Page:Chernyshevsky.whatistobedone.djvu/386

366 "Only he loves whose mind grows brighter and hands grow stronger from love."

And the following conversations are very frequent:—

"My dear, I am reading Boccaccio now" ("What immorality!" we remark with the sapient reader—"a woman reading Boccaccio; only he and I have a right to read it." But I, apart from him, also make this remark, "A woman will hear more veiled nastiness from the sapient reader in five minutes than she will find in all Boccaccio, and she will not hear from him a single fresh, bright, pure thought, while Boccaccio has hosts of them!"); "you are right, my dear; he has great talent. Some of his stories I think can be put in the same rank with the best of Shakespeare's dramas, from their depth and keenness of psychological analysis."

"But how do you like the comical stories, in which he is so unceremonious?"

"Some of them are amusing, but for the most part they are dull, like any other coarse farce."

"But that may be forgiven him, for he lived five hundred years before us; what seems to us too vile, too cheap, was not then considered out of the way."

"Just as all our habits and all our style will seem dirty to those who will live much less than five hundred years after us—but this is not interesting. I was speaking about those splendid stories of his in which he seriously pictures a passionate, lofty love. In those more than in others his talent lies; but this is what I wanted to say, Sasha: he draws very admirable and powerful pictures of love, but I should judge that he did not understand that tenderness of love which we see nowadays. Love was not felt at that time so keenly, though they say that was the period when love was most fully enjoyed. No, how could it be? They did not enjoy it half so deeply as we do. Their feelings were too superficial; their raptures were too feeble and too transitory."

"The strength of sensation is proportionate to the depth of the organism from which it takes its rise. If it is stirred exclusively by an outward object, by an outward motive, then it is transitory, and develops only one special side of its life. He who drinks only because he is given a glass understands only very little the taste of wine; it affords him very little pleasure. Enjoyment is vastly stronger when its root is in the imagination; but this is still