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INTRODUCTION At times enchanted with the beautiful aloofness of science, literature may become infatuated with a dogma, and then we see Emile Zola viewing man only as a "belly," constructed "with charming coarseness," and we also see how the cold despair of Du Bois Reymond infects so great an artist as Gustave Flaubert.

It is obvious that literature cannot be completely free from what Turgeniev called "the pressure of time"; it is natural, for "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." And it may be that the evil of the day poisons more often than it should the sacred spirit of beauty, and our search for its "inspirations and prayers"; these inspirations and prayers are poisoned by the venomous dust of the day. But "the beautiful is the rare," as Edmond Goncourt justly said, and we most certainly often consider lacking in beauty and insignificant habitual things—those habitual things which, as they recede into the past, acquire for our descendants all the marks and qualities of true, unfading beauty. Does not the austere life of ancient Greece appear to us beautiful? Does not the bloody, stormy and creative epoch of the Renaissance with all its "habitual" cruelty enrapture us? It is more than probable that the great days of the social catastrophe we are going through now will arouse the ecstasy, awe and creativeness of the generations that will come after us.

Nor let us forget that though Balzac's "Poor Relations," Gogol's "Dead Souls," "The Pickwick Papers," are essentially books that describe conditions of actual life, there is hidden in them a great and imperishable lesson which the best university cannot provide, and which an average man will not have learnt so exactly or so clearly after fifty years of hard-working life.

The habitual is not always banal, for it is habitual for man to be consumed in the hell fire of his vocation, and this self-consumption is always beautiful and necessary, as it is instructive for those who timidly smoulder all their life long, without