The article was well-meant but full of banalities and
errors; one could see that its author was not sufficiently familiar with art and that he did not understand anything about the talent of the great artist. "Have you read it?" Lirat shouted, "have you
read it, eh, tell me? . . . What idiots these critics are!
. . . If they keep on talking about me, they will finally
force me to paint in a cave, understand? . . . What do they take me for anyway a vulgarizer? . . . And then what business is it of this fellow here whether I make paintings, boots or slippers? . . . That's my private affair!"
Nevertheless he had put it away in a drawer as a thing of great value, and several times I surprised him reading it. It was very well for him to say with supreme detachment, when we were inveighing against the stupidity of the public: "Well, what would you want them to do? . . . Do you expect the people to start a revolution because I paint my canvases plainly?" But in reality this contempt for notoriety, this apparent resignation concealed deep but secret sentiment. Deep in his very sensitive and very generous soul there accumulated profound aversions, which were vented with terrible and malignant fervor on the whole world. If, on the one hand, his talent had gained in strength and ruggedness on account of this, his character, on the other hand, had lost something of its inherent nobility, and his critical spirit had been deprived of some of its penetrating quality and brilliance.
He ended by giving himself over entirely to decrying everybody and everything, the excess of which threatened to render him odious; at times it bore evidence of nothing but a childishness which made him ridiculous. Great souls nearly always have petty weaknesses—that is a mysterious law of nature, and
