaming in floods; it is chaos wailing and groaning; it is its blind eyes weeping. but with us all is quiet and bright, and warm and gracious; something diverting, something childishly innocent is fluttering about like a butterfly, is it not? we nestle up to each other, we lean our heads together and both read a good book; i feel the slender vein in thy delicate temple beating; i hear how thou art living, thou hearest how i am living, thy smile is born upon my face before it comes on thine; thou silently repliest to my silent question; thy thoughts, my thoughts, are like the two wings of one and the{311} same bird drowned in the azure.... the last partitions have fallen—and our love has become so calm, so profound, every breach has vanished so completely, leaving no trace behind it, that we do not even wish to exchange a word, a glance.... we only wish to breathe, to breathe together, to live together, to be together, ... and not even to be conscious of the fact that we are together....

xi

or, in conclusion, there presents itself to me a clear september morning when thou and i were walking together through the deserted garden, as yet not wholly out of bloom, of an abandoned palace, on the bank of a great non-russian river, beneath the soft radiance of a cloudless sky. oh, how shall i describe those sensations?—that endlessly-flowing river, that absence of people, and tranquillity, and joy, and a certain intoxicating sadness, and the vibration of happiness, the unfamiliar, monotonous town, the autumnal croaking of the daws in the tall, bright trees—and those affectionate speeches and smiles and glances long and soft, which pierce to the very bottom, and beauty,—the beauty in ourselves, round about, everywhere;—it is beyond words. oh, bench on which we sat in silence, with heads drooping low with happiness—i shall never for{312}get thee to my dying hour!—how charming were those rare passers-by with their gentle greeting and kind faces, and the large, quiet boats which floated past (on one of them—dost thou remember?—stood a horse gazing pensively at the water gliding by under its feet), the childish babble of the little waves inshore and the very barking of distant dogs over the expanse of the river, the very shouts of the corpulent under-officer at the red-cheeked recruits drilling there on one side, with their projecting elbows and their legs thrust forward like the legs of cranes!... we both felt that there never had been and never would be anything better in the world for us than those moments—than all the rest.... but what comparisons are these! enough ... enough.... alas! yes: it is enough.

xii

for the last time i have surrendered myself to these memories, and i am parting from them irrevocably—as a miser, after gloating for the last time upon his hoard, his gold, his bright treasure, buries it in the damp earth; as the wick of an exhausted lamp, after flashing up in one last brilliant flame, becomes covered with grey ashes. the little wild animal has peered forth for the last time from his lair at the velvety grass, at the fair little sun, at the blue, gracious waters,—and{313} has retreated to the deepest level, and curled himself up in a ball, and fallen asleep. will he have visions, if only in his sleep, of the fair little sun, and the grass, and the blue, gracious waters?

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xiii

sternly and ruthlessly does fate lead each one of us—and only in the early days do we, occupied with all sorts of accidents, nonsense, ourselves, fail to feel her harsh hand.—so long as we are able to deceive ourselves and are not ashamed to lie, it is possible to live and to hope without shame. the truth—not the full truth (there can be no question of that), but even that tiny fraction which is accessible to us—immediately closes our mouths, binds our hands, and reduces “to negation.”—the only thing that is then left for a man, in order to keep erect on his feet and not crumble to dust, not to become bemired in the ooze of self-forgetfulness, is self-scorn; is to turn calmly away from everything and say: “it is enough!”—and folding his useless arms on his empty breast to preserve the last, the sole merit which is accessible to him, the merit of recognising his own insignificance; the merit to which pascal alludes, when, calling man a think{314}ing reed, he says that if the entire universe were to crush him, he, that reed, would still be higher than the universe because he would know that it is crushing him—while it would not know that. a feeble merit! sad consolation! try as thou mayest to permeate thyself with it, to believe in it,—oh, thou my poor brother, whosoever thou mayest be!—thou canst not refute those ominous words of the poet:

life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

and then is heard no more: it is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing....[32]

i have cited the verses from “macbeth,” and those witches, phantoms, visions have recurred to my mind.... alas! it is not visions, not fantastic, subterranean powers that are terrible; the creations of hoffmann are not dreadful, under whatsoever form they may present themselves.... the terrible thing is that there is nothing terrible, that the very substance of life itself is petty, uninteresting—and insipid to beggary. having once become permeated with this consciousness, having once tasted of this wormwood, no honey will ever seem sweet—and even that loftiest, sweetest happiness, the happiness of love, of complete friendship, of irrevocable devotion{315}—even it loses all its charm; all its worth is annihilated by its own pettiness, its brevity. well, yes: a man has loved, he has burned, he has faltered words about eternal bliss, about immortal enjoyments—and behold: it is long, long since the last trace vanished of that worm which has eaten out the last remnants of his withered tongue. thus late in autumn, on a frosty day, when everything is lifeless and dumb in the last blades of grass, on the verge of the denuded forest, the sun has but to emerge for an instant from the fog, to gaze intently at the chilled earth, and immediately, from all sides, gnats rise up; they frolic in the warmth of his rays, they bustle and jostle upward, downward, they circle round one another.... the sun hides himself, and the gnats fall to the earth in a soft rain—and there is an end to their momentary life.

xiv

“but are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation? nationality, right, liberty, humanity, art?” yes; those words do exist, and many people live by them and for them. but nevertheless, i have an idea that if shakspeare were to be born again he would find no occasion to disclaim his “hamlet,” his “lear.” his penetrating glance would not descry anything new in{316} human existence: the same motley and, in reality, incoherent picture would still unfold itself before him in its disquieting monotony. the same frivolity, the same cruelty, the same pressing demand for blood, gold, filth, the same stale pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name of ... well, in the name of the same nonsense which was ridiculed by aristophanes three thousand years ago, the same coarse lures to which the many-headed beast still yields as readily as ever—in a word, the same anxious skipping of the squirrel in the same old wheel, which has not even been renewed.... shakspeare would again make lear repeat his harsh: “there are no guilty ones”—which, in other words, signifies: “there are no just”—and he also would say: “it is enough!” and he also would turn away.—one thing only: perhaps, in contrast to the gloomy, tragic tyrant richard, the ironical genius of the great poet would like to draw another, more up-to-date tyrant, who is almost ready to believe in his own virtue and rests calmly at night or complains of the over-dainty dinner at the same time that his half-stifled victims are endeavouring to comfort themselves by at least imagining him as richard iii. surrounded by the ghosts of the people he has murdered....

but to what purpose?

why demonstrate—and that by picking and weighing one’s words, by rounding and polishing{317} one’s speech—why demonstrate to gnats that they really are gnats?

xv

but art?... beauty?... yes, those are mighty words; they are, probably, mightier than those which i have mentioned above. the venus of melos, for example, is more indubitable than the roman law, or than the principles of 1789. men may retort—and how many times have i heard these retorts!—that beauty itself is also a matter of convention, that to the chinese it presents itself in a totally different manner from what it does to the european.... but it is not the conventionality of art which disconcerts me; its perishableness, and again its perishableness,—its decay and dust—that is what deprives me of courage and of faith. art, at any given moment, is, i grant, more powerful than nature itself, because in it there is neither symphony of beethoven nor picture of ruysdael nor poem of goethe—and only dull-witted pedants or conscienceless babblers can still talk of art as a copy of nature. but in the long run nature is irresistible; she cannot be hurried, and sooner or later she will assert her rights. unconsciously and infallibly obedient to law, she does not know art, as she does not know liberty, as she does not know good; moving onward from eternity, trans{318}mitted from eternity, she tolerates nothing immortal, nothing unchangeable.... man is her child; but the human, the artificial is inimical to her, precisely because she strives to be unchangeable and immortal. man is the child of nature; but she is the universal mother, and she has no preferences: everything which exists in her bosom has arisen only for the benefit of another and must, in due time, make way for that other—she creates by destroying, and it is a matter of perfect indifference to her what she creates, what she destroys, if only life be not extirpated, if only death do not lose its rights.... and therefore she as calmly covers with mould the divine visage of phidias’s jupiter as she does a plain pebble, and delivers over to be devoured by the contemned moth the most precious lines of sophocles. men, it is true, zealously aid her in her work of extermination; but is not the same elementary force,—is not the force of nature shown in the finger of the barbarian who senselessly shattered the radiant brow of apollo, in the beast-like howls with which he hurled the picture of apelles into the fire? how are we poor men, poor artists, to come to an agreement with this deaf and dumb force, blind from its birth, which does not even triumph in its victories, but marches, ever marches on ahead, devouring all things? how are we to stand up against those heavy, coarse, interminably and incessantly onrolling waves, how believe,{319} in short, in the significance and worth of those perishable images which we, in the darkness, on the verge of the abyss, mould from the dust and for a mere instant?

xvi

all this is so ... but only the transitory is beautiful, shakspeare has said; and nature herself, in the unceasing play of her rising and vanishing forms, does not shun beauty. is it not she who sedulously adorns the most momentary of her offspring—the petals of the flowers, the wings of the butterfly—with such charming colours? is it not she who imparts to them such exquisite outlines? it is not necessary for beauty to live forever in order to be immortal—one moment is sufficient for it. that is so; that is just, i grant you—but only in cases where there is no personality, where man is not, liberty is not: the faded wing of the butterfly comes back again, and a thousand years later, with the selfsame wing of the selfsame butterfly, necessity sternly and regularly and impartially fulfils its round ... but man does not repeat himself like the butterfly, and the work of his hands, his art, his free creation once destroyed, is annihilated forever.... to him alone is it given to “create” ... but it is strange and terrible to articulate: “we {320}are creators ... for an hour,”—as there once was, they say, a caliph for an hour.—therein lies our supremacy—and our curse: each one of these “creators” in himself—precisely he, not any one else, precisely that ego—seems to have been created with deliberate intent, on a plan previously designed; each one more or less dimly understands his significance, feels that he is akin to something higher, something eternal—and he lives, he is bound to live in the moment and for the moment.[33] sit in the mud, my dear fellow, and strive toward heaven!—the greatest among us are precisely those who are the most profoundly conscious of all of that fundamental contradiction; but in that case the question arises,—are the words “greatest, great” appropriate?

xvii

but what shall be said of those to whom, despite a thorough desire to do so, one cannot apply those appellations even in the sense which is attributed to them by the feeble human tongue?—what shall be said of the ordinary, commonplace, second-rate, third-rate toilers—whoever they may be—statesmen, learned men, artists—especially ar{321}tists? how force them to shake off their dumb indolence, their dejected perplexity, how draw them once more to the field of battle, if once the thought as to the vanity of everything human, of every activity which sets for itself a higher aim than the winning of daily bread, has once crept into their heads? by what wreaths are they lured on—they, for whom laurels and thorns have become equally insignificant? why should they again subject themselves to the laughter of “the cold throng” or to “the condemnation of the dunce,”—of the old dunce who cannot forgive them for having turned away from the former idols; of the young dunce who demands that they shall immediately go down on their knees in his company, that they should lie prone before new, just-discovered idols? why shall they betake themselves again to that rag-fair of phantoms, to that market-place where both the seller and the buyer cheat each other equally, where everything is so noisy, so loud—and yet so poor and worthless? why “with exhaustion in their bones” shall they interweave themselves again with that world where the nations, like peasant urchins on a festival day, flounder about in the mud for the sake of a handful of empty nuts, or admire with gaping mouths the wretched woodcuts, decorated with tinsel gold,—with that world where they had no right to life while they lived in it, and, deafening themselves with their own shouts, each one{322} hastens with convulsive speed to a goal which he neither knows nor understands? no ... no.... it is enough ... enough ... enough!

xviii

... the rest is silence. ...