Part 20

Years thus fleeted away! Although our houses were only Twenty paces apart, yet I thy threshold ne'er crossed. Now by the fearful flood are we parted! Thou liest to Heaven, Billow! thy beautiful blue seems to me dark as the night. All were now in movement: a boy to the house of my father Ran at full speed and exclaimed, "Hasten thee quick to the strand! Hoisted the sail is already, e'en now in the wind it is fluttering, While the anchor they weigh, heaving it up from the sand; Come, Alexis, oh come!"--My worthy stout-hearted father Pressed, with a blessing, his hand down on my curly-locked head, While my mother carefully reached me a newly made bundle; "Happy mayst thou return!" cried they--"both happy and rich!" Then I sprang away, and under my arm held the bundle, Running along by the wall. Standing I found thee hard by, At the door of thy garden. Thou smilingly saidst then, "Alexis! Say, are yon boisterous crew going thy comrades to be? Foreign coasts wilt thou visit, and precious merchandise purchase, Ornaments meet for the rich matrons who dwell in the town; Bring me also, I pray thee, a light chain; gladly I'll pay thee, Oft have I wished to possess some such a trinket as that." There I remained, and asked, as merchants are wont, with precision After the form and the weight which thy commission should have. Modest indeed was the price thou didst name! I meanwhile was gazing On thy neck, which deserved ornaments worn but by queens. Loudly now rose the cry from the ship; then kindly thou spakest:-- "Take, I entreat thee, some fruit out of the garden, my friend! Take the ripest oranges, figs of the whitest; the ocean Beareth no fruit, and in truth, 'tis not produced by each land." So I entered in. Thou pluckedst the fruit from the branches, And the burden of gold was in thine apron upheld. Oft did I cry, Enough! But fairer fruits were still falling Into thy hand as I spake, ever obeying thy touch. Presently didst thou reach the arbor; there lay there a basket, Sweet blooming myrtle-trees waved, as we drew nigh, o'er our heads. Then thou began'st to arrange the fruit with skill and in silence: First the orange, which heavy as though 'twere of gold, Then the yielding fig, by the slightest pressure disfigured, And with myrtle, the gift soon was both covered and graced. But I raised it not up. I stood. Our eyes met together, And my eyesight grew dim, seeming obscured by a film. Soon I felt thy bosom on mine! Mine arm was soon twining Round thy beautiful form; thousand times kissed I thy neck. On my shoulder sank thy head; thy fair arms, encircling, Soon rendered perfect the ring knitting a rapturous pair. Amor's hands I felt; he pressed us together with ardor, And from the firmament clear, thrice did it thunder; then tears Streamed from mine eyes in torrents, thou weptest, I wept, both were weeping, And 'mid our sorrow and bliss, even the world seemed to die. Louder and louder they called from the strand; my feet would no longer Bear my weight, and I cried:--"Dora! and art thou not mine?" "Thine forever!" thou gently didst say. Then the tears we were shedding Seemed to be wiped from our eyes, as by the breath of a god. Nearer was heard the cry "Alexis!" The stripling who sought me Suddenly peeped through the door. How he the basket snatched up! How he urged me away! how pressed I thy hand! Dost thou ask me How the vessel I reached? Drunken I seemed, well I know, Drunken my shipmates believed me, and so had pity upon me; And as the breeze drove us on, distance the town soon obscured. "Thine forever!" thou, Dora, didst murmur; it fell on my senses With the thunder of Zeus! while by the thunderer's throne Stood his daughter, the goddess of Love; the Graces were standing Close by her side! so the bond beareth an impress divine! Oh then hasten, thou ship, with every favoring zephyr! Onward, thou powerful keel, cleaving the waves as they foam! Bring me unto the foreign harbor, so that the goldsmith May in his workshop prepare straightway the heavenly pledge! Ay, of a truth, the chain shall indeed be a chain, O my Dora! Nine times encircling thy neck, loosely around it entwined. Other and manifold trinkets I'll buy thee; gold-mounted bracelets, Richly and skillfully wrought, also shall grace thy fair hand. There shall the ruby and emerald vie, the sapphire so lovely Be to the jacinth opposed, seeming its foil; while the gold Holds all the jewels together, in beauteous union commingled. Oh, how the bridegroom exults, when he adorns his betrothed! Pearls if I see, of thee they remind me; each ring that is shown me Brings to my mind thy fair hand's graceful and tapering form. I will barter and buy; the fairest of all shalt thou choose thee; Joyously would I devote all of the cargo to thee. Yet not trinkets and jewels alone is thy loved one procuring; With them he brings thee whate'er gives to a housewife delight: Fine and woolen coverlets, wrought with an edging of purple, Fit for a couch where we both, lovingly, gently may rest; Costly pieces of linen. Thou sittest and sewest, and clothest Me, and thyself, and perchance even a third with it too. Visions of hope, deceive ye my heart! Ye kindly immortals, Soften this fierce-raging flame, wildly pervading my breast! Yet how I long to feel them again, those rapturous torments, When in their stead, Care draws nigh, coldly and fearfully calm. Neither the Furies' torch, nor the hounds of hell with their barking, Awe the delinquent so much, down in the plains of despair, As by the motionless spectre I'm awed, that shows me the fair one Far away: of a truth, open the garden door stands! And another one cometh! For him the fruit, too, is falling, And for him also the fig strengthening honey doth yield! Doth she entice him as well to the arbor? He follows? Oh, make me Blind, ye Immortals! efface visions like this from my mind! Yes, she is but a maiden! And she who to one doth so quickly Yield, to another erelong, doubtless, will turn herself round. Smile not, Zeus, for this once, at an oath so cruelly broken! Thunder more fearfully! Strike!--Stay--thy fierce lightnings withhold! Hurl at me thy quivering bolt! In the darkness of midnight Strike with thy lightning this mast, make it a pitiful wreck! Scatter the planks all around, and give to the boisterous billows All these wares, and let _me_ be to the dolphins a prey!-- Now, ye Muses, enough! In vain would ye strive to depicture How, in a love-laden breast, anguish alternates with bliss. Ye cannot heal the wounds, it is true, that love hath inflicted; Yet from you only proceeds, kindly ones, comfort and balm.

Translation of E. A. Bowring.

MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS

From 'Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.'

Translation of Bailey Saunders. Copyright 1892, by Macmillan & Co.

It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape: it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.

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I must hold it for the greatest calamity of our time, which lets nothing come to maturity, that one moment is consumed by the next, and the day spent in the day; so that a man is always living from hand to mouth, without having anything to show for it. Have we not already newspapers for every hour of the day? A good head could assuredly intercalate one or other of them. They publish abroad everything that every one does, or is busy with or meditating; nay, his very designs are thereby dragged into publicity. No one can rejoice or be sorry, but as a pastime for others; and so it goes on from house to house, from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, and at last from one hemisphere to the other,--all in post-haste.

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During a prolonged study of the lives of various men both great and small, I came upon this thought: In the web of the world the one may well be regarded as the warp, the other as the woof. It is the little men, after all, who give breadth to the web, and the great men firmness and solidity; perhaps also the addition of some sort of pattern. But the scissors of the Fates determine its length, and to that all the rest must join in submitting itself.

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There is nothing more odious than the majority: it consists of a few powerful men to lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and of a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own mind.

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Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.

NATURE

Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

There is constant life in her, motion and development; and yet she remains where she was. She is eternally changing, nor for a moment does she stand still. Of rest she knows nothing, and to all stagnation she has affixed her curse. She is steadfast; her step is measured, her exceptions rare, her laws immutable.

She loves herself, and clings eternally to herself with eyes and hearts innumerable. She has divided herself that she may be her own delight. She is ever making new creatures spring up to delight in her, and imparts herself insatiably.

She rejoices in illusion. If a man destroys this in himself and others, she punishes him like the hardest tyrant. If he follows her in confidence, she presses him to her heart as it were her child.

She spurts forth her creatures out of nothing, and tells them not whence they come and whither they go. They have only to go their way: she knows the path.

Her crown is Love. Only through Love can we come near her. She puts gulfs between all things, and all things strive to be interfused. She isolates everything, that she may draw everything together. With a few draughts from the cup of Love she repays for a life full of trouble.

She is all things. She rewards herself and punishes herself, and in herself rejoices and is distressed. She is rough and gentle, loving and terrible, powerless and almighty. In her everything is always present. Past or Future she knows not. The Present is her Eternity. She is kind. I praise her with all her works. She is wise and still. No one can force her to explain herself, or frighten her into a gift that she does not give willingly. She is crafty, but for a good end; and it is best not to notice her cunning.

NIKOLAI VASILIEVITCH GOGOL

(1809-1852)

BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD

Gogol has been called the "father of modern Russian realism," and he has been credited with the creation of all the types which we meet in the great novelists who followed him. This is in great measure true, especially so far as the male characters are concerned. The germs at least, if not the condensed characterization in full, are recognizable in Gogol's famous novel 'Dead Souls,' his Little-Russian stories 'Tales from a Farm-House near Dikanka' and 'Mirgorod,' and his comedy 'The Inspector,' which still holds the stage.

It was precisely because of his genius in seizing the national types that the poet Pushkin, one of Gogol's earliest and warmest admirers, gave to him the plans of 'Dead Souls' and 'The Inspector,' which he had intended to make use of himself. That he became the "father of Russian realism" was due not only to his own genius, but to the epoch in which he lived, though he solved the problem for himself quite independently of the Continental literatures which were undergoing the same process of transformation from romanticism to realism. For, nearly a hundred years before Gogol and his foreign contemporaries of the forties--the pioneers, in their respective countries, of the new literature--won the public, Europe had been living a sort of modern epic. In imitation of the ancient epics, writers portrayed heroes of gigantic powers in every direction, and set them in a framework of exceptional crises which aroused their powerful emotions in the cause of right, or their superhuman conflict with masterful persons or overwhelming woes. But the daily experience of those who suffered from the manifold miseries of battle and invasion in this modern epic epoch, made it impossible for them to disregard longer the claim on their sympathies of the common things and people of their world, though these can very easily be ignored when one reads the ancient epics. Thus did realism have its dawn in many lands when the era of peace gave men time to define their position, and when pseudo-classicism had at last palled on their taste, which had begun to recognize its coldness and inherent falsity.

Naturally, in this new quest of Truth, romanticism and realism were mingled at first. This was the case with Gogol-Yanovsky, to give him his full name. But he soon struck out in the right path. He was born and reared in Little Russia, at Sorotchinsky, government of Poltava. He was separated by only two generations from the epoch of the Zaporozhian Kazak army, whose life he has recorded in his famous historical novel 'Taras Bulba,' his grandfather having been regimental scribe of the Kazaks, an office of honor. The spirit of the Zaporozhian Kazaks still lingered over the land, which was overflowing with legends, and with fervent, childlike piety of the superstitious order. At least one half of the Little-Russian stories which made Gogol's fame he owes to his grandfather, who appears as Rudiy Panko the Bee-Farmer, in the 'Tales from a Farm-House near Dikanka.' His father, who represented the modern spirit, was an inimitable narrator of comic stories, and the talents of this father and grandfather rendered their house the social centre of a very wide neighborhood.

At school Gogol did not distinguish himself in his studies, but wrote a great deal, all of an imitative character, and got up school plays in emulation of those which he had seen at his own home. His lack of scholarship made it impossible for him to pursue the learned career of professor of history, on which he embarked after he had with labor obtained, and shortly renounced, the career of copying-clerk in St. Petersburg. His vast but dimly defined ambition to accomplish great things for his fatherland in some mysterious way, and fame for himself, equally suffered shipwreck to his mind; though if we consider the part which the realistic literature he founded has played on the world's stage, we may count his apparent defeat a solid victory. His brief career as professor of history at the university was brought about by his ambition, and through the influence of the literary men whose friendship he had won by his first 'Little-Russian Tales.' They recognized his genius, and at last he himself recognized that the new style of writing which he had created was his vocation, and devoted himself wholly to literature. At the close of 1831 the first volume of 'Tales from a Farm-House' appeared, and had an immense success. The second volume, 'Mirgorod, followed, with equal success. It contained a new element: the merriment of the first volume had been pure, unmixed; in the second volume he had developed not only the realism but that special trait of his genius, "laughter piercing through a mist of tears," of which 'Old-Fashioned Gentry' and 'How the Two Ivans Quarreled' offer celebrated examples. But success always flew to Gogol's head: he immediately began to despise these products of his true vocation, and to plan grandiose projects far beyond his powers of education and entirely outside the range of his talent. Now, for instance, he undertook a colossal work in nine volumes on the history of the Middle Ages. Happily, he abandoned that, after his studies of Little-Russian history incidental thereto had resulted in his epic of the highest art, 'Taras Bulba.'

The first outcome of his recognition that literary work was his moral duty, not a mere pastime, was his great play 'The Inspector.' It was produced in April, 1836. The authorities steadfastly opposed its production; but the Emperor Nicholas I. heard of it, read it, ordered it produced, and upheld Gogol in enthusiastic delight. Officials, merchants, police, literary people, everybody, attacked the author. They had laughed at his pathos; now they raged at his comedy, refused to recognize their own portraits, and still tried to have the play prohibited. Gogol's health and spirits were profoundly affected by this unexpected enmity. He fled abroad, and returned to Russia thereafter only at intervals for brief visits, and chiefly to Moscow, where most of his faithful friends lived. He traveled much, but spent most of his time in Rome, where his lavish charities kept him always poor, even after the complete success of 'The Inspector' and of the first part of 'Dead Souls' would have enabled him to exist in comfort. He was accustomed to say that he could only see Russia clearly when he was far from her, and in a measure he proved this by his inimitable first volume of 'Dead Souls.' Herein he justified Pushkin's expectations in giving him that subject which would enable him to paint, in types, the classes and localities of his fatherland. But this long residence in Rome was fatal to his mind and health, and eventually extinguished the last sparks of genius. The Russian mind is peculiarly inclined to mysticism, and Russian writers of eminence seem to be even more susceptible in that direction than ordinary men. Of the noted writers in this century, Pushkin and Lermontoff had leaned decidedly in that direction towards the end of their careers, brief as their lives were. Gogol was their intimate friend in Russia, and after he went abroad he was the intimate friend of the aged poet Zhukovsky, who became a mystic in his declining years.

Even in his school days Gogol had shown, in his letters to his mother, a marked tendency to religious exaltation. Now, under the combined pressure of his personal inclinations, friendships, and the clerical atmosphere of Rome, he developed into a mystic and ascetic of the most pronounced type. In this frame of mind, he looked upon all his earlier writings as sins which must be atoned for; and yet his immense self-esteem was so flattered by the tremendous success of 'The Inspector' and of the first part of 'Dead Souls,' that he began to regard himself as a kind of divinely commissioned prophet, whose duty it was to exhort his fellow-men. The extract from these hortatory letters to his friends which he published convinced his countrymen that nothing more was to be expected from him. The failure of this volume only helped to plunge him into deeper depths of self-torture. In the few remaining lucid moments of his genius he worked at the second part of 'Dead Souls,' but destroyed what he had written in the moments of ecstatic remorse which followed. Thus the greatest work of his mature genius remains uncompleted. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and returned through Odessa to Moscow, where he lived until his death, growing constantly more mystical, more ascetic. Sleepless nights spent in prayer, fasting to the extent of trying to nourish himself (as it is affirmed that practiced ascetics successfully can) for a week on one of the tiny double loaves which are used in the Holy Communion, completed the ravages of his long-endured maladies.

It was for publishing in a Moscow paper an enthusiastic obituary of the dead genius, which he had been forbidden to publish in St. Petersburg, that Turgenieff was sent into residence on his estate, and enriched the world with the first work of the rising genius, 'The Diary of a Sportsman.' Acuteness of observation; natural, infectious, genuine humor; vivid realism; and an inimitable power of depicting national types, are Gogol's distinguishing characteristics: and these in varying degrees are precisely the ingredients which have entered into the works of his successors and rendered Russian literature famous as a school.

In reviewing Gogol's work, we may set aside with but cursory mention his youthful idyl, written while still in the gymnasium, published anonymously and overwhelmed with ridicule, 'Hans Kuchel-garten'; his 'Arabesques,' which are useful chiefly as a contribution to the study of the man and his opinions, not as permanent additions to literature; his 'Extracts from Correspondence with Friends,' which belong to the sermonizing, clouded period of his life's close; and the divers 'Fragments,' both of prose and dramatic writing, all of which are conscientiously included in the complete editions of his writings.

The only complete play which he wrote except 'The Inspector' is the comedy 'Marriage,' which is still acted, though very seldom. It is full of naturalness and his own peculiar humor, but its subject does not appeal to the universal public of all lands as nearly as does the plan of 'The Inspector.' The plot, in brief, is founded on a young girl's meditations on marriage, and her actions which lead up to and follow those meditations. The Heroine, desirous of marrying, invokes the aid of the Match-maker, the old-time matrimonial agent in the Russian merchant and peasant classes by conventional etiquette. The Match-maker offers for her consideration several suitable men, all strangers; the Heroine makes her choice, and is very well content with her suitor. But she begins to meditate on the future, becomes moved to tears by the thought of her daughter's possible unhappiness in a hypothetical wretched marriage in the dim future, and at last, unable to endure this painful prospect, she evades her betrothed and breaks off the match. While the characteristic and national touches are keen and true,--precursors of the vein which Ostrovsky so happily developed later,--the play must remain a matter of greater interest to Russians than to foreigners.

The interest of 'The Inspector,' on the other hand, is universal: official negligence and corruption, bribery, masculine boastfulness and vanity, and feminine qualities to correspond, are the private prerogatives of no one nation, of no one epoch. The comedy possesses all the elements of social portraiture and satire without caricature: concentration of time, place, action, language, and a tremendous condensation of character traits which are not only truly, typically national, but which come within the ken of all fair-minded persons in other countries.