In the above I was grossly unfair to Maupassant. “La Maison Tellier” is enough to prove it.
Russian writers have been so much the fashion that sober-minded people have greatly exaggerated the merit of certain writers merely because they write in Russian, so that Kuprin, for instance, Korolenko and Sologub have received an attention which they hardly deserve. Sologub seems worthless to me, but his combination of sensuality and mysticism is evidently one that was bound to attract readers of a certain class. On the other hand I can’t look on Artzibachev with the contempt some affect. Sanine, to my mind, is a book of some value; it has the merit, rare in Russian fiction, of sunshine. The characters do not pass their lives in the freezing drizzle which we are accustomed to: the sky is blue and the pleasant breezes of summer rustle through the birches.
What must surprise anyone who enters upon the study of Russian literature is its extraordinary poverty. The most enthusiastic critics claim no more than an historical interest for the works written before the nineteenth century, and Russian literature begins with Pushkin; then you have Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky; then Chekov; and that is all. Students mention a number of names, but they do not attach any importance to them, and the stranger has only to read works here and there of other writers to realise that he will lose little by ignoring them. I have tried to imagine what English literature would be if it began with Byron and Shelley (it would scarcely be unfair to put Tom Moore in Shelley’s place) and Walter Scott; proceeded with Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot; and finished with George Meredith. The first effect would be to give a far greater importance to these writers.
Because the Russians have so small a literature they know it with great thoroughness. Everyone who reads at all has read everything and read it so often that it is as familiar to him as to us the authorised version of the Bible. And because literature in Russia consists for the most part of novels, fiction has a much higher place in the opinion of the cultivated man than in other countries.
The Revisor has an extraordinary reputation in Russia. In itself it makes up the whole of Russian classical drama. It is read by every schoolboy as Hamlet is read by us, and acted on high days and holidays as Le Cid is acted at the Comédie Française. For the Russians this one trivial little play is like Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Congreve and Wycherley, Goldsmith and the School for Scandal. The characters have become labels to attach to people and a hundred different lines have grown into proverbs. Yet it is an extremely insignificant farce, neither better nor worse than Kotzebue’s Kleinstädter, which possibly suggested it. It is about on a level with She Stoops to Conquer. The intrigue is unimportant and the persons of the play are drawn from the standpoint of caricature rather than character. Whatever your goodwill you cannot suspend your disbelief in them. Gogol, however, had the good sense not to distort his picture by the introduction of any person of intelligence or decency. There is a certain artistic completeness in his collection of rogues and fools which would have been ruined by the introduction of an honest man or a man of parts. Congreve had the same wisdom and took care not to bring a virtuous person into the company of his rips. It is not very strange that Gogol and his contemporaries should have attached importance to this merry little farce, but it is surely surprising that critics acquainted with the literature of Western Europe should have done the same. For the most part the interpreters of Russia to the world have known little of other countries; they have praised various traits as typically Russian because they were not English, and have not known that, being due to physical conditions, they could be found in all countries where the physical conditions were similar. To know a foreign country at all you must not only have lived in it and in your own, but also lived in at least one other. Arnold Bennett has never ceased to believe in a peculiar distinction of the French that they make their breakfast off coffee and rolls.
My native gifts are not remarkable, but I have a certain force of character which has enabled me in a measure to supplement my deficiencies. I have common-sense. Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. For many years I have been described as a cynic: I told the truth. I wish no one to take me for other than I am, and on the other hand I see no need to accept others’ pretences.
The student of a country other than his own can hope to know comparatively few of its inhabitants, nor with the difference of language and of culture will he even after many years become intimate with them. Even with the English and American, between whom the differences of language are very small, there can be no real understanding. Probably people are best able to know one another when their early years and their education have been similar. It is the impressions of a man’s first twenty years which form him. Between the English and the Russians the abyss is wide and deep. The difficulty of the language must always keep them apart. Even if you know it well you will not know it well enough for people to forget that you are an alien, and they will never be quite the same with you as when they are with one another, It is by reading that the foreigner will gain most insight into a strange people, and here writers of the second class will be of more service to him than those of the first. Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy. Chekov will tell you more about the Russians than Dostoievsky. By comparing then the people you have known with the people you have read of an impression may be formed which if not coincident with the truth is at all events self-contained, reasonable and coherent.
I have my own views about learning a language. I think it waste of time to acquire a greater knowledge than suffices me to read fluently and talk enough for the ordinary affairs of life. The labour required to acquire a real familiarity with a foreign tongue is profitless.
God has of late years been very much the fashion among men of letters, and they have used the Almighty with picturesque effect to balance a phrase or give emotion to a paragraph. And now G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells have taken him up, though only just in time, and they have hurried along to set themselves at the head of the movement. It must be hard work to be a leader of thought when you are no longer so active as you were, and it is not astonishing if they both seem a little out of breath.
I wish some thoughtful person would write an essay on the reason for which even before the war there was in English letters a revival of religious belief. The curious thing about it was that it left the masses untouched and the churches remained empty; nor had it any great effect on the more intelligent and highly educated sections of the population. Men of law and science, merchants and business men were on the whole sceptical; the movement was purely literary. It certainly had something to do with a similar movement in France, where its origin was largely political and where the ground was prepared for it by the defeats of 1870: the generation that grew up after this was of diminished vitality, and so naturally inclined to faith; the Third Republic was anti-Catholic, and all who were malcontent with it ranged themselves on the side of Catholicism; to many religion became identified with patriotism and the greatness of France; finally science had not fulfilled the promises which the unwise expected, and, dissatisfied at not receiving answers to questions that science never pretended to answer, many threw themselves into the arms of the Church.
Every literary movement in France has found imitators in England, and there have always been men of letters in our country who have acquired a reputation for originality by the simple process of reading attentively the French reviews. In England likewise many were dissatisfied with science. The universities had remained religious. They instilled into the young the notion that it was good form to believe in God. It is not hard to see why it should be chiefly among men of letters that this rebirth of religion showed itself: for one thing men with the religious instinct, who in former days would have taken orders, now that the Church is a profession little in favour, gave all or part of their time to writing; and for another, wri
ters seek constantly after change, they are a volatile, inconstant race, and the upholding of a moribund belief not only gave them new themes, picturesque and telling, but appealed to their passion for romance. And the desire for romance, as we know, was a steadily growing passion among us during the last twenty years. We all sought Ruritania in the Bayswater Road. Then came the war, and grief, fear and perplexity brought many to religion. Many consoled themselves for the loss of persons they did not care very much about by their faith in an all-powerful, all-merciful and all-knowing Creator. Once, at sea, I thought I was in imminent danger of death, and words of appeal rose quite involuntarily to my lips, remains of the forgotten faith of my childhood, and it required a certain effort of will to suppress them and look forward to what might come with an equal mind. I was at that moment within an ace of believing in God, and it required an outraged sense of the ridiculous to save me from surrender to my fear. I tried in Of Human Bondage to set down why I had lost the very ardent faith of my childhood, but it is difficult to describe such things accurately and I have never been satisfied with the result. Though the turn of my mind is concrete and my intelligence moves inactively amongst abstractions, I have a passion for metaphysics and I find a keen delight in the acrobatics of philosophers on the tight-rope of the incomprehensible. I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief in what is usually meant by the word religion. I have little patience with the writers who try to reconcile in one conception the Absolute of the metaphysician with the God of the Christian. But if I had had any doubts, the war would have effectually silenced them.
No one can make excursions into Russian life or Russian fiction without noticing how great a place is taken by an acute sense of sin. Not only is the Russian constantly telling you that he is a sinner, but apparently he feels it, and he suffers from very lively pangs of remorse. It is a curious trait and I have tried to account for it. Of course we say that we are miserable sinners in church, but we do not believe it; we have the good sense to know that we are nothing of the kind; we have our faults and we have all done things that we regret, but we know quite well that our actions have not been such as to need any beating of our breasts and gnashing of our teeth. The majority of us are fairly decent, doing our best in that state of life in which chance has placed us; and if we believe in a judgment we feel that God has too much wisdom and good sense to bother much about failings which we mortals have no difficulty in forgiving in our neighbours. It is not that we are satisfied with ourselves, on the whole we are sufficiently humble, but we do the work which is next to our hand and do not trouble much about our souls. The Russians seem different. They are more introspective than we and their sense of sin is urgent. They are really overwhelmed by the burden and they will repent in sackcloth and ashes, with weeping and lamentation, for peccadillos which would leave our less sensitive consciences untroubled. Dmitri Karamazov looked upon himself as a great sinner, and Dostoievsky saw in him a violent, passionate man on whose soul Satan had laid his hold; but a calmer judgment can only look upon Dmitri as a very gentle transgressor: he played cards and drank more than he could decently carry, and when drunk was boisterous and noisy; he had strong sexual passions and a quick temper which he could not always control; he was hasty and impetuous; but that is about the extent of his wickedness. Monsieur de Valmont and Lord George Hell, before love made him a happy hypocrite, would both have looked upon his delinquencies with good-humoured contempt. As a matter of fact the Russian is not a great sinner. He is lazy and infirm of purpose; he talks too much; he has no great control over himself so that the expression of his passions is more lively than their intensity warrants; but he is kindly on the whole and good-humoured; he does not bear malice; he is generous, tolerant of others’ failings; he is probably less engrossed in sexual affairs than the Spaniard or the Frenchman; he is sociable; his temper is quick, but he is easily appeased. If he is weighed down by a conviction of sin, it is evidently not on account of his acts of omission or commission (and in point of fact it is chiefly for the first that he loves to reproach himself) but on account of some physiological peculiarity. Few persons can have gone to a convivial gathering of Russians without noticing that they take their liquor sadly. They weep when they are drunk. They are very often drunk. The nation suffers from Katzenjammer. It would be an amusing thing if the prohibition of vodka took away from Russia the trait which sentimentalists in Western Europe have found such an engaging subject for their meditation.
I have nothing but horror for the literary cultivation of suffering which has been so fashionable of late. I have no sympathy with Dostoievsky’s attitude toward it. I have seen a good deal of suffering in my time and endured a good deal myself. When I was a medical student I had occasion in the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital to see the effects of suffering on patients of all sorts. During the war I had the same experience, and I have seen also the effects of mental suffering. I have looked into my own heart. I have never found that suffering improves the character. Its influence to refine and ennoble is a myth. The first effect of suffering is to make people narrow. They grow self-centred. Their bodies, their immediate surroundings, acquire an importance which is unreasonable. They become peevish and querulous. They attach consequence to trifles. I have suffered from poverty and the anguish of unrequited love, disappointment, disillusion, lack of opportunity and recognition, want of freedom; and I know that they made me envious and uncharitable, irritable, selfish, unjust; prosperity, success, happiness, have made me a better man. The healthy man exercises all his faculties, he is happy in himself and the cause of happiness in others; his abundant vitality enables him to use and improve the gifts that nature has endowed him with; his ripening intelligence enriches him with complicated thought; his imagination gives him sway over time and space; his educated senses enlarge the beauty of the world. He grows ever more complete a man. But suffering depresses the vitality. It coarsens the moral fibre rather than refines it; it does not increase a man, but lessens him. It is true that sometimes it teaches patience, and patience edifies. But patience is not a virtue. It is a means to an end and no more. Patience is essential to those who would do great things, but the patience exercised in doing small ones calls for no more respect than is due to small things. Waterloo Bridge is nothing in itself: it is merely a means of communication between two banks of the Thames, and it is London stretching on either side that gives it importance. You do not admire a man who uses infinite patience to collect postage stamps; the exercise of this quality does not save it from being a trivial pursuit.
It is said that suffering results in resignation, and resignation is looked upon as a solution to the perplexities of life. But resignation is a surrender to the hostile whims of chance. Resignation accepts the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and calls them good. It kisses the rod that chastens it. It is the virtue of the vanquished. A braver spirit will have no dealings with resignation: it will struggle unceasingly against circumstances, and though conscious that the struggle is unequal, fight on. Defeat may be inevitable, but it is doubly defeat if it is accepted. To some Prometheus, chained to his rock and strong in his unconquerable courage, is a more inspiriting example than that other, hanging on a shameful cross, who besought His Father to forgive His enemies because they knew not what they did. Resignation is too close to apathy for the spirited mind. It submits sometimes to what neither need nor should be borne. It is the final attempt of slaves to make their lack of mettle a reason for self-complacency. And even though the fetters that bind a man cannot be broken, let him remain a rebel still: though he suffers from cold and hunger, illness and poverty and lack of friends, though he knows that the road is uphill all the way and that the night has no morning, let him refuse ever to acknowledge that cold and hunger, illness and poverty are good; though he has not the strength to continue the hopeless battle, let hi
m keep that one last spark of freedom in his heart which enables him to say that pain is bad.
Where the Russian has the advantage over us is that he is much less than we the slave of convention. It never occurs to him that he should do anything he does not want to because it is expected of him. Why he bore with a certain equanimity the oppression of centuries (and he surely bore it with equanimity, for it is inconceivable that a whole people could long endure a tyranny which they found intolerable) is that though politically coerced he was personally free. The Russian’s personal freedom is much greater than the Englishman’s. He is bound by no rules. He eats what he likes at the hours that suit him, he dresses as he chooses without regard to common usage (the artist will wear a bowler hat and a stiff collar as unconcernedly as the lawyer a sombrero); his habits seem to him so natural that everyone else accepts them as natural too; though often he talks for effect he never seeks to appear other than he is, he is only inclined to exaggerate himself a little; he is not shocked by a position he does not share; he can accept anything and he is perfectly tolerant of other people’s eccentricities in thought or behaviour.
A Writer's Notebook Page 16
