Part 7

The literature, for instance, cannot go back to the time when there was no political life, because there is a political life now. The Reactionaries may have the best of it; the Liberals may discredit themselves and they may fail again and again; but all this constitutes a thing called political life, and which is reflected directly in the daily Press and indirectly in the literature of the day. Therefore, so far, whatever may be the discouragement felt by political reformers, there is as yet no trace of a note of apathy in the literature of the day. The curious thing is that nearly all the literature which is now appearing--with the exception of a small æsthetic school which has plunged into mysticism, decadentism, and many other isms--has for its subject-matter political events and political events only. Prisons, police, Pogroms, meetings, elections, parties, assassinations, bombs, revolutionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, fanatics--these are the main elements of the new literature. Another interesting point is that with all this stock-in-trade of sensationalism the literature is not sensational. If one compares it with English or German books on the same subject one thinks one is reading about a different country. This is owing to the simple fact that the Russians understand the people about whom they are writing. They know that humanity is not divided into two clearly defined categories--Liberals who are all saints and Conservatives who are all monsters. They know that because a man is a policeman he does not necessarily cease to be a human being, or that because a man is a revolutionary he does not necessarily become a superman, endowed with the resistance of Prometheus, the energy of Cromwell, the kindness of St. John. These writers distinguish. Andreev, for instance, writes a touching story of the Governor of a town, who in a moment of riot gives the order for firing on the crowd. He then relates how this man knows he will be killed, how every one else knows it, and how slowly, deliberately, and helplessly he slides into his doom. Kouprin, one of the most talented writers of the younger generation, tells a story which he says is a true one, of how after one of the Jewish “Pogroms,” when a committee was sitting to organise relief for those who had suffered, a deputation of thieves arrives and addresses the President. The thieves are burning with indignation because they have been accused of having taken part in the “Pogrom.” They are wounded in their most sensitive spot: their _amour propre_. They cannot get over the fact that people such as they--thieves by profession, who take pride in their art, whether it consist in pocketpicking, or housebreaking--should be confused with the inglorious herd of hooligans; and what is to them the unkindest cut of all is that people should have thought them capable of siding with the police, since they say that the “Pogroms” are the work of the police, and that the police is but the instrument in the hands of what Prince Ourousov once called the “dark forces” which stand behind the Government, and who make it so difficult for people to govern Russia.

Again, the same author tells a story of a revolutionary student who betrays his companions because, when he is interviewed by the police inspector he loses his nerve. He is not otherwise a coward; but he is afraid of _people_. The police inspector, he says, was as civil as a dentist to his comrades, but him he hectored and bullied, feeling instinctively that he would give way, and he did. He shoots himself: he is not afraid of doing that. In a letter he writes before killing himself he explains that he is not in the least afraid of death or of danger; but that in the presence of people he loses his head, and he attributes the fact to his having been soaked in the atmosphere of the stagnant generation of his parents, from whose influence he never escaped. These writers afford us an infinite number of sidelights on the subtleties, the contradictions, the curious contrasts which the political events bring to light--in fact on human nature, which is the same everywhere, but which under the stress and pressure of untoward violence is sharply revealed to us as though by lightning. Then, of course, the very existence of conflicting parties, ideals, opinions and aims gives the writer endless “copy” and an unbounded field of dramatic material.

The Dreyfus case divided France into two camps and split up families. Much more powerful, then, must be the political question in Russia, where it is not merely abstract but concrete; not merely platonic, but full of living passion, where any day a Conservative statesman may learn that his son or his daughter has blown up one of his colleagues, or a revolutionary girl may ascertain that her betrothed has denounced her comrades to the police. In this domain vistas are opened on to endless “conflicts of wills,” the most rewarding stuff for drama.

All this does not make for stagnation, and it is impossible to sum up the characteristics of modern Russian literature better than in the following words, which Kouprin puts into the mouth of the student (in a story to which I alluded above) who shot himself. He is talking of the schoolboy of the present generation, and what he says of the schoolboy applies equally well to the new generation, its literature, and all that belongs to it.

“I am convinced that the schoolboy of the sixth form to-day in the presence of all the Kings of Europe, in any throne room you please, would fiercely and clearly--and even somewhat rudely--declare the claims of _his party_. He is, it is true, almost absurd, this premature schoolboy; but there is in him a sacred respect for his own joyful, proud, and free ego, for that very thing which the spiritual poverty and the cowardly morals of our parents extirpated in us, who belong to the former generation.”

THE RUSSIAN STAGE

Hamlet in one of those pointed phrases which appear to Count Tolstoi to be so foreign to his character, and to the rest of the world to be peculiarly in harmony with it, said that players were “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.” It is certain that at the present day in Russia the doings of the Russian stage and of the players throw many interesting sidelights on the present situation; in fact, Hamlet’s remark is especially applicable to Russia at the present day. Whatever one may think of Russian politics at the present moment, whether we are witnessing the slow phases of a revolution, an evolution, or merely a crisis, one thing is certain and that is that the country is not in a normal condition, and that the element of paradox which has always existed in Russian life has now reached an exaggerated point of intensity.

The country is still an autocracy in which the Monarch is constantly declaring that his autocratic sovereignty is to remain inviolate, and at the same time that he is determined to fulfil his promise that the people shall govern themselves. The most important political party is still outlawed. You may be hanged for stealing three roubles (six shillings); for shooting a student in a restaurant you receive a year’s imprisonment, and for arranging a bomb explosion which fails to kill the Prime Minister, but which does kill many other people, you are let off with penal servitude, and under no circumstances whatever can you be handcuffed. This is not a normal situation, and the people who are factors in such a situation cannot fail to be affected by it. Therefore it is interesting to study as manifested on the stage the “abstracts and brief chronicles” of this extraordinary epoch. Such a study is doubly interesting and valuable owing to the peculiar nature of the Russian stage at the present moment.

To explain why this is so I must state briefly what are the chief characteristics of the Russian stage. It differs entirely from the European stage in that it escaped the influence of the modern French stage and the French ideals of stagecraft, of the “well-made” play, which produced the skill of Scribe, the ingenuity of Sardou, the logic of Alexandre Dumas _fils_, which left so deep an imprint on the stage of all other European countries. This tradition of stagecraft and these ideals were absorbed by Henrik Ibsen, who, as soon as he had made himself absolute master of all tricks which this craft comprised, threw them overboard and wrote plays in which he showed how at a given moment Fate may deal to mortals terrific blows arising from their deeds in the past, and often what they considered to be their good deeds--the aforesaid blows making themselves manifest in that by the ordinary course and conversations of everyday life. Ibsen was, therefore, the great reformer of the modern stage; and he not only cast away the tricks of the French school, but he wrote plays about human beings ruthlessly and vividly portrayed instead of conventional puppets. In France there was likewise a revolt against the “well-made” play, and dramatists of the naturalist school gave to the public what they called “slices of life,” which in its turn produced a reaction towards romanticism and artificial comedy. But in spite of the various phases of Scribisme and naturalism, and in spite of the fact that the Scribe-Sardou tradition has been thrown to the winds, certain ideals belonging to this school remain in the modern French stage, namely, the necessity of “situations,” or of fundamental theses to be worked out logically, which cause many modern French plays to resemble mathematical problems. The Russian stage differs entirely from both the French and the Scandinavian. The Sardou-Scribe school never reigned in Russia, so that there was no necessity to dethrone it, but apart from this significant fact the Russian stage has just as little in common with Ibsen, the French naturalist school, and the modern French play _à thèse_ as it has with Sardou or Dumas _fils_. This is where the difference lies. Ibsen shows us human beings at a moment when Fate in the shape of the inevitable result of their actions falls upon them like a thunderbolt; the French naturalist school gave us slices of raw life, but slices of brutally raw life so brutal as to be exaggerated, abnormal, and therefore unreal; the modern French play _à thèse_ goes back for its machinery to the old ideal of the well-made play; that is to say, the wine is new, but the skins are old.

The Russian stage simply aims at one thing--to depict everyday life; not exclusively the brutality of everyday life, nor the tremendous catastrophes befalling human beings; nor to devise intricate problems and far-fetched cases of conscience in which human beings might possibly be entangled. It simply aims at presenting glimpses of human beings as they really are, and by means of such glimpses it opens out avenues and vistas on to their lives. The Russian stage, therefore is like the Russian novel, realistic because it is a reflection of life, and it is unlike the French naturalist novel or naturalist play because these two things never reproduced life as it is, but portions only of life exaggerated and magnified by the fantastic vision of men of talent who were sometimes men of genius. The reflection of anybody who has some experience of the stage, on reading this will, I imagine, be the following: The everyday life of ordinary human beings can be reflected in a novel, but not on the stage, which demands the observation of certain conventions and the presence of certain cardinal factors such as dramatic interest, the conflict of wills, etc., which are indispensable to the acted drama. Moreover, the public goes to the theatre to be amused, and the faithful photography of everyday life cannot be amusing; the public wishes to forget everyday life, and to find on the stage that which in everyday life is not predominant. Well, the Russian stage has proved that these two contentions are not necessarily true. Excellent plays can be written on the basis of strong situations, but the Russian playwrights have proved that excellent plays can be written in which the situations are neither more nor less dramatic than those which occur every day before our eyes among our immediate circle of acquaintance. They have also proved another thing--that the public finds this kind of play interesting in the extreme and flocks to see it; and this leads one to conclude that the secret of the matter lies possibly in the fact that these plays are _true_ pictures of life, and not would-be pictures of life which are in reality false, and that the former cannot help being interesting, and the latter cannot help being tedious. I believe that plays written about real life, in which the characters live and behave as they do in reality, would be not only interesting but successful in any country. However that may be, the fact remains that the modern Russian play consists of a series of pictures of everyday life faithfully depicted, without any research of special theses or situations more theatrical than those which everyday life abundantly affords, and that these plays are successful. They make money. A cosmopolitan traveller once said to me that he could no longer sit through a modern French play of the type of _Le Dédale_ or plays such as M. Bernstein writes, because he found them so intolerably artificial, and this was because he had seen many Russian plays, of which the pre-eminent characteristics were reality and naturalness. This being so it is easy to understand that Russian plays form an exceedingly interesting commentary, an illuminating “abstract and brief chronicle” of the Russian life of to-day.

I will give a few instances taken from plays which were being performed during the winter season.[3] It must be remembered that there is a censorship in Russia which is almost as severe where politics are concerned as our censor in England is severe when the public morality is liable to be shocked. In spite of this, politics, if not always mentioned outright, permeate the Russian stage just as much as they permeate Russian life, and in some cases they are allowed to be mentioned outright, for the Russian censorship acts in a way peculiarly its own, or rather it acts just as our censorship does when morals are concerned, in an utterly illogical and incomprehensible fashion. There is a play called _Walls_ being performed at the State-subventioned theatre in St. Petersburg. This play would be forbidden in England, not because it inculcates immorality, but because certain facts are mentioned in it over which we draw a veil in this century, but which Shakespeare did not shrink from mentioning in the days of Queen Elizabeth. That is by the way. In this play we get among other things a glimpse of the life of an old schoolmaster, who has retired, and his wife; they have a daughter aged fifteen. These nice old parents feel that there is a gulf between them and their child. The daughter conceals her movements. She hides a portion of her life from her parents, and this distresses them. We see the interior of their home, and we see them waiting for the daughter in anxiety when she is returning late from one of the expeditions about which she refuses to speak. The father is distressed by the young generation. “In my time,” he says, “we were Liberals, and we worked for the cause, but quietly; now every one howls in the street and there is no talent anywhere.” He looks at Hertzen’s portrait, which is hanging on the wall, and he says: “Where have they got a man like him?” At last the daughter arrives, a charming, simple, natural girl, pretty and attractive. They beg her to say where she has been, and to be admitted into her confidence. We, the public, know to a man that she has been to something political, socialistic or revolutionary; we know that the parents know, and that she knows that the parents know, and that the parents know that she knows that they know. In spite of this she refuses to give any details. The father tells her she is on a wrong tack. “It’s all words,” he says. “You don’t understand, you can’t understand,” she answers. Then after a while she gives the following astounding explanation of her ideals: “There are two loves--a small love and a great love. The small love is what one feels for one’s favourite chair, one’s table, one’s father, one’s mother; the great love is the love which Christ felt for the whole world, for humanity, for man, for the people.” The father revolts at the idea of being compared to a table, and she kisses and quiets him, but one feels that, as far as she is concerned, she spoke the truth. Therefore we are not surprised in the last act when she tells a man who loves her, and loves her in vain, that she is going for good; she has received orders and starts for the South by the twelve o’clock train. Here again the whole audience knows that she is going to obey the orders of the Revolutionary Committee, probably to kill some one. We see her leave the house. The parents are within drinking tea; we see them by the light of the lamp through the window; she has promised to be back soon; she is only going on a commission to the next street, she says; “she casts one longing, lingering look behind;” the man who is in love with her tries to keep her back by force, but she tears herself away from him and disappears into the night, and we see the parents waiting and waiting, and opening the window and listening for her return, and the curtain falls.

[3] 1907.

This character of the daughter is a perfectly faithful picture of a type that exists by the score in Russia to-day, and this play, acted (it sounds like a paradox) at the State-paid Imperial Theatre throws a searchlight on to the inner life of the throwers of bombs and the killers of governors. It explains to us what sort of people these are and why they do these things, and the spectacle is most instructive.

There was another play being performed this season[4] called _Chaos_, in which the hero is the son of an aristocratic family who is a Social Revolutionary. This play is far more stagy and less original than Russian plays are generally, but it also contains many interesting sidelights on the situation. We see the young wife of a high official gradually opening her eyes to the political situation and gradually becoming bitten with Liberal ideas, and finally plunging into the whole thing. We see the young Socialist’s agony when the family receive the news that their home in the country has been burnt and they tell him that he must go at once, and he cannot go because he is “wanted” by his party in St. Petersburg. We are shown the comic aspects also--the family in which every member takes in a newspaper of a different shade of political opinion and is quarrelling over the fact; and a meeting of students in the aristocratic home quarrelling over Karl Marx and throwing their cigarettes on the floor. We are shown, impartially, the good points and the ridiculous points of both parties. Altogether it is a most amusing play “palpitating with actuality.”

[4] January 1907.

I have seen Tchekoff’s last play, _The Cherry Garden_, either seven or eight times. It tells in four pictures the whole story of the aristocratic landed proprietor class in Russia. We see a charming old and rather foolish aristocratic landlord coming back to his country house with his sister, a young and beautiful married woman, after five years’ absence. Their affairs are in a shocking state, and a neighbour of theirs, whose father was a serf, and who himself was a peasant, but who has become a merchant and a millionaire, warns them that unless they let their property and allow it to be cut up into villas it will be sold by auction. They tell him he does not understand what he is talking about. The idea is simply inconceivable to them. They say that something will turn up and save them; but it does not, and the place and the beautiful cherry garden are sold by auction, and bought by the merchant whose father was their serf, and who ran about barefoot in their village as a child; and they go away, and the shutters are shut, and we hear the cherry garden being hewed down. That is the whole subject of the play; but I know no play more poignant and more intensely real. It has, I should add, the advantage of being played by the company of the “Artistic Theatre” of Moscow. The acting of this company seems to me as superior to any other acting I have ever seen as Shakespeare’s plays are superior to any other plays in verse. It is simply in another class. They are now performing Ibsen’s great poetical play _Brand_ so magnificently that it would be worth while for any stage lover to go to Moscow from London merely to see this performance. To see one of the greatest of poetical plays played with inspiration by the chief actors, not only magnificently but artistically staged and mounted, and perfectly interpreted down to the smallest part and the most trivial detail is very rare. It is worth a pilgrimage just in the same way as it is worth while going to Bayreuth to hear _Parsifal_. And for the perfection of ensemble in the interpretation and the inspiration of the principal units, it surpasses anything which I have seen at Bayreuth, or anywhere else.

A RUSSIAN MYSTERY PLAY[5]

I was once in a company of Russian people, when a lady suddenly asked to be explained what algebra meant. There were several mathematicians present, but they, perhaps because they were mathematicians, were unable to give a satisfactory explanation. I then said to the lady that algebra is to arithmetic what Andreev’s play _The Life of Man_ is to other plays. She immediately understood the nature of algebra. Andreev’s play, _The Life of Man_, which was produced for the first time last year in St. Petersburg, and which is now being given at the Artistic Theatre of Moscow, is written in the algebra of art. Shakespeare wrote plays in which Fate manifested its inexorable designs through the passions of individual men; for instance, he showed us the fate of a man who was warm-hearted, brave, simple and jealous--Othello; of a man who was dreamy, ambitious, superstitious and hysterical--Macbeth. Molière, on the other hand, synthesised into a series of vital types the various aspects of humanity, and showed us the misanthropy of the whole human race in _Le Misanthrope_, and the hypocrisy of all hypocrites in _Tartuffe_. Andreev in his play represents neither types nor individuals, but simply the algebraic symbol of man. Not man the miser, or man the infinitely complex Hamlet, but man the quantity, man _X_, in face of fate the quantity _Y_.

[5] _The Life of Man_, by Andreev.

His play is not a play but a morality, such as those which were played in the Middle Ages, without the buffoonery. It is a solemn mystery and it is treated as such. The audience do not applaud and the actors do not come before the curtain. The persons of the plays are puppets, the pictures shown are like a series of rough woodcuts such as those in a child’s newspaper; a penny plain and twopence coloured.

I have seen the play mounted and played with all the skill and subtlety which are at the command of M. Stanislavski’s company at the Artistic Theatre of Moscow. The acting was superlative, and the mounting curious and original; nevertheless I will describe the play as I saw it when it was given for the first time at the small theatre of Madame Komisarjevskaia at St. Petersburg; because there (although the acting was less excellent), owing to the simplicity of the staging, the poignancy and the _macabre_ effect of the play were to my mind even more forcibly brought home, and the effect, if not more impressive, was in closer harmony with the author’s written words.