Part 6
“So you’ve come to talk politics,” he said, “and I am not going to talk politics with you. I am going to talk literature with you--a far more interesting subject. No Russian knows anything about politics or really cares about politics; we are an artistic (I mean artistic, not æsthetic) nation; we have been forced to take notice of politics because our Government went just beyond the limit of incapacity and general idiocy that a nation can stand; but that does not make our political ideas any the more interesting. Whereas our ideas on literature are really interesting, because all the defects of our nature, owing to which we are such bad politicians, help to make us good judges of literature. We have neither the sublime and contented ignorance of the British, nor the Chinese Wall-like narrow-mindedness of the French, nor the complicated misapprehension of the Teutons; we are absolutely open-minded and catholic; we can understand and assimilate everything and anything; there is no hard bar in our nature; it is all plastic, pliant, and receptive. There is nothing we cannot appreciate; a Frenchman--even an extremely clever Frenchman like M. Bourget--cannot possibly appreciate either the humour or the style or the point of a Scotch writer of genius such as Stevenson or the works of Jacobs or a book like the _Diary of a Nobody_. We can; that’s the difference. That is why our politicians are so bad and our non-politicians so intelligent.” “That is all very well,” I answered, “but I have to write political letters to my newspaper and I want your views--people in England prefer politics to literature.” “I quite understand that,” answered Dimitri Nikolaievitch, “but for all that I refuse to talk politics to-day. I am going to talk to you about Byron, a subject which few Englishmen are interested in, I believe, and if what I say won’t do for a political letter send it to the literary page of your newspaper. In the _Morning Post_, which I take in in the hope of seeing my name mentioned now and then, I noticed that one of the most delightful of English writers, Mr. Andrew Lang, lately raised the question as to who was right about Byron, his detractors or the people who praised him. Now, it is an odd thing, which I have noticed, that people accept their likes and dislikes about most things with decent resignation. If they don’t like chicken or roast beef or Mozart’s music, or Rembrandt’s pictures, or Homer’s verse, they say so and pass on. Not so with Shakespeare and Byron. These two authors have the effect which a red rag has on a bull on the people who dislike them. If a man dislikes Shakespeare he feels it incumbent on himself to proclaim the fact on the housetops, as though it were a great discovery, oblivious of the fact that people and literature are like a Seidlitz powder, the man must have the complementary blue powder which when mixed with the white powder of the book produces a fizzing combustion in a glass of water. Count Tolstoi being without the blue powder that makes Shakespeare fizz for him has to write a book in which he explains that Shakespeare knows nothing of human nature and could not draw a living character. This does not damage Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright, but it destroys Count Tolstoi’s reputation as a critic. Byron produces the same effect; people who dislike Byron get very angry if one says that he is a great poet, and quote you a long list of the errors in syntax which are to be found in his works. Now, the reason I want to talk about Byron is that being a foreigner and living far off from the literary fashions of London, far from the catchwords and quarrels of cliques and coteries, I am a much more impartial judge of Byron than any Englishman can be. The obvious retort to this is that foreigners admire Byron because they cannot appreciate the nicety, the lights and shades, the values of the English language. In my case you will admit the argument does not hold good; to a Russian who knows English from his childhood and has a knowledge and appreciation of the world’s literature, the manipulation of the English language and the apprehension of its values is child’s play compared to the manipulation of the Russian language. The argument of a foreigner’s inability to appreciate the values of the language may be true of a Frenchman or of a German; it is not true of an Italian critic such as Nencioni, who translated Browning, nor is it true of a Russian critic such as myself, who has run to seed and made a hash of life from having appreciated literature and the arts wisely and too well, and has, thank heavens, written nothing at all. To go back to Byron, the mistake people make with regard to him seems to me that they judge him by a wrong standard. They apply to him the standards which appertain to other things. To judge Byron by the standard of Tennyson is like criticising Michael Angelo by the standard of Benvenuto Cellini. They apply a magnifying glass to the picture, at which they should look from a distance of several yards. They criticise a frieze as if it were a carved cherry-stone. To this I reply that other men such as Goethe judge him by the standard of Shakespeare, and criticise him with the finest discrimination and find him good.
“Read all that Goethe says about Byron in ‘Eckerman,’ not merely the oft-quoted phrases of his being the greatest genius of the nineteenth century, but all his _obiter dicta_ with regard to Byron, and you will be struck by their profound wisdom and incredible acuteness.
“But a better reply is to quote what is perhaps the most hackneyed of hackneyed Byronic quotations, two stanzas of which I learned in the nursery, but which, I dare say, you have never read--
CXL
‘I see before me the Gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand--his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his droop’d head sinks gradually low-- And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him; he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won.
CXLI
He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away; He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, _There_ were his young barbarians all at play, _There_ was their Dacian mother--he, their sire, Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday-- All this rush’d with his blood--Shall he expire, And unavenged?--Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!’
“By so doing I may be applying the wrong test myself, since it is a commonplace of criticism that Byron must be judged by the whole and not by fragments; but I maintain that just as if some one were to examine a limb hacked off a statue by Michael Angelo or a horse’s head from the Parthenon frieze he would say the hand who wrought such a fragment was a mighty hand; so it is with this short quotation; it is impossible to read it without being convinced that the man who wrote it was more than a ‘clever man.’ He was a poet. He was a great poet. Because to have said--
‘his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away,’
in this connection signifies that he had the gift by the use of the simplest possible and most ordinary words of piercing the heart and brain with the divine stab which only great poetry can inflict.
“Other poets can do other things. But because Virgil and Keats touch you with a wand that produces a ravishing enchantment, because Shelley and Coleridge lift you into unimagined heavens of light and music, because Shakespeare takes your breath away by the potent magic of his phrases, that does not prove that Byron has not in his fashion achieved what is generally accepted as being one of the highest achievements of poetry: that is to say, the achievement of making style disappear and of knocking you on the head with poetry made out of the language of every day.
“Goethe is usually thought to be a great poet. But Goethe’s claim to greatness as a poet rests on this achievement, on nothing less and on nothing more. When he is at his best, as in the first part of _Faust_ and in a dozen lyrics, he gets beyond and above style and writes--
‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’
or
‘Mein Ruh ist hin,’
or
‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen ass,’
or
‘Von wem Ich’s habe, dass sag Ich Euch nicht,’
or
‘Denkt Ihr an mich ein Augenblickchen nur,’
or
‘Es war ein König in Thule,’
or
‘Heiss mich nicht reden, heiss mich schweigen,’
and the world agrees that when he writes like this he is ‘grand comme le monde.’ Nobody disputes the fact because he wrote masses and masses of inferior work. The point is that only a very great poet could have written
‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’
and the rest.
“I maintain that only a great poet could have written the ‘Dying Gladiator’; that only a great poet could have written the song that begins--
‘She walks in beauty like the night;’
and the song that ends
‘In silence and tears;’
the stanzas beginning
‘The moon is up, and yet it is not night’
(not a bad line?) The stanzas on Waterloo and Rome, or, to take a slighter instance, I contend that only a great poet could have written this little song--
I
‘So we’ll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving And the moon be still as bright.
II
For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.
III
Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon.’
“But to do justice to Byron one must take a deep draught of his foaming beverage, and to refresh your memory just listen to these stanzas. Don’t stop to pause and criticise line by line, but drink the whole thing in at a draught--
CLXXXIII
‘It was the cooling hour, just when the rounded Red sun sinks down behind the azure hill, Which then seems as if the whole earth it bounded, Circling all nature, hush’d, and dim, and still, With the far mountain-crescent half surrounded On one side, and the deep sea calm and chill Upon the other, and the rosy sky With one star sparkling through it like an eye.
CLXXXIV
And thus they wander’d forth, and hand in hand, Over the shining pebbles and the shells, Glided along the smooth and harden’d sand, And in the worn and wild receptacles Work’d by the storms, yet work’d as it were plann’d In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells, They turned to rest; and, each clasp’d by an arm, Yielded to the deep twilight’s purple charm.
CLXXXV
They look’d up to the sky, whose floating glow Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright; They gazed upon the glittering sea below, Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight; They heard the waves splash, and the wind so low, And saw each other’s dark eyes darting light Into each other--and, beholding this, Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss.
CLXXXVI
A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth, and love, And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above: Such kisses as belong to early days Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move, And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze, Each kiss a heart-quake--for a kiss’s strength, I think, it must be reckoned by its length.
CLXXXVII
By length I mean duration; theirs endured Heaven knows how long--no doubt they never reckon’d; And if they had, they could not have secured The sum of their sensations to a second: They had not spoken; but they felt allured, As if their souls and lips each other beckon’d, Which, being joined, like swarming bees they clung-- Their hearts the flowers from whence the honey sprung.
CLXXXVIII
They were alone, but not alone as they Who shut in chambers think it loneliness; The silent ocean, and the starlight bay, The twilight glow, which momently grew less, The voiceless sands, and dropping caves, that lay Around them, made them to each other press, As if there were no life beneath the sky Save theirs, and that their life could never die.
CLXXXIX
They fear’d no eyes nor ears on that lone beach, They felt no terrors from the night; they were All in all to each other: though their speech Was broken words, they thought a language there; And all the burning tongues the passions teach Found in one sigh the best interpreter Of Nature’s oracle--first love--that all Which Eve has left her daughters since her fall.
CXC
Haidée spoke not of scruples, ask’d no vows Nor offered any; she had never heard Of plight and promises to be a spouse Or perils by a loving maid incurr’d; She was all which pure ignorance allows, And flew to her young mate like a young bird; And never having dreamt of falsehood, she Had not one word to say of constancy.’
“Isn’t this poetry? Wouldn’t any of the minor poets of to-day be surprised and pleased to have found that they had written these stanzas and those which follow until the passage ends thus--
CXCVI
‘An infant when it gazes on the light, A child the moment when it drains the breast, A devotee when soars the Host in sight, An Arab with a stranger for a guest, A sailor when the prize has struck in fight, A miser filling his most hoarded chest, Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping.
CXCVII
For there it lies, so tranquil, so beloved: All that it hath of life with us is living; So gentle, stirless, helpless and unmoved, And all unconscious of the joy ’tis giving; All it hath felt, inflicted, pass’d, and proved, Hush’d into depths beyond the watcher’s diving; There lies the thing we love, with all its errors And all its charms, like death, without its terrors.
CXCVIII
The lady watch’d her lover--and that hour Of Love’s, and Night’s, and Ocean’s solitude, O’erflow’d her soul with their united power: Amidst the barren sand and rocks so rude, She and her wave-worn love had made their bower Where nought upon their passion could intrude; And all the stars that crowded the blue space Saw nothing happier than her glowing face.’
“The man who wrote this had the tremendous driving force of passion, the sweeping vision, and the commanding utterance, the swiftness, and the splendour which belongs only to the gods and the Titans, and because Byron does not sit on the tranquil mountain in the serene spaces with Virgil, Praxiteles, Racine, Leopardi, Milton, Mozart, and Raphael, he is none the less more than mortal. He may have been cast out of the heaven of pure art; but the story of his divine downfall has been written in the sky like a constellation and hangs there for ever; a permanent comet. One generation may forget him, being interested in other and later appearances in the firmament of poetry, but there will always be men to look and to wonder in any generation. Of such was your great scholar Arthur Strong, who knew Russian as well as I do from having learnt it out of a book, who was not only perhaps the man of the widest and deepest reading of our generation in Europe, but whose power of appreciation was as delicate as a microphone and as wide as the sea. He, alas! is now ‘famous, calm, and dead’; and he admired Byron because he considered him to be an inspired poet and a writer of good verse. ‘The French,’ he once said to me, ‘are like the Persians, they stand no nonsense about poetry. To them it is either good or bad verse.’ Opinions differ, and opinions of the same man about the same thing differ under the influence of time. For instance, Swinburne’s blame of Byron has been recently quoted; but his praise of Byron in the first volume of _Essays and Studies_ is, to my mind, the finest thing he ever wrote, and the last word of what can be said in praise of Byron. In that essay, in which he speaks of Byron having ‘the imperishable excellence and sincerity and strength,’ he was of the opinion that Byron wrote good verse. Personally I cannot think that the man who wrote the following lines:--
XXX
‘There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee, And mine were nothing, had I such to give; But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree, Which living waves where thou didst cease to live, And saw around me the wide field revive With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring Come forth her work of gladness to contrive, With all her reckless birds upon the wing, I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring,’
or in another manner (of the meeting of the Archangel and Lucifer)--
‘And yet between his Darkness and his Brightness, There passed a mutual glance of great politeness,’
wrote bad verse.
“And to me he will always be what he was to Goethe, to Shelley, and to Arthur Strong--
‘A beautiful and mighty thing of Light.’
“The phrase is Byron’s.”
MODERN LITERATURE IN RUSSIA
At the beginning of last century there was in Russia, as in most other countries, a great wave of romanticism, which produced Pouskin, Lermontov, and other poets. The wave subsided, and no planets of great magnitude swam into the ken of the watchers of the skies of Russian literature until the period of the Crimean War. After the war and the liberation of the serfs there came another great movement, and a race of literary giants--Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Dostoievski--was born. It is a remarkable fact that the movements of literary renascence in Russia have always immediately followed movements of political renascence and change. This second movement subsided, and although the Russo-Turkish War gave a kind of flip to the country a general calm soon once more prevailed, which up till 1903 bore all the signs of stagnation. The writer who gives the most faithful picture of the general atmosphere of the period which preceded the Russo-Japanese War is Anton Tchekoff. In a multitude of short stories, some broadly humorous, others poignantly sad, and in half a dozen plays (in writing which he inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the stage and was the pioneer of a movement which at one moment made itself felt in London at the Court Theatre) he reflects the frame of mind of educated Russia during this period. It is a frame of mind of stagnation. Its prevailing characteristic is the hopelessness arising from the conviction that it is no use trying to do anything in Russia; that on those who would like to work for progress and enlightenment, education and liberalism in the larger non-political sense of the word, the doors are shut, and that therefore there is nothing to do but to play cards, drink vodka, and while away the tedious hours as best one can. It is not that Tchekoff despaired in the least of the advent of the dawn, only he felt he would not live to see it, and that it would break upon another generation.
They would march prospering not from his presence; Songs shall inspirit them not from his lyre.
The dawn came quicker probably than he expected. Tchekoff’s last play was performed in 1904, and he himself died soon after, while the war was still going on. Then came the bursting of the dam, and with the swift and tumultuous events of the political movement, with the granting of the freedom of the Press and the inflooding of Russia with a light which it had never before known, came a new literary renascence. It is too soon as yet to discern and to gauge what is the literary value of the thick and turbulent mass of production which has been poured out in Russia during the last two years. But one thing is certain, namely, that there is nothing stagnant in the new phenomena. The writers of the younger generation are still often pessimistic in the extreme; they dip their pencils in the “hues of earthquake and eclipse,” but it is the gloom of the earthquake and not the monotonous greyness of a sunless atmosphere. They shriek, they vociferate and they anathematise, but they do not say: “There is nothing to be done. Let us sit down and play Vindt.” It is true that this revolutionary outburst was succeeded by weariness and apathy. It is true that reaction was again in its turn as triumphant as it was in France during the reign of Louis XVIII., that the Liberal movement suffered a great blow owing to the fact that a considerable part of the population, namely, the landed proprietors and all people of means, who were until 1905 nearly all of them staunch supporters of the Opposition, frightened by the spectres of expropriation, revolution, and anarchy and ruin, veered to the Right. It is true that some people think that it will need another war, a famine, an epidemic of cholera, and several other disasters of the kind to set the movement going again. But in spite of this we shall never get back to the old stagnation, because of the flood of light which has been let into the country, and which cannot now ever be driven out again.