the eternal contradictions of reality give birth to doubt in the heart; this feeling is indeed agonizing, but it lasts not long.… It disappears, but it carries away with it our best and poetic prejudices of the spirit." [Are they best, if they are prejudices? Is illusion truly poetic?—I. P.] Not, therefore, in vain has Goethe the Great given the name the Spirit of Denial to man's eternal enemy. And Pushkin wished to typify the Spirit of Denial.
REGRET. (Page 69.)
See Introduction, §§ 16, 25.
THE BIRDLET. (Page 97.)
This piece is not found among Pushkin's Lyrical Poems. It is a song taken from a longer Narrative Poem, called "The Gypsies."
LOVE. (Page 113.)
This poem is Pushkin all over. In four lines he has given a whole drama with a world of pathos and tenderness in it. These four lines give more instruction in the art of story-telling than volumes on the "Art of Fiction." A magazine writer, who of the same incidents would have woven out some twenty pages (of which no fewer than nineteen and three-quarters would have been writ for the approval of check-book critic, rather than of the art critic), would have really told less than Pushkin has here told,—so true is the preacher's criticism on his own sermon: "Madame, if it had been shorter by half, it would have been twice as long!"
JEALOUSY. (Page 114.)
Of this piece I have already spoken in the Preface, § 7.
