...'--(January, 1900.)
Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men
before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be
crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully
conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.
'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between
thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of
alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a
great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull
time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the
artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack
"something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our
muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic:
they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.
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