"And it is exactly this that brings him nearer to me than Goethe and Shakespeare. He is filled with a sacred sense of purpose in his work. He had not the cold ambition of the artist to be merely faithful to his model. He was full of longing that we should be carried away with him. Of the three requirements I make of the great artist--technical perfection, worthiness of subject, and self-identification with the matter--the last is the most important. One may be a great writer even when technical perfection, complete mastery of the tricks of the trade, is lacking, as, for instance, in the case of Dostoyevski. But unless a man writes with his heart's blood he cannot be a great artist." "I believe the heart's-blood doctrine would rule out all cheerful _genre_, and that meets perhaps best of all the fundamental purpose of art." "You say that because you yourself see in art only a means of enjoyment, only play." I could not have denied that this is really my conception, and should, therewith, have hit upon the fundamental opposition between our Western conception of life, as expressed by Goethe, and the exclusively religio-moral one of Tolstoï. I could not, however, compel myself to fill with a fruitless argument the few hours I had to spend with the honored man. I should have been as little able to convince the apostle of seventy-five, whose ascetic philosophy is the product of definite conditions of civilization, as he to convince me, the west-German, whose light-heartedness and confident belief in culture had ripened in the sunshine of the Rhine bank. I therefore evaded the point, and said: "I have hitherto not taken your rigorous demands upon art as well as upon life quite literally, count. I thought to myself that when one pulls up a horse suddenly he does not wish it to turn around, but only to stop. I supposed that you wished merely to counteract other powerful impulses." "No," said the count, after a moment's reflection. "That is not so. I believe in the absolute correctness of my demands. I myself, however, was too weakly or too badly trained to submit to them altogether. I cannot, for instance, keep from enjoying Chopin, although I condemn his music as exclusive art, which addresses itself to the understanding and feelings only of the aristocratically cultivated few." "It seems to me an unattainable ideal that all men should share in enjoyment of art; and the requirement that the artist shall refrain from all work that could be enjoyed only by a limited number of especially cultivated men is impossible and even harmful. It would deprive us of the finest works we possess." "If the requirement is justified in and of itself, it is quite immaterial what sacrifices must be made to it. Nothing is to be considered in comparison with truth."