Part II. deals charmingly with the story of the last pomyèschick:

"A very old man Wearing long white moustaches (He seems to be all white); His cap, broad and high-crowned, Is white, with a peak, In the front, of red satin. His body is lean As a hare's in the winter, His nose like a hawk's beak. His eyes--well, they differ: The one, sharp and shining, The other--the left eye-- Is sightless and blank, Like a dull leaden farthing. Some woolly white poodles With tufts on their ankles Are in the boat too."

This venerable barin Prince Yutiàtin believes that the old regime still exists and his serfs have agreed to humour him in order to keep him alive.

They agree to

"'Keep silent and act still As if all this trouble Had never existed: Give way to him, bow to him Just as in old days.'"

So the Prince has all his whims satisfied and peasants are beaten (voluntarily) at his pleasure. He orders his sons to dance and girls to sing.

"The golden-haired lady Does not want to sing, But the old man will have it. The lady is singing A song low and tender, It sounds like the breeze On a soft summer evening In velvety grasses Astray, like spring raindrops That kiss the young leaves, And it soothes the Pomyèschick, The feeble old man: He is falling asleep now ... And gently they carry him Down to the water, And into the boat. And he lies there, still sleeping. Above him stands, holding A big green umbrella, The faithful old servant, His other hand guarding The sleeping Pomyèschick From gnats and mosquitoes. The oarsmen are silent, The faint-sounding music Can hardly be heard As the boat moving gently Glides on through the water...."

In Part III., having failed to elicit a satisfactory answer to their question from the men, they decide to try the women. They go to the woman Matròna

[Who] "Is tall, finely moulded, Majestic in bearing, And strikingly handsome. Of thirty-eight years She appears, and her black hair Is mingled with grey. Her complexion is swarthy, Her eyes large and dark And severe, with rich lashes."

They manage to prevail upon her to tell her life story:

"'My girl-hood was happy, For we were a thrifty And diligent household: And I, the young maiden, With father and mother Knew nothing but joy. My father got up And went out before sunrise, He woke me with kisses And tender caresses: My brother, while dressing, Would sing little verses: "Get up, little sister, Get up, little sister, In no little beds now Are people delaying, In all little churches The peasants are praying; Get up, now, get up, It is time, little sister. The shepherd has gone To the field with the sheep, And no little maidens Are lying asleep, They've gone to pick raspberries, Merrily singing...."

I never ran after The youths, and the forward I checked very sharply. To those who were gentle And shy, I would whisper: "My cheeks will grow hot, And sharp eyes has my mother: Be wise, now, and leave me Alone" ... and they left me.'"

At last came the man to whom she was destined to give her heart:

"'And Philip was handsome, Was rosy and lusty, Was strong and broad-shouldered, With fair curling hair, With a voice low and tender.... Ah, well ... I was won....

* * * * *

"Don't fear, little pigeon, We shall not regret it," Said Philip, but still I was timid and doubtful. Of course I was fairer And sweeter and dearer Than any that lived, And his arms were about me.... Then all of a sudden I made a sharp effort To wrench myself free. "How now? What's the matter? You're strong, little pigeon!" Said Philip, astonished, But still held me tight. "Ah, Philip, if you had Not held me so firmly You would not have won me: I did it to try you, To measure your strength: You were strong and it pleased me." We must have been happy In those fleeting moments When softly we whispered And argued together: I think that we never Were happy again....'"

She marries Philip and joins his family.

"'A quarrelsome household It was--that of Philip's To which I belonged now: And I from my girlhood Stepped straight into Hell. My husband departed To work in the city, And leaving, advised me To work and be silent, To yield and be patient: "Don't splash the red iron With cold water--it hisses." With father and mother And sisters-in-law he Now left me alone: Not a soul was among them To love or to shield me, But many to scold.... Well, you know yourselves, friends, How quarrels arise In the homes of the peasants. A young married sister Of Philip's one day Came to visit her parents. She found she had holes In her boots, and it vexed her. Then Philip said, "Wife, Fetch some boots for my sister." And I did not answer At once: I was lifting A large wooden tub, So, of course, couldn't speak. But Philip was angry With me, and he waited Until I had hoisted The tub to the oven Then struck me a blow With his fist, on my temple.... Again Philip struck me ... And again Philip struck me ... Well, that is the story. 'Tis surely not fitting For wives to sit counting The blows of their husbands, But then I had promised To keep nothing back.'"

A baby is born to her, and her life becomes more and more of a burden to her: one friend alone of Philip's relatives, an old man called Savyèli, has pity on her. Savyèli has been branded as a convict for burying a German alive. She relates now the story of his life and more particularly the account of his crime:

"'"He (the German) started to nag us, Quite coolly and slowly, Without heat or hurry; For that was his way. And we, tired and hungry, Stood listening in silence. He kicked the wet earth With his boot while he scolded, Not far from the edge Of the pit. I stood near him, And happened to give him A push with my shoulder: Then somehow a second And third pushed him gently.... We spoke not a word, Gave no sign to each other, But silently, slowly, Drew closer together, And edging the German Respectfully forward, We brought him at last To the brink of the hollow ... He tumbled in headlong! 'A ladder,' he bellows: Nine shovels reply. 'Heave-to'--the words fell From my lips on the instant, The word to which people Work gaily in Russia: 'Heave-to,' and 'Heave-to,' And we laboured so bravely That soon not a trace Of the pit was remaining, The earth was as smooth As before we had touched it: And then we stopped short And we looked at each other."'"

Matròna gets Savyèli to look after her infant Djòma, and while she is away the pigs attacked and killed him. The country police as the custom is in Russia threatened to hold an inquest unless they were bribed: this Matròna could not afford.

"'"My God, give me patience, And let me not strangle The wicked blasphemer!" I looked at the doctor And shuddered in terror; Before him lay lancets, Sharp scissors and knives. I conquered myself, For I knew why they lay there. I answered him trembling, "I loved little Djòma, I would not have harmed him." "And did you not poison him, Give him some powder?"'"

They refuse to listen to her piteous cries:

"'They have lifted the napkin Which covered my baby: His little white body With scissors and lancets They worry and torture ... The room has grown darker, I'm struggling and screaming, You butchers! You fiends! Oh, hear me, just God! May thy curse fall and strike them! Ordain that their garments May rot on their bodies! Their eyes be struck blind, And their brains scorch in madness! Their wives be unfaithful, Their children be crippled!... The pope lit his pipe And sat watching the doctor. He said, 'You are rending A heart with a knife.' I started up wildly: I knew that the doctor Was piercing the heart Of my little dead baby."

Her husband is taken for the army, and Matròna goes, although her time is on her to bring to birth another baby, to plead for him to the Governor's lady. Somewhat to our surprise she wins her cause and gets her husband back again, but the peasants are cured after hearing her story of imagining that any woman could be happy in Russia.

"'The Tsar, little Father, But never a woman: God knows, among women Your search will be endless.'"

So they continue their wanderings, and having heard many grim stories of all sorts, they remain without a solution to their problem, and the only consolation suggested by the author comes in a subtle touch: a son of a psalm-singer, with a knowledge of, and deep sympathy for, all the down-trodden ones, finds exaltation in putting together songs about their pains and greatness:

"In his breast rose throbbingly powers unembraceable, In his ears rang melody--henceforth undefaceable: Words of azure radiance, noble in benignity. Hailing coming happiness and the People's dignity."

Happiness, Nekrassov concludes, can only be won in doing creative work.

I have, I think, by my copious quotations from his most popular poem at any rate proved his claim to be considered "the Russian Crabbe," the uncompromising realist who can depict the sorrows of the poor with undeflected trueness of aim.

III

PUSHKIN (1799-1837)

It is habitual with critics, especially critics of Russian literature, to probe with a microscopic accuracy into the work of the subject they undertake to explain: they search for psychological phenomena untiringly, and are not content unless they can wrest a secret from the author which the author himself would certainly in many cases never have realised that he possessed. We see this in our own tongue in many of the critical essays on Shakespeare. We see it applied to Pushkin equally unnecessarily; for Pushkin needs no interpreter: he is delightfully human, clear, sincere, impulsive, vital and vivifying, as far removed as possible from any artfulness, the least of a digger in the depths of his own soul imaginable. He is the type of artist who sees Beauty in her naked blaze and straightway reincarnates her because he cannot help it. He is of the earth, earthy in the best sense of the word. The final word about him is that he accepted life open-heartedly and as a consequence requires in his readers an equal open-heartedness and nothing else.

He was brought up as a boy in an atmosphere of that sparkling elegance which we associate with the French, and himself wrote verses in that tongue, by the age of twelve acquiring a real taste in French literature. He revelled in Plutarch, Voltaire, Rousseau and Molière, imitated the French comedies and acted them before his sister. As was customary in Russia, he was, as a boy, allowed free access to the society of the literary and artistic people who frequented his father's house. Here he entered into that life of boundless hospitality, disorderliness, whimsical jollity, and revelry, of erotic and bacchanalian orgies, which were typical of the upper classes of his time.

From his nurse, a life-long friend, he learnt to love the world of Russian folklore.

For five years, from twelve to seventeen, he was at the Lyceum, just then opened at the Tsàrskoye Selò, which reflected among its youthful pupils the same passions of illicit amours, drink, and literature which characterised the parents. They became a sort of jovial anarchists. Like the Elizabethans, they were as often intoxicated with poetry as with wine. Pushkin early became the leader, as was only natural: he was already the best-read man in Russia; he was enthusiastic over the work of his younger contemporaries; he was an ideal companion. Like Milton and most other geniuses of a high order, he recognised his _métier_ very early in his life. He wrote in his teens:

"I am a poet too. My new and modest road Is now bestrewn with flowers by goddesses of singing, And gods have poured into my breast The names, elating visions bringing...."

Not only so, but--

"My pen revels in finding In it the ends of lines. Exactness of expressions Through hallowed crystal shines."

Exactness of expression is as important to Pushkin as it was to Pope, just as fearless honesty was the keystone of his personality.

It was at the public examination of the Lyceists in Russian literature in 1815 that he first came before the public eye. Together with other competitors he had to read his work before the old ode-writer D'erjàvin, who was so thrilled by _The Reminiscences of the Tsàrskoye Selò_ that he wanted to rush forward and embrace the young poet.

Jukòvski, then at the height of his fame, would read his verses to Pushkin and rely on his judgment. When in return Pushkin read _Ruslàn and Ludmìla_, Jukòvski gave the boy his portrait with this inscription: "To the victorious pupil from his conquered teacher."

Such treatment might well be expected to turn the head of the youth, but Pushkin was then, as ever, modest and extremely critical of his own work. He was, as I have said, always searching for hidden genius in others: he it was who first discovered Gogol, and when that Dickens of Russia published _Dead Souls_ and _The Inspector-General_, the subjects in each case being suggested to him by Pushkin, the poet said delightedly: "The rascal robs me in such a bewitching way that it is impossible to be angry with him."

Pushkin's father declined to allow him to take a commission in the Hussars, and at eighteen the poet obtained a post in the Foreign Office, where he had much leisure, and plunged deeper than ever into the excesses common to his time, with the result that, though he swam, rode, fenced and walked to keep himself fit, twice in his nineteenth and twentieth years he nearly lost his health. Nor did his riotous living prevent him from working hard at his poetry.

In 1820 the long fairy tale _Ruslàn and Ludmìla_ appeared. The nearest approach to it in England is _Hero and Leander_--sensuous yet cold. Everywhere it was read, copied out and learnt by heart by tradesman and noble alike. The story was founded on the national folklore. A wicked, humped dwarf carries away the only daughter of Prince Vladimir of Kiev from her nuptial bed to his castle: Ruslàn, the bridegroom, and three disappointed lovers give chase. The adventures of the four warriors, Ludmìla's seclusion in the wizard's castle and Ruslàn's ultimate victory by hanging on to the long beard of the dwarf as he flies over seas and forests form the plot of the story.

The method of handling the story was fascinating, and quite new to Russia. It was vigorous, whimsical, absolutely natural and human: it was this last characteristic in particular which captivated the hearts of the whole race. Russia always loves the natural--but she did not yet recognise why it was that Pushkin especially appealed to her: there had been hitherto no realistic school.

No one realised, Pushkin least of all, that _Ruslàn and Ludmìla_ laid the foundation-stone of all future Russian literature.

The two schools then in existence, the pseudo-classical and the romantic, debated savagely as to which category Pushkin belonged. They were unable to grasp the significance of this bubbling over of human fun, this directness of detail; indignation at such ideas as "Ruslàn's tickling with his spear the nostrils of the giant's head," as bringing the national element into poetry at all, and so on, spread fast.

In the same year Pushkin threw himself heart and soul into the movement of young reformers, and joined the "Society of Welfare," which somewhat naturally roused the Government to action.

Alexander I. was for banishing him; Karamzin, however, pleaded for him with such effect that he was only sent to Bessarabia for a year. His banishment only accentuated his popularity. He took advantage of his retirement to write _The Prisoner of the Caucasus_ in eight hundred lines, the main feature of which is the first appearance in his work of _that grand reverence for women_ which is one of Pushkin's greatest charms.

A man in a Circassian village brings home one day as prisoner a young Russian, who has left his usual world to find freedom in the wilderness: being captured, he is put in irons and left to drag out his days in a cave. A young Circassian girl falls in love with him; he responds out of pity, being in love with another girl at home who did not, however, return his affection. The girl, struck with grief, yet understands, and gives up visiting him secretly, and while the tribe are away raiding she comes with a saw and dagger and gives him his freedom. They part with a kiss of great _human_ love. The young man, touched to the heart, looks back after he has swum the river, but the girl is nowhere to be seen and "only a circle widens on the face of the water, in the gentle shine of the moon." ... The public swallowed the poem greedily, the description of the manners of the Circassians especially attracting them. In another poem Pushkin uses a legend which he came across while visiting the ancient capital of the Crimean Tartars.

The young Tartar Khan, Givèy, captures in a raid on Poland a young Christian princess, Mary, and conceals her in his harem. Her purity and saintly beauty so work upon him that he remains in awe before her. Another beauty, Zarèma, once a favourite of Givèy, implores Mary to make her man come back to her: failing, of course, Zarèma kills her and is herself drowned. The Khan in despair leaves his harem and goes out to wage wars, and returns in the end to build a fountain in memory of Mary, over which he erects a crescent crowned with a cross.

It was at this time that Pushkin fell under the influence of Byron and learned English to do so: not that he imitated Byron, but he was braced up to do something equally good in another way. This was in Kishinòv, a hot-bed of noisy, passionate freethinking blended with Asiatic aboriginality. He fought three duels, one of them resulting from a quarrel at a ball as to whether a waltz or a mazurka should be next on the programme. He then fell in love with a gipsy and joined the camp to which the girl belonged. The result was another poem called _The Gipsies_.

The hero, a man of society, comes to join the free life of a gipsy tribe because he despises the degenerating effect of civilisation. He has had enough of people in cities.

"Of love afraid, they cast off feeling And thought, and barter their free will: Before their idols blindly kneeling They ask for chains and money still."

The gipsies admit him into their careless, free, happy life. Alèko, as they call him, falls in love with the only child of a very wise old man and is happy, just loving, lying about in the sun and taking round for show a tame bear.

Zemphìra, the girl, after bearing a son to Alèko, gets tired of him and falls in love with another gipsy. Alèko feels this very much and complains to her father, who tells him that he too in his youth lost his love in a similar way.

"'And thou didst not kill her lover?'" asks her lover. The old gipsy replies:

"'For what? Man's youth enjoys bird's licence. Who is there that can love restrain? In turn, joy brings to all sufficance. What has been once comes ne'er again.'"

This does not satisfy Alèko, who kills Zemphìra and her lover, after which the old father implores him to leave their free, kind world and return to civilisation.

Pushkin next writes a _Mazeppa_ of his own, the epic of _Peter the Great_, but not idealised as Byron's was.... The heroine Marỳa leaves her lover and becomes insane when her father is executed.

This stern, objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses, and cupids, was like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god ... it is not surprising that it met with little or no appreciation. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as Pope's and as concentrated as Browning's dramatic lyrics. It revealed an entirely new phase in his style: hitherto it had seemed as shining and luscious fruit, now it became a concentrated, weighty tramp of ringing rhyme.

Pushkin has been accused (not by the Russians) of sentimentality ... a charge that can be confuted by quoting almost any of his lines at random.

Does this, for instance, reek of sentimentality?--

"To see you every hour that flies, To follow where your footsteps wander-- Your lip's faint smile, your turn of eyes, On these my thirsting love to squander, To listen to your voice, to grasp By man's soul woman's consummation, To pine for you, wither and gasp, This is a life's supreme elation."

Or this?--

"Just what I was before, the same I am to-day, Light-hearted, ever prone to fall in love again."

Or this Tenth Commandment?--

"In thy commandment, Lord, I read My neighbours' goods I must not covet, But ask me not to rise above it When tender hopes for licence plead: I do not wish to harm my fellow, I never grudge him house or folk: Nor will his cattle e'er provoke My envy--though in hordes they bellow: His wife or ox I never seek, Of asses I am unobservant: But if his youthfullest maid-servant Is pretty! Lord, there I am weak."

He was not given to brooding over disappointment, nor was there any self-centredness about him. Only once, on his twenty-eighth birthday, does he show himself obsessed with the problems of existence:

"Casual present, gift so aimless, Life, why art thou given to me? As by secret judgment nameless, Why is death-doom passed on thee?

Who with hostile power inspired Called me out of nothingness, My poor heart with passion fired, Doubt upon my mind did press?

Aimless is my whole existence, Vague my mind, emotions thin. With monotonous persistence Life out-tires me with its din."

He was, _par excellence_, the singer of _this_ world, reflecting it with a photographic exactness. Gogol called it _reality turned into a pearl of creation_, which is about the best and most concise definition we could require.

As a result of this Byronic obsession Pushkin was sent to Odessa to join the staff of the Governor. But the atmosphere of rectitude and cold officialdom bored him: trying his best was no good here: he was sent into the depths of the country to do easy and interesting reconnaissance work, to investigate the causes and results of the locust plague. The following is his official report:--

"The locust was flitting and flitting: And sitting And sitting sat, ravage committing, At last the place quitting."

About this time he wrote to a friend a letter which was intercepted. It ran as follows:--

"I am reading the Bible. The Holy Ghost sometimes soothes me, but I prefer Goethe and Shakespeare. There is an Englishman here, a clever atheist, who overturns the theory of immortality--I am having lessons from him...."

The reading public got to know of it and devoured it ... officially it led to his banishment to the estate of his parents. His father bullied him so that he begged to be sent to a fortress. Jukòvski intervened and his parents left him to the care of his nurse, and he had two years of quiet, learning more and more of the old folklore. He wrote six long fairy tales of the school of _Ruslàn and Ludmìla_. He wrote the long historical poem _Poltàva_, the novel in verse, _Evgèni Onyègin_, the historical drama in blank verse, _Borìs Godunòv_, the story in verse, _The Bronze Horsemen_, and dozens of shorter poems. He abandoned Byron for Shakespeare.

"Shakespeare," he wrote about this time--"what a man! I am overwhelmed. What a nonentity Byron is with his travesty of tragedy, as compared to Shakespeare." We can trace this influence in _Borìs Godunòv_.

Shakespeare helped him to develop his power of realism: even his wonderland becomes a matter of course--Russia.

_Evgèni Onyègin_ swept the country off its feet. Society suddenly saw the greatness of the simple beauty of Russia, the dignified, lovable Russian woman: in the hero he reflects his own education, tastes and manners: it is the first work of a consciously psychological analysis in Russian literature.

The typical man of society is bored with life because he does not know what real life is: he "hastened to live and hurried to feel" on too narrow a scale. His first blow is the realisation of the fact that the thoughtful girl of seventeen, whose love he neglected early in life, rejects his passion when she, married, is shining and dignified in society life. Then only, being honestly told by her that she still loves him, but is going to remain true to her husband, he flies from the capital, tortured by his first deep heart pain. Here the story ends. At the beginning he kills a romantic poet, Lensky, in a duel, a man of whom he is genuinely fond, but to whose _fiancée_, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face like the foolish moon, he pays court out of sheer devilry. The elder sister, Tatiana, shy and dreamy, and yet clean-cut in character and iron-willed, is the girl who has given her heart to Onyégin and afterwards rejects him. She is as real as Diana Middleton or Sophia Western, as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman, taken straight from life, the crowning glory of Russian life. Mr Baring puts her confession of love on a level with Romeo and Juliet's leave-taking as one of the absolutely perfect things in the literature of the world. It is, he says, a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird's song. It is Pushkin's most characteristic work. It is certainly the best-known and most popular. It is all--like _Hamlet_--quotations! Pushkin himself speaks as having seen the unfettered march of the novel in a magic prism. The scenes are clear, the nail is hit on the head every time, all the labour escapes notice. It arrests the attention as a story, it is amusing; it delights the intelligence. It is simply a story of everyday life executed perfectly by a master spirit.

"'Onyegin, I was younger then, and better-looking, I suppose; and I loved you.... For me, Onyegin, all that wealth, That showy tinsel of Court life, All my successes in the world, My well-appointed house and balls ... For me, are nought!--I gladly would Give up these rags, this masquerade, And all this brilliancy and din, For a few books, a garden wild, Our weather-beaten house, so poor-- Those very places where I met With you, Onyegin, that first time; And for the churchyard of our village, Where now a cross and shady trees Stand on the grave of my poor nurse.

* * * * *

And happiness was possible then! It was so near!'"

The girl beseeches him to leave her.

"'I love you'" (she goes on): "'Why should I hide the truth from you? But I am given to another, And true to him I shall remain.'"

Pushkin's own opinion of the work is shown in the dedication:

"Accept these motley chapters' run, Pages half mirth, half sadness blending, Idealistic, unpretending: The casual fruit of leisure, fun, Insomnia, light inspirations In youthful and unripened years My mind's dispassioned observations, My heart's grave notes on human cares."

In form the novel is like _Childe Harold_. But the descriptions, the irony, and humour are truly Russian.

As an example of all three in one these may suffice:

"For forty years he nagged with his housekeeper, looked out of the window and squashed flies."

"Once upon a time the head of a secret team of gamblers, now he was a kind and simple father of a bachelor's numerous brood, living the life of a true philosopher: planting cabbages, breeding ducks and geese and teaching his youngsters the A B C."

All the characters use genuine everyday speech, and yet the realistic subjects are magically turned into poetry. "One can be a serious man and yet think of the beauty of one's nails."

An example of his descriptive power may be found in this stanza on Moscow:

"O'er the snow-humps the sleigh is dashing, Alongside in the streets are flashing Shops, convents, palaces, mean shacks, Peasantry, country-wives, cozàcks, Gardens of kitchen-stuff and flowers, Street-boys, lamps, chemists, fashion-stores, Churches, stone lions at house doors, Sentries, sleighs, balconies, old towers, Merchants, Tartars that sell old clo' And on the crosses many a crow."

As you can see even from these few extracts, the realism in _Onyégin_ is the realism of Jane Austen--meticulous, correct, amazingly sketched in.

He imitated the Koran, blending sensuality with religious enthusiasm and even the element of nonsense in a way that is inimitably reminiscent of the Eastern Law.

Equally brilliant are his _Imitations of Dante_ ... the Divine Comedy lives again for us in Pushkin's rendering: again, in _The Journeying of Cæsar_, we seem to be reading the Latin classics themselves. But his prose-work as a whole is perhaps below his poetry, though Baring does not think so. Unfortunately in England it is on these very prose works that we have for the most part to rely, because so few of his poems are translated.

He was not born with a passion to reform the world: he was neither Liberal nor Conservative: he was a democrat in his love for the Russian people, a patriot in his love of his country.

There seem to have been in him, however, two distinct spirits, as in so many other Russians--the inspired priest of Apollo and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world. The former characteristic predominated, but the people, his readers, preferred his latter mood; they like the dazzling colours, the sensuousness of his early poems--they could not appreciate the nobler, simpler and more majestic harmonies of _Borìs Godunòv_ and _Onyégin_.

It is this two-sidedness that makes for his all-embracing humanity--Dostoievsky called him [Greek: πανανδρωπος]--this capacity for understanding everybody which makes him so profoundly Russian. He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional and, like Peter the Great, spent his whole life in apprenticeship and all his energies in craftsmanship. He is completely the artist and never the fighter, which explains the coldness of much of his work.

He was no innovator of forms in his verse: he was content to follow the accepted types; nor did he ever fly too high ... he does not try to unlock the gates of the Unknown: the old iambic introduced by Lomonòsov was good enough for him. Only in _Borìs Godunòv_ does he break out into an imitation of Shakespearean form: the play is rather like _Henry VIII._ in its plan: it is a succession of isolated scenes, not a coherent drama; there is no definite beginning or end.

On the other hand his scenes, taken by themselves, tragic or comic, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters all live and are convincing.

As a chronicle it is completely successful. There are scenes so inspired as to be really in spirit Shakespearean, an absence of all conscious effort and visible artifice which only the greatest artists can attain to.

As there are no innovations, so are there no mannerisms: metaphors and similes are few and apt. Of Peter the Great we read:

" ... His eyes Are shining: features awe-inspiring: His movements swift: handsome, untiring, He is like Heaven's thunderstorm."

Wholesome, breezy, clear-cut, genuine, free and honest--those are the adjectives to apply to his art. Unfortunately it is impossible to convey in English the ring and beauty of his original work.

While he was at home the Decembrists' revolt took place, 14th December 1824. He was absent from all his old friends and was naturally concerned about them. He petitioned the Government, signing a pledge never to join any secret society, to give him his liberty. One morning a field-yeger appeared, gave him time to put on his greatcoat and take his money, enter the sledge and dash to Petrograd. After travelling two hundred miles he was brought before the young Emperor and the following conversation took place:--

"Pushkin, I hope thou art pleased with thy return. Wouldst thou take part in the 14th December if thou wert here?"

"By all means, Sovereign. All my friends were in it. My absence alone has saved me."

"Well, thou hast played the fool sufficiently long. I hope thou wilt be sensible in the future, and we shall not quarrel. Send me all thy manuscripts. I shall be thy censor myself."

He was received everywhere with open arms. He joined the main current of social and literary life and speedily electrified society. He was for a little entirely happy, but he had overestimated the extent of his freedom. Gradually he realised that he was not allowed even to read aloud his writings without submitting them to his censor.

_Borìs Godunòv_ was refused on the plea that it would have been better if the author had rewritten it in prose, turning it into a historical novel like those of Sir Walter Scott. Consequently the drama did not appear till 1831, much polished and toned down.

In these last years Pushkin founded and edited a literary monthly called _The Contemporary_, which played a great part in the development of the literature of Russia later on.

The net of officialdom was meanwhile being drawn tighter and tighter round him: he had to attend compulsory meaningless ceremonies at the Court. The Government gave him 20,000 roubles for the publication of his works, and elected him member of the Academy. But they would not allow him to retire from the service. In 1829 he dashed away to the Caucasus without leave.

He joined the ranks and fought, but returned safely. He then married a society beauty whom he loved sincerely but who increased his expenses enormously. He continued to train his talents and wrote a series of brilliant epigrams which increased the number of his friends and foes. He had enemies in every camp.... Meanwhile a young officer, of French and Dutch extraction, by name Baron Dantes, began to press his attentions on Pushkin's wife. Pushkin received a series of anonymous letters ... he, however, trusted his wife completely. She urged him to retire with her to the country to get away from the impending doom, but he challenged the Baron, who had by that time married the sister of Pushkin's wife. Pushkin was fatally wounded in the duel and died mourned by a whole nation.... And what is his legacy? He must have been no mean poet who could induce Turgenev to say that he would burn all his works if he could but have written four lines of the conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet.

His legacy is that he stripped Reality from her daintily-coloured veil--not to show her possible hideousness, but to enjoy the beauty of her form. And beneath his hands nakedness rose like a piece of magic sculpture, warm and breathing of life. His variety and the width of his range are astonishing.

I have attempted to convey something of this. He can write an elegy as tender as Tennyson, a picture of a snowstorm in intoxicating rhythms which would have made Poe green with jealousy; his patriotic poems are lofty and inspired, his prayers humble, sincere and devout. His love poems are as playful as Heine's, as tender as Musset's; he can translate with equal spirit and exactness Byron and Horace, the Koran and Dante. Mr Baring selects two poems as examples of the greatness of his style and the force of his magic.

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine Is the remembrance of delirious days: But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs The past more sorely, as my days decline. My path is dark. The future lies in wait, A gathering ocean of anxiety. But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create, That is my prayer: to live and not to die! I know that ecstasy shall still lie there In sorrow and adversity and care. Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine, Be moved to tears by musings that are mine: And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

The other and greater is _The Prophet_, which is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression: it is, Mr Baring says, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: and he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep; and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with my will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with my word to the hearts of the people.'"

IV

LÈRMONTOV (1814-1841)

Lèrmontov was descended from a Scotsman, George Learmonth, who was present at the siege of a small Polish town in 1613.

He had always been connected with the army: his father was an officer, his mother a young girl, at the time of her marriage, of noble birth: she died at the age of twenty. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who only permitted him to visit his father on very rare occasions. He was in all respects very lonely, entirely without society or friendship, excellently educated by the very best tutors in noble tastes and refined manners, with such success that he knew French, German and English thoroughly before he was twelve. If ever he saw a serf being punished he would immediately give vent to his anger by attacking the torturer with a knife or stones.

He was, in spite of his fondness for other languages, tenacious of his own, and a great lover of Russia. "In the Russian folklore," he wrote when he was fifteen, "told from mouth to mouth there is probably more than in the whole of French literature."

But it was the Caucasus that first led him to creative art. He was ten when he first accompanied his grandmother to that land, whither she went in search of health. It is, I think, worth while to dwell on the beauties of this country in order to see quite what sort of scenery it was that so fascinated the child's mind.

In his fifteenth and sixteenth year Lèrmontov was educated at the University Pension at Moscow, and filled all his exercise-books with poetry, all of which betrayed a deeply impressionable, passionate, highly strung nature, permeated with views quite extraordinary in one so young.

The two years following saw him a member of the University proper, consciously isolating himself from his contemporaries in spite of adequate means; on the other hand, he launched into the sea of fashionable society life.

The influence of an unending round of balls, masquerades and supper-parties prompted him to write drinking songs and epigrams which could not be tolerated by the Press, while at the same time he showed an extraordinary power of detaching himself from vulgarity and giving himself up to his work. Always he would invest his productions with mockery and sarcasm.

During his second year he left Moscow on account of a row which he got into over an unpopular professor, and went to Petrograd, where he joined the fashionable Yunker's School, and learnt some of the joys of military life.

Half his time was occupied in revelling, the other half in seeking some remote class-room where he could work and satisfy his craving to write.

At the age of nineteen he was commissioned and gazetted in the Life Guard Hussars, already the author of _The Demon_, though that poem was still in manuscript. A satirical comedy was censored, and other poems began to appear in the reviews, so that not only the literary circles but Society looked with keen expectation for something good at his hands.

One of his poems in particular at this time attracted attention: it is the author's prayer in dedicating a girl to the Virgin. It was so sincere and simple in its religious tone that some of his critics declared that it was merely a pose of his. They failed to realise that his sanctuary was his supreme elation of love for a girl who answered his feelings by friendship. Lèrmontov loathed the idea of the marriage bond--real love was to him something far higher: his Vàrenka, who married another, was his kindred spirit. She it was whom he dedicated to the Virgin, and this relationship finds expression in several of his poems.

For five years he remained in his regiment, and during this time translated Byron, Heine and Goethe ... then in 1837 came the blow of Pushkin's death, which stung Lèrmontov to such a pitch of fury that he wrote his immortal ode, _On the Death of Pushkin_, which became at once known and repeated throughout the length and breadth of Russia by people who repeated it to, and copied it from, one another:

"And you, the proud and shameless progeny Of fathers famous for their infamy, You, who with servile heel have trampled down The fragments of great names laid low by chance, You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne, Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, You hide behind the shelter of the law, Before you, right and justice must be dumb! But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize; There is an awful court of law that waits. You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds; And vainly you shall call the lying witness; That shall not help you any more; And not with all the filth of all your gore Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."

For this daring outburst he was arrested, tried and banished to the Caucasus, which again acted, as in his childhood, as a direct inspiration. New poems came flying to Petrograd full of human passions, and descriptions of a Nature prodigal and passionate as her devoted lover. No geography book could ever give such a vivid picture of the Caucasus as Lèrmontov's verse and prose. As the Arabs say: "They turn our hearing into seeing." Fame at last descended upon him. Then appeared the "_Song of the Tsar Ivàn Vasìlyevich, the young Opriknik, and the Brave Merchant Kalàshinkov_," in which the Opriknik insults the merchant's wife, and the merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him and is executed for it. The poem is written as a folk-song, in the style of the _Byliny_: as an epic there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it for simplicity, appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness.

Every line begins with an anapæst, followed by some odd dactyls, and ends in a dactyl unrhymed. It has been translated by Madame Voynich admirably, and is published by Elkin Mathews.

While in the Caucasus, his age being now twenty-three, Lèrmontov finished _The Demon_, on which he had been at work for so long.

The personality of this Demon, the Spirit of Exile, is quite different from the Satanic Mephistopheles or Lucifer. With all his contempt for Earth, Lèrmontov's Demon is fascinating in every way. He is always musing over his former days in Heaven, and vainly seeking some relief in the desert of time and space into which he is cast out _alone_; he is the embodiment of the idea of loneliness in a proud soul. His sudden love for the Grùzian girl Tamàra inflames him with the desire of abandoning his pride, of opening his heart to Good, of making peace with Heaven ... we are never allowed to forget that the Angel and the Demon had been brothers. Moved by his love, the Demon is on the verge of humility and of opening his heart to Goodness when his pride and hatred return upon him, due entirely to the tone of enmity which the Angel adopts on meeting him. The Angel is a good hater and thorough in his scornfulness. Being Tamàra's celestial guardian, he becomes quite human and understandable when he meets the Demon (whom he might have conquered by greeting him with Heavenly grace) with icy contempt and threats. Here we have a perfect delineation of the kinship between the spirits of good and evil.

The Demon's wooing of Tamàra is irresistibly bewitching, one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplets of sonorous iambics that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp. Tamàra yields to him (what human girl could have done otherwise?) and forfeits her life, but her soul is borne off to Heaven by the Angel: by death she has expiated her offence, and the Demon is left as before desolate in a loveless universe.

Owing to his grandmother's persistence Lèrmontov was recalled before one of his five years' exile had elapsed, and we see him again in Petrograd with his old regiment, a tremendous source of interest to all society, half of whom hated, while half loved him.

In 1838 _Duma_ appeared, in which Lèrmontov gave to the world his view of his contemporaries: it was the severest indictment imaginable, far saner and truer than Byron's, not of the great Russian nation of course, but of the shallow side of that human nature to which he had allied himself. How clear he was of the shortcomings of that lot of people to which he himself, at least outwardly, belonged, and how deeply it hurt him is proved by the exquisite precision with which he exercised his lancet of lampoon.

It is in form a perfect example of his rhymed and scanned prose as it were--that is, not a single word would have to be altered or shifted if you wanted to write it out in prose. It is the work not of a superficial satirist, but of a deep and profound thinker, of a Shelley rather than a Byron.

In 1840 he was challenged to a duel by a son of the French ambassador, in which Lèrmontov fired his shot in the air and received himself a slight scratch. For this he was again arrested and banished as before to the Caucasus. This, the last year of his life, he spent at Patigorsk, a town forming the centre of a fashionable healing-springs district, at the foot of a mountain range. Here he wrote his only novel in prose, _The Hero of Our Times_, as great a piece of artistry as anything that he did in poetry. It is the first psychological novel in Russia. The hero, Pechorin by name, was undoubtedly Lèrmontov himself, although he said, and quite probably thought, that he was merely creating a type.

This Pechorin is an officer in the Caucasus, who analyses his own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies and faults with extreme candour and frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither of them will admit it: I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a tiring business."

Or again: "I have an innate passion for contradiction ... the presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a passionate dreamer."

On the eve of fighting a duel he writes:

"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage is there, Good-bye! I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born? And I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers: but I did not divine my high calling: I gave myself up to the allurement of shallow and ignoble passions: I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the Executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I am. Some will say he was a good fellow: others he was a blackguard."

From this it may be easily seen that Lèrmontov must have been a most trying companion. He had an impossible temperament, proud, exasperated, filled with a savage amour-propre: he took a childish delight in annoying: he was envious of that which was least enviable in his contemporaries. When he could not make himself successful--that is, felt--by pleasant, he would choose unpleasant means, and yet in spite of all this he was warmhearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love--if he chose.

During the course of this second banishment he took an active part in the fighting with the Circassian tribes, showing striking courage combined with perfect modesty.

This experience was the direct inspiration of _Valèrik_, one of the most beautiful of his long poems on the Caucasus.

After this came his second duel. On this occasion he somehow contrived to offend a somewhat posing officer called Major Martỳnov, who could not bear Lèrmontov's jokes in the presence of ladies. As before, Lèrmontov fired his pistol into the air, but Martỳnov aimed so long that the seconds began to remonstrate. He then fired and killed Lèrmontov immediately.

As a result Martỳnov only escaped the anger of the mob by being arrested.

In 1909 Merejkòvski produced a little book on Lèrmontov as a counterblast to one by Solovyòv in which Martỳnov was hailed as "Heaven's weapon sent to punish blood-thirstiness and devilish lust." It is a blessing indeed that Solovyòv should have been led to attack Lèrmontov, for Merejkòvski was thus brought to criticise Lèrmontov with an amazingly accurate insight. He loved the poet and so his appreciation is the more perfect. "Something like Solovyòv's attitude towards Lèrmontov," he says, "must have been in the minds of the poet's contemporaries and successors. Even Dostoievski mentions him as the 'spirit of wrath.' Nicholas I. expressed grim pleasure at his death. He has been up till now the scapegoat of Russian literature. All Russian writers preach humility, even those who began by heading revolts--Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoi ... here is the one single man who never gave in and never submitted to his last breath ... he is the Cain of Russian literature and has been killed by Abel, the spirit of humility. Solovyòv's cry of 'Devilish superman' is only another proof of the fact that the struggle between superhumanism and deo-humanism is the eternal problem of life." Merejkòvski's idea is that Lèrmontov could remember the past of his eternity ... from the ordinary human mind this previous existence is excluded, we dwell on the eternity to come ... but Lèrmontov never did: his mind was concentrated on what he saw left behind him. From the very first his poetry attracts you uneasily: you may--Russian youths often are--be taught to hate him as a "spring of poison" ... he knew the harrowing threat of fruitless ages. Even as a boy he frequently said: "If only I could forget the unforgettable." His Demon is never permitted to forget the past. He lives by what is death to others.

Pechorin, in _The Hero of our Days_, speaks as Lèrmontov when he says: "I never forget anything--anything."

In one of his poems he laments that his despair is that no love lasts through eternity: he means _his_ eternity. He knows of a kind of existence which is neither this life, nor death as promised by Christianity. That existence is not deprived of love: his idea is that the less earthly, the deeper and greater the passion becomes. The difference between Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations_ and Lèrmontov's is that Wordsworth speaks of these intimations coming to him from outside this world and Lèrmontov speaks from the outside world himself, as one belonging to it, while realising his temporary existence in this world to which he does not belong. This attitude was a continual torment to him; it made him feel very much of a stranger.

"Usually," says Merejkòvski, "artists find their creation beautiful because nothing like it has existed before." Lèrmontov feels the beauty just where it had been always. That is why there is something so individual and inimitable in him when he speaks of Nature: 'For several moments spent among the wilderness of rocks where I played as a child I would give Paradise and Eternity.'

"He is in love with Nature. He longs to blend in an embrace with the storm and Shelley-like catches of lightnings with his hands. It is the only non-earthly love for earth to be found in poetry. Christianity is a movement from here--thither: Lèrmontov's poetry is from there--hither. He was not-quite-a-man encased in a man's shell. He tried to conceal this, because people do not forgive anyone for being unlike them. Hence his reticence, which people mistook for pride. They thought he was untruthful, posing ... while in reality it was his tragedy that he felt out of place here and tried to be like everyone else. This explains his escape into the sphere of dissipations, his cruel attitude towards the girl he deserted ... when he could feel that at last he was like his contemporaries.

"The fourth dimension seemed to be squeezed into the three for a while, and the icy horror of eternity and the inane temporarily forgotten in the warmth of human vulgarity."

This, Merejkòvski thinks, accounts for that amazing child-likeness in Lèrmontov which dwelt side by side with his pessimism, sadness, bitterness, flippancy and sarcasm. He could always play children's games to the state of self-forgetfulness and had no fear of death, because he _knew_ that there was no death.

"His Demon never laughs and never lies; he has something of the child-like in him. He is always genuine, as far removed as possible from Gogol's spirit of mischief or Dostoievsky's wicked, sneering Devil. Lèrmontov's Devil is beautiful, because he is not thought out, but suffered out by the poet himself; he is hardly a devil at all."

There is a legend that once there was a fight between God and Satan and some of the angels were undecided which side to take. In order to help them to make up their mind they were sent to be born on earth, where they should dwell for a little in a limited world: the soul of Lèrmontov had been in his past one of these. That is why his duality was always such a burden to him. This explains many queer things about Lèrmontov: his amazingly deep passion for a girl of nine when he was ten ("I did not know whence she came") and his having drawn a detailed picture of his death many times before his final duel: most strange of all is Merejkòvski's idea that Lèrmontov remembered the future of eternity. Pushkin is the day-luminary of Russian poetry and Lèrmontov is the night-luminary: "It is high time to rise after our final stage of humility and start on our last revolt, and remember that besides Pushkin we have Lèrmontov and his message to the world.... Because in the end Satan will make peace with God."

He owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors and still less to foreign models.

As a schoolboy he imitated Byron, merely echoes these, however, of his reading. Shelley urged him as Byron urged Pushkin to emulation, not imitation. His pride and obstinacy if nothing else would have made him carve out his own path: he chose the narrow path of romance, the Turner method rather than the Constable in his depictions of landscape, as may be seen in _Mtsysi_, the story of a Circassian orphan educated in a convent, who has ungovernable longings for freedom: he escapes, loses his way in the forest and is brought back after three days, dying from exhaustion and starvation. The greater portion of the poem is given up to his confession: he then tells how insatiable were his desires to seek out his own home and people: he describes his wanderings, hearing the song of a girl ... seeing at nightfall the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a fallen star, but afraid to seek it. He then kills a panther and in the morning finds a way out of the woods and lies exhausted in the grass under the blinding sun of noon. He then fancies in his delirium that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream; the fish sing to him in a voice so unearthly that he is enticed and allured as if the fish were the Erl-King's daughter.

In _The Testament_ he rises to an unadorned realism that is little short of magic in its poignancy:

"'I want to be alone with you, A moment quite alone. The minutes left to me are few, They say I'll soon be gone. And you'll be going home on leave, Then say ... but why? I do believe There's not a soul who'll greatly care To hear about me over there.

And yet if someone asks you there, Let us suppose they do-- Tell them a bullet hit me here, The chest--and it went through. And say I died, and for the Tsar, And say what fools the doctors are:-- And that I shook you by the hand, And thought about my native land.

My father and my mother, too! They may be dead by now: To tell the truth, it wouldn't do To grieve them anyhow. If one of them is living, say I'm bad at writing home and they Have sent me to the front, you see-- And that they needn't wait for me.

We had a neighbour, as you know, And you remember, I And she ... How very long ago It is we said good-bye. She won't ask after me, nor care, But tell her everything, don't spare Her empty heart; and let her cry:-- To her it doesn't signify.'"

It is such a poem that led Baring to apply to Lèrmontov what Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth: "there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him." When one passes in review the vast output of his short life, we are struck by the lyrical inspiration, the strength and intensity, the concentration of his power, the wealth of his imagination, his gorgeous colouring and maintained high level.

It is as though he combined the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley, so exquisitely blended is his romantic sense and stern realism. So simple and straightforward is he that his style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness, as in _The Testament_. There is none of the misty vagueness of Keats or Coleridge; he never follows Shelley into the intense inane.

I propose to conclude this chapter with extracts from his masterpiece, _The Demon_, to illustrate, if I can, the amazing achievement of this Lucifer-spirit. He opens with a description of his hero-devil ruminating over his past:

"When, thirsting for eternal knowledge, He keenly followed through the mist The caravans of wandering planets Thrown into vastness; when he list-- The happy first-born of creation-- To voice of Faith and Love, and knew No doubt or hatred; and there was No threat of ages fruitless, dreary, Awaiting him in even rows ..."

Now an outcast:

"He planted sin without enjoyance; His art has never met contest, Has quickly lost its charm and zest, And has become a mere annoyance."

We follow him in his exile over the world through the Caucasus to Gruzia:

"A blissful, brilliant nook of Earth! 'Mid stately ancient pillared ruins, Relucent, gurgling rivulets run And ripple over motley pebbles; Between them, rose-trees where the birds Sing love-songs, while the ivy girds The stems, and crowns the foliage-temples Of green chinàra; and the herds Of timid red-deer seek the boon Of mountain eaves in sultry noon; And sparkling life, and rustling leaves, And hum of voices hundred-toned, The sweetly breathing thousand plants, Voluptuous heat of skies sun-laden, Caressive dew of gorgeous night, And stars--as clear as eyes of maiden, As glance of Grùzian maiden bright! But all this brilliancy of Nature Awoke not in the Demon's soul A moment's joy, nor tender feeling."

We are now introduced to the heroine, Tamàra, whose wedding feast is being prepared:

"Amid her friends, the whole day long Tamàra spent in play and song. The sun, behind a far-off mountain, Is half set in a sea of gold. The maidens in a round are sitting And, to a lilting tune they're singing They clap in time. Tamàra takes Her tambourine, and nimbly shakes It o'er her head; with fleeting motion Now trips it lighter than a bird, Now holds a-sudden in her dance, And casts a shining, roguish glance From underneath the jealous lashes; Her eyebrow curves in coy expression, Her lithesome shape does swift incline, And o'er the carpet slides and flashes Her little foot of form divine.... The Demon did behold her.... Rapture And awe possessed him: and at once The silent desert of his spirit Rang suddenly with joyful tones; And once again the sacred grandeur Of Love and Good and Beauty shone Within his soul.... He felt a sadness strangely new-- As if the overwhelming shower Of feelings rang with words he knew. Was this a sign of renovation? Gone were the words of dread temptation, His mind no more in guile adept. Will he forget his past?... But God Would never grant him this relief, Nor he forgetfulness accept."

Tamàra's bridegroom-elect is foully done to death on his way to the wedding. The bride, fallen on her bed, sobs with a lorn and piteous feeling until she suddenly hears a voice of magic sweetness urging her to cease.

"'Forsooth, the destiny of mortals, Believe me, angel upon earth'" (sings the voice), "'Is not--not for a single moment Of thy dear child-like sorrow worth!'"

He beseeches her to listen to his pleas:

"'As soon as night throws silky veiling O'er Caucasus, and all the world Grows still and fairy-like, bewitched By Nature's magic wand and word; As soon as zephyrs flutter shyly Across the faded grass, and gaily Flies out of it the lurking bird; As soon as under vine and maize The flowers of night find dew, and raise Unfolding petals with relief: As soon as from behind the mountains The golden crescent glides, and steals A glance upon thee furtively-- I shall fly down each night to thee, Shall guard till dawn thy virgin slumber, And on thy lashes dreams of amber I'll waft, to woo them prettily....'"

We are not surprised that fire began to flow along the maiden's veins as she listened to so exquisite a speech. She decides to enter a nunnery to avoid both marriage and the hellish spirit that assails her in dreams. The Devil follows:

"But, filled with fear of sanctity, He dared not boldly force an entrance And violate the sanctuary. Then for a moment was he fain To give up his hell-dark device."

He catches a glimpse of the glimmering lamplight in Tamàra's window and hears a song in the far distance, a song for earth in heaven born and nourished.

"Had, then, an angel flown in secret To meet him as his friend of yore, To sing the byegone joys they cherished, And soothe the sufferings he bore? Then first the Demon knew he loved; Knew how he yearned and longed for love. In sudden fear, he thought to fly ... But in that first, heart-rending anguish His wing was stayed--he had no power! And, marvel! from his veilèd eye There dropped a tear.... This very hour There lieth by Tamàra's tower A stone burnt through by flame-like tear-- Inhuman tear: a sign for aye!..."

As he entered he was met by the guardian angel of the fair sinner, who reproaches the Demon, and bids him begone.

"The Demon's face Lit up with smile of proud derision, His look flashed jealousy and scorn, And in his soul again awakened The former hatred's poisonous thorn."

The guardian angel departs and the Demon is left victor of the field to plead his cause. In answer to Tamàra's question, "'But who art thou? Who?... Answer me,'" he replies:

"'I'm he whose voice has made thee listen Throughout the midnight's calm and rest; Whose thoughts have reached thee like a whisper, Whose vision through thy dreams would glisten, Whose sadness thou hast dimly guessed.... I am the lord of understanding And freedom: I am Nature's foe, The world's despair, and Heaven's woe. Yet at thy feet I worship thee!... I love thee: I'm thy slave to-day.... What is eternity without thee? My boundless realm, when I am lonely?'"

Tamàra then asks him why he loves her, to which he replies:

"'Why do I, fair? I do not know. Since first the earthly world began, In my mind's eye imprinted ever Thine image seemed to fill the ether, And through eternity it ran. In Paradise the glorious years Were lacking only thy creation. Oh, if thou couldst but comprehend The bitterness of my existence Through dreary ages' dread consistence.... Oft through the rack and tempest raging, I rushed at midnight levin-clad, In fruitless hope of e'er assuaging My aching heart's revolt and dread, To kill the pain of mind's regret, The ne'er forgotten to forget.'"

Tamàra is gradually won to listen to his passionate pleading.

"'Whoe'er thou art, my friend so mystic, I list to thee against my will. I know my peace is lost for ever; But thou art suffering, and never I could forget thee suffering still. But if thy words are false and cunning, But if thou plannest a deceit ... Have mercy. What's to thee this conquest? What counts my soul in thy conceit? Oh, give thy oath, thy sacred vow: Thou seest--I fail and suffer now-- Thou seest a woman's tender dreams!... But fear grows less ... To me it seems Thou understand'st and knowest all.... Swear on thy oath, give me a token That sin and wrong thou wilt renounce.'"

The Demon vows fidelity:

"'I swear by dawn of the creation, By the decay of earthly sooth, By the disgrace of crime and evil, And by the triumph of the truth. I swear by flashing hopes of conquest, I swear by bitter pains of fall, I swear by having met with thee, And by the threat of losing all; ... I swear by Hell, I swear by Heaven, I swear by sacredness, by thee, Thy latest look my soul enslaving, Thy first and guileless tear for me; By breath from lips so pure and ireless, Thy silky tresses' wave and shine, I swear by suffering, elation, And by my love for thee, divine.... But here's my offer; all my power I bring to thee, my sanctuary! I seek thy love, I need its blessing; Thou wilt obtain eternity For one short moment. Trust my greatness In love, and wrath, and equity. I, free and wilful Son of Ether, Shall take thee high above the stars, And thou shalt be the Queen of Nature, My foremost love, eternal treasure, Whom nothing equals or debars!... Crowds of ethereal fairy-maidens Will wait, thy every wish to meet. The crown which Evening Star is wearing I'll tear from her, and crown thy head; I'll take the dew from evening flowers To shine on it in diamonds' stead; I'll take a sunset ray of scarlet, And gird thee with its ribbon light; I'll saturate the air around thee With purest fragrance of the night. A never-dying magic music Will charm thine ears by fall and swell. I'll build a palace out of turquoise And pearls and gold for thee to dwell; I'll search for thee the depth of ocean; I'll get all riches from the stars; I'll give thee every earthly treasure-- But love me ...' Closely o'er her bending, He gently touched Tamàra's trembling Lips with his lips burning like fire, Words overwhelming with temptation Were to her pleading his reply.... The evil spirit was the victor ... But poison of his touch inflicted A fatal blow on child-like breast, An agonising shriek, through rest And silence of the hour, broke ..."

The guardian angel returns and banishes the Demon.

"Then at the spirit of Temptation An austere glance the Angel bent: The conquered Demon cursed his longings, His maddening dreams where love had shone; And once again he stood relentless, In scornful arrogance, and dauntless, Amidst the Universe--alone."

Comment on such a poem is needless. I have done my part if I have induced you by my brief extracts to go back to the original and read the whole of it for yourselves.

V

GOGOL (1809-1852)

Nicholas Gogol was born in 1809 near Poltàva and brought up in affluence by a Cossack grandmother: at school he did but little work, but devoted himself with enthusiasm to drawing and the theatre. In 1829 he obtained a Government office in Petrograd. He then tried the stage, schoolmastering, and obtained a Professorship of History; failing in all these, he turned to literature. His first fruits brought him to the notice of the famous literary men of his day, and he became a friend of Pushkin, who proved invaluable as critic and adviser.

For seven years he lived in Petrograd, and during this period began his sketches of Little Russian--that is, of South Russian--life in _Evenings on a Farm on the Dikanka_ and _Mirgorod_. Little Russia differs from Great Russia in having scattered whitewashed houses in place of the regular streets of the villages of Great Russia: separate little farms surrounded by charming little gardens. It is specially attractive in its more genial climate, warm nights, its musical language, the beauty of its people, their picturesque dress and its lyrical songs. There is, too, more freedom in the relations between young men and young girls; there is none of that seclusion of the women which we meet with in Great Russia. The Little Russians have also preserved numerous traditions and epic poems from the time when they were free Cossacks, fighting against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. In Gogol we see a merging of the Great and the Little, for though Little by birth and breeding, he yet wrote in the language of Pushkin and Lèrmontov. From his very first days we feel the richness of his laughter and the whimsical, Puck-like vein of wit which is characteristically Little Russian. It was only later that we feel the unseen tears behind the laughter.

In these we find that quality which we immediately associate with his name, a realism based upon meticulous observation, but merged into it and permeating his whole work is an eerie romanticism, a delight in the supernatural and a deep religious vein which afterwards dominated all the other qualities. His humour is rich and many-sided, ranging from the broad and farcical to a delicate and half melancholy, and later to an almost Swiftean irony.

Right from the beginning we plunge into an atmosphere that brings us at a bound into the very heart of Russia as no other writer has been able to do. In his first stories we hear of water-nymphs, the devil, witches, magicians; in the second, _Mirgorod_, we find him feeling his way towards realism. _The Quarrel of the Two Ivans_ is simply the story of two friends who quarrel over nothing and are just on the point of reconciliation, years after, when the mere mention of the word "goose," which was the prime cause of the quarrel, sets them off again, this time irrevocably. It is in this volume that we come across _Taras Bulba_, now published in the Everyman Edition, a short historical novel in which Cossack life is inimitably set down.

Later in _Arabesques_ and the _Tales_ he leaves the supernatural altogether, and we get such a story as _The Overcoat_, in which a minor public servant who is always shivering dreams of the day when he can achieve his ambition of owning a warm overcoat. After years of poverty and striving he manages to save enough money to buy one, and on the first day he wears it it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his ghost haunts the streets. It sets one thinking at once of that host of failures which exercise so queer a fascination over all later Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky.

Interspersed between the stories came the plays. One has to remember in this connection the exceptionally severe censorship of the stage. It is a matter of no little surprise to us on reading _The Inspector-General_ to think that such a play should ever have been licensed in such a country. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. An ordinary traveller from Petrograd--an intrepid liar--is mistaken for the Inspector and plays up to his part until the arrival of the real one, when he manages to effect his escape.

As a satire on Russian bureaucracy the play has no rival: nearly every character is dishonest, and it is a delight to see them all taken in by the empty-headed hero with his fluent lying. Of all plays which can count on drawing big houses at holiday-time in Russia this stands easily first. It became a classic as soon as it was produced and it is as irresistible in its appeal now as it was when it was written.

Gogol now left Russia and settled in Rome, never to return to his native country.

It was here that he produced his masterpiece, _Dead Souls_, the great comic work of all Russia. Again it was Pushkin who gave him the idea. The hero of the book, Chichikov, conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs, called "souls." Every ten years a revision took place and the landlord had to pay poll-tax on all the "souls" who had died in that period. Between the periods no one inspected the lists. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to get out of the tax by this means; Chichikov would then register his purchases and then mortgage the souls at the rate of three hundred roubles each at a bank in Petrograd or Moscow, representing that they were in some corner of the Crimea, and so make enough money to buy live "souls" of his own.

The book is simply the odyssey of Chichikov all over Russia in his search for these souls: it gives infinite scope to the author, for he can bring in every type of man and woman that he knows. The book was to be divided into three parts, the first of which appeared in 1842: he went on working at the other two parts until 1852, when he died. He twice threw the second part of his work into the fire when it was finished, so we are left with a complete first part and an incomplete second. The third part was probably only sketched. In the second part he meant to show us the moral regeneration of Chichikov: apparently he could not bring himself to believe that he had done this adequately, and he came to be more and more of an ascetic and a recluse as the years passed.

So here once more we get that extraordinary "break" in mid-flight which is so peculiar a characteristic of all Russian writers.

The book made an immediate and lasting impression upon the country. It pleased some by its reality, its artistry and its social ideas; it pleased the Slavophils by its truth to life and its smell of Russia. When Gogol read the first chapter to his master, Pushkin, the latter remarked: "God! what a sad country Russia is!"--a queer comment, you may think, for the most humorous book that Russia has produced. But the truth is that, comic as the best chapters are, Gogol refuses to flatter either his country or the people who inhabit it, and in Chichikov, just as in Oblòmov, most readers find themselves wondering whether after all there is not a good deal of the character there portrayed in themselves, some such scoundrelly ideas, at any rate in embryo. But Chichikov is so shameless, so entertaining, so magnificent a liar, so plausible, so ingenious, in a word, so Falstaffian that he enchants us all. He is always human and the least of a hypocrite imaginable.

In fact Gogol goes further than most satirists in other countries and having laid bare his baseness, turns round and tells us that we have no cause to be angry with him: Chichikov is, after all, only the victim of circumstances, of the ruling passion of gain: like all his countrymen, he is indulgent and charitable: he cannot be brought to condemn. He sees the mean and the common, but he does not conclude from that that life is either of these. Rather does he infer the opposite. Chichikov is great just as Napoleon was great, the victim of a ruling passion and great by reason of it. Our minds immediately turn to Dostoievsky once more, to _Crime and Punishment_, where the chief character tries to be the victim of a ruling passion, not this time of rascality, but fails.

_Dead Souls_ is not unlike _Don Quixote_. It has the same depth: it makes boys laugh, young men think and old men weep.

Its influence was as great on its merits taken as a work of art as on its other sides of philosophy and ideas. Gogol for ever liberated fiction from the grand style. By writing a novel without any love interest, with such a rascal as Chichikov for hero, he created Russian realism. There is no exaggeration, no caricature; there is the instinctive economy, the sense of selection of the true artist.

Just as Pushkin showed his countrymen that there was such a thing as Russian landscape, so Gogol showed them what an inexhaustible mine of humour, absurdity, irony and quaintness lay in the ordinary life of ordinary people.

In 1847 _Passages from a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which changed the opinions of many of his followers from worship to disgust, for he there preached a lesson of abject humility and submission to the Government in matters both temporal and spiritual.

He had shown up the evils of Bureaucracy, his enemies said, therefore it was inconsistent in him not to resist the powers, but he had shown up the evils of misers, the obstinacy of old women, and many other things: he had never pretended to be a Liberal.

His bent lay in the direction of devotion: he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, spending all his money in charity and his time in religious study. There are those who lament that by reason of this we have lost much rich humour, but it may at least be open to question whether we should have possessed so rich a legacy as he has left us had it not been for that very intensity of feeling which caused him to renounce his art, an art which he looked upon as a torch-bearer indicating a higher ideal of living.

While others expended their energies in spreading political ideals in their novels, Gogol was content to give the social element in Russian its prominent and dominating position. He is the living proof, if proof were needed, that realism does not connote a mere anatomy of society, a dwelling upon revolting details, a love of defying convention by fluttering over cesspools and bringing to light, the hidden lower things of life. True Realism does not mean Zola, but Gogol--an all-round view of humanity as it is not seen through the smoked glasses of the romancer nor the microscope of the moral scientist.

VI

TURGENEV (1816-1883)

In Edward Garnett's admirable book on Turgenev Conrad lays his finger with unerring accuracy on the crux of the whole problem with regard to him when he says that we are apt to belittle a consummate artist who is quiet when we compare him with a Titanic, restless genius like Dostoievsky. It is like comparing Jane Austen with Victor Hugo. Incidentally Mr Garnett's book loses much of its value owing to his repeated endeavour to show Turgenev's superiority over Dostoievsky.

As a matter of fact, there is no comparison possible.

Turgenev came of noble birth and began by writing verse, but soon found his proper _métier_ in prose.

For two years he was exiled to his country estate for his quite harmless defence of Gogol. After this term was over he left Russia for Baden and Paris, which accounts to some extent for his aloofness from the problems which perturbed his countrymen, and makes him more a Cosmopolitan than National, like Dostoievsky. His five great novels, _Rúdin_, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, _On the Eve_, _Fathers and Sons_ and _Smoke_, all appeared in the eleven years between 1856 and 1867 and he was at once appraised by all European critics, who discovered in him Russia for the first time, and the Russian woman in particular. His popularity at home was impaired on the publication of _Fathers and Sons_, because the revolutionaries saw in Bazarov, the hero, only calumny and a libel, whereas the reactionary party looked on the book as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he fell between two stools. In Europe, however, he gained larger and larger audiences, until an admiration for his work became the hall-mark of good taste.

But to-day Turgenev holds his own even in his own country, for his exquisite style, the majesty of his poetry and the sureness of his characterisation. Baring finds a parallel to Turgenev in this country in Tennyson, in that they are both Mid-Victorian, both shut off from the world by the trees of old parks; but Major Baring, as it seems to me, is fair to neither genius.

For Turgenev has an amazing insight into men's motives and actions which we do not commonly associate with those who are shut off from the world.

Rúdin is a picture of a type that peculiarly appealed to Turgenev, the Hamlet type of man who can only unpack his heart with words, but breaks down when he is asked to translate his theories into action: he is passionately devoted to Liberty in his eloquent talk and makes Natasha, the daughter of the house in which he is staying, fall madly in love with him and persuade herself that she is ready to fly with him, but he, whose love is more that of the intellect than the heart, fails her and tells her to submit.

He is eventually killed in '48 on a barricade in Paris. In the epilogue we get his character beautifully unfolded to us.

"'I know him well,' continued Lézhneff, 'I am aware of his faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small scale.'

"'His is a character of genius!' cried Bassístoff.

"'Genius very likely he has!' replied Lézhneff, 'but as for character ... That's just his misfortune: there's no force of character in him.... But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sásha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in his blood--that is not his fault--and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use, that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom Nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. Sásha knows what Rúdin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that Rúdin's words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man's eloquence, and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man's ear, happily, is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation he will supply for himself!'

"'Bravo, bravo!' cried Bassístoff, 'that is justly spoken! And as regards Rúdin's influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how to move you, he lifts you up; he does not let you stand still, he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire!'"

In _A Nobleman's Retreat_ we find a man, Lavrètsiy by name, separated from his wife, who meets a good, honest girl, by name Liza: they fall in love with one another: for a moment they are led to believe that his wife is dead, but she reappears and Liza goes to a convent.

But it is in the next two novels, _On the Eve_ and _Fathers and Sons_, that we see Turgenev at his best.

_On the Eve_ is a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the Russia of the fifties.

The central figure of the novel is Elena, who comes near to being the most completely successful heroine in all fiction. We know her through and through, and she is, as are all Turgenev's heroines, well worth knowing. "Her strength of will, her serious, courageous, proud soul, her capacity for passion, all the play of her delicate idealistic nature troubled by the contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness that the dawn of love brings to her, all this is conveyed to us by the simplest and the most consummate art." Her confession (in her diary) of her discovery that she loved the Bulgarian Insarov is in itself an amazing revelation of the working of a young girl's heart. Every side of her nature is shown us. We see her from her father's point of view, which is contemptuous; from her mother's, which is that of affectionate bewilderment; from one of her lovers (Shubin's), which is petulantly critical; from another of her lovers (Bevsenyev's), which is halfhearted enthralment; from Insarov's, which recognises her greatness of soul and sincerity of purpose.

Turgenev's magnificent clear-sightedness never manifests itself so sustainedly as in this book. Not only does each of the characters breathe and move and live from the first page, but politically too the author precisely hits off with his pen the Russian temperament. Of all the great Russian writers he is the least diffuse, the most of an artist. He is, after all, as he himself confessed, not so much a Russian as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe, and it is his mission to stand aloof and describe with absolute impartiality the various types that come before his eye without seeking to make his puppets conform to his own ideas or using them as a peg on which to hang a thesis of his own.

The foundation of his art lies in his portraits of women. Pure, virginal, heroic, self-sacrificing, boundless in their love and devotion to a man or cause, they form a gallery worthy to be set by the side of Shakespeare's and Meredith's heroines. They are very flesh and blood, very woman, and yet altogether fascinating, adorable, steadfast, superbly endowed with all the gifts that make for nobility of soul.

Over the creation of these Turgenev showed himself to be deeply sensitive, responsive to all that is best in the feminine mind, of shrewd insight, unfailingly generous, absolutely sane and level-headed. So perfect is his sense of balance, so consummate his artistry, that his work has been unduly depreciated by some critics: they do not easily forgive perfection of form, absolute harmony of style, a sense of proportion so exquisitely poised as his.

He reminds us again of Meredith in his highly intellectual conception as in his portraits of women. He became almost uncannily prophetic in his utterances about the educated classes and their ideals.

He is so interested in characterisation that he needs no incidents to show the growth of his characters: indeed we are almost taken aback by such a dramatic situation as that of the drunken German being thrown into the lake by Insarov. We feel that the play of character upon character is enough, without fortuitous circumstances of this sort ... but there is never anything repulsively inartistic in his work.

He is melancholy, and there is a strain of sadness throughout all Turgenev's work, but he is restrained: he never gives way to his emotions. He loves mankind even though he is clear-sighted with regard to his failings. As a philosopher he sees no reason to trust in man nor to think much of him: particularly does he lament the absence of men in Russia.

"'O great philosopher of the Russian world!' says Shubin to Uvar Ivanovitch, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose: one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength!...

"'We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere--either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful detail and are for ever feeling the pulse of every sensation and reporting to themselves: "That's what I feel, that's what I think." A useful, rational occupation! When will our time be? When will men be born among us?'"

This is not the man to flatter where praise is not deserved. He rather realises than idealises, and that is why it is so exhilarating and refreshing to come into contact with his women, for we can be sure that he paints as he sees and not as he would wish to see. He believes in his women and makes us believe in them. Stranger still is the discovery that he always draws from life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, on whom the various elements were harmonised together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly." To such purpose did he do this in _Fathers and Sons_ that he roused hostility of so savage a nature that he never afterwards became popular in Russia during his lifetime. On the other hand, "I received congratulations," he said, "almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy."

The type which he here speaks of is, of course, the Nihilist, Bazarov. His readers were swayed by party passion and consequently were unable to accept the portrait as a work of art. The fast-increasing antipathy between the old and new made the reactionaries, who hailed in this novel the picture of the insidious revolutionary ideas current in young Russia, ironically congratulate the former champion of Liberalism on his penetration and honesty in unmasking the Nihilist: the younger generation saw only a caricature of itself. "The whole ground of the misunderstanding," wrote Turgenev, "lay in the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pass through the usual phases. At the very moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as well as a new type I introduced.... The reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist to entertain."

And what is Bazarov? Let us listen again to Turgenev: "I dreamed of a sombre, savage and great figure, only half emerged from barbarism, strong, méchant, and honest, and nevertheless doomed to perish because it is always in advance of the future."

Mr Garnett calls him the bare mind of Science first applied to politics. His watchword is not "Negation," as all his critics averred, but Reality.

His creator, whose first and last words to young writers was, "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations," was driven to confess that he shared all Bazarov's convictions except those on Art. He stands at the dividing-line between the religion of the Past which is Faith and that of the future which is Science. His savage egoism is necessary if he is to break away from all the old laws and customs that men held sacred. His aversion from Art and Poetry is simply due to his refusal to be hoodwinked by glamour. The Englishman sees in him merely the quintessence of bad form, bad taste, bad manners and colossal conceit, but in reality he stands for Humanity awakened from age-old superstitions, Aggression, destroyed in his destroying: he must needs stand alone, and delights in doing so. Despising honour, success, public opinion, he allows nothing, not even love, to come between him and his fixity of purpose.

He towers above all the other people in the novel. If there still remain any who have so far held out against the fascination and consummate mastery of Turgenev, I would ask them to turn again to the twenty-seventh chapter of _Fathers and Sons_ and read aloud the account of Bazarov's last hours. Anything more poignant, more simple and yet more effective than the last scene of the parents at the grave does not exist: there Turgenev in one stroke epitomises the infinite aspiration, the eternal insignificance of the life of man.

So quietly does the artist work that hasty readers fail to realise his greatness after the storm and stress of Dostoievsky or the titanic canvases of Tolstoy: he lacked exuberance: his men are, Hamlet-like, unable to make mouths at the invisible event, ineffectual, their native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought--it is left to his women to be independent, to know their own minds, to be courageous, pure, crystal-clear, simple, strong, no longer mere sexual incidents in a man's life, but helping companions. In his love of language and his power of making us breathe the air of his landscapes he affords an interesting parallel to Tennyson: we find an echo of him in Elena's diary: "To be good is not enough: to do good--yes, that is the great thing in life."

But where he is most himself and most a genius is in his wonderful capacity for making his characters all reveal themselves in the ordinary details of daily life.

VII

GONCHAROV (1812-1891)

Goncharov is important from the English point of view through one book alone. But this novel, _Oblòmov_, far transcends in value many far more famous books that we should do better to leave unread until we have appreciated this most Russian of the Russian works of art.

Oblòmov, the hero of the novel, is a nobleman whose main characteristic is lack of initiative, due primarily to the indolence caused by riches.

"'From my earliest childhood,'" Oblòmov asks, "'have I myself ever put on my socks?'"

We see him first in his lodgings in Petrograd in bed: he is too lazy to get up. Not that he lacked interest in life.

"The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him," Goncharov writes; "the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere far away--probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves into decisions.... Moved by a moral force, he would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect from so great an effort! But--the morning would pass away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline towards rest--the storms in his soul would subside--his head would shake off the worrying thoughts--his blood would circulate more slowly in his veins--and Oblomoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back; looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring house--and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that sunset!"

His landlord wishes him to change his lodgings while his rooms are put into repair. He is terrified at the prospect of going through the trouble of moving.

Later he meets a young girl called Olga, in some ways curiously reminiscent of Turgenev's heroines. She devotes herself to the cause of curing Oblòmov, with whom she falls in love, of his laziness. She tries by every means in her power to rouse him to exert himself in art and literature. At first she seems to succeed: they are about to marry: but his slackness comes over him again; he cannot even take the first necessary steps.

He sinks back into his life of dressing gown and slippers in spite of Olga's splendid efforts to make a man of him. In the end she is compelled to give up the struggle to reform him, and in a parting scene which is as good as anything I know of its kind she describes the sort of life they would lead if she acquiesced in his desires.

"He fell to musing over the words: 'Now or never!' As he listened inwardly to this despairing appeal of reason and will-power, he consciously weighed the little will-power that was left to him, whither he would carry it, into what he would put that paltry remnant. After having pondered over it painfully, he seized the pen, dragged a book out of the corner, and in one hour wanted to read, write, and think all that he had neglected to read, write, and think in ten years. What was he to do now? To go ahead, or to remain? This Oblòmov question was of more import to him than Hamlet's. To go ahead--that would mean at once doffing his comfortable dressing gown, not only from the shoulders, but from the soul and mind; together with the cobweb on the walls to sweep away the cobweb from the eyes, and regain eyesight! What first step should be made for this? Where begin? 'I do not know--I cannot--no, I am begging the question, I do know, and---- And here is Stoltz by my side; he will tell me. What will he tell me? "In a week," he will say, "you must sketch a detailed instruction for your plenipotentiary and send him into the village. Get your Oblòmovka mortgaged, buy some more land, send a plan of new buildings, give up your house, procure a passport, and go abroad for six months, to get rid of your surplus fat, to throw off the weight, to refresh the soul with the atmosphere of which you have dreamed long ago with your friend, to live without a dressing gown, without Zakhar and Tarantev, to put on your own socks and take off your own boots, sleep only at night, travel where all travel, on railroads, steamboats, and then---- Then to settle in Oblòmovka, to find out what sowing and threshing is, why peasants are poor or well-to-do, walk over the fields, go to elections, to the factory, to the mill, the docks. At the same time you are to read newspapers, books, and become excited why the English have sent a warship to the East----" That's what he will say! That's what is meant by going ahead, and thus it is to be all my life! Farewell, poetical ideal of life! That is some kind of a blacksmith shop, not life! There is in it an eternal fire, hammering, heat, din---- But when is one to live? Would it not be better to stay? To stay means to put on a shirt over all, to hear the patter of Zakhar's feet as he jumps down from his couch, to dine with Tarantev, to think less about anything, never to finish the _Voyage to Africa_, to grow peacefully old in these chambers, at the house of Tarantev's lady friend.'

"'Now or never!' 'To be or not to be!' Oblòmov was about to rise from his chair, but his foot did not at once find its way into the slipper, and he sat down again."

The publication of this novel in 1859 produced an instantaneous effect: everyone in Russia who read it recognised something of himself in Oblòmov, and felt the disease of Oblòmovism in his veins.

It is to miss out quite one of the major characteristics of the nation to discount this inertia which pervades every side of life. It is universal in that it expresses ultra-conservative fights to preserve old customs: Oblòmov is remarkable for his inability to put up any sort of resistance to anything; he is frightened of everything, even of love: love is disquieting, restless.

There have been many Oblòmovs in real life among even great Russian writers, though it seems paradoxical to think that any man who achieves fame could ever be preternaturally lazy. Krylov is a case in point.

This poet spent most of his days lying on a sofa: one day somebody pointed out to him that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa was loose, and that the picture would probably fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, "the picture will fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle."

It must not be forgotten that Oblòmov was in all respects save one entirely excellent: he had a heart of gold, a chaste mind and clear soul: it was just that his will was sapped: Olga, even after her marriage with her really splendid husband, continued to love Oblòmov till the end. It was simply that he had forfeited her respect.

VIII

DOSTOIEVSKY (1821-1881)

Quite one of the most remarkable things about Dostoievsky is his complete antithesis to Tolstoy in everything. Tolstoy is healthy, Dostoievsky epileptic. Tolstoy's life was strangely uneventful; Dostoievsky was condemned to death after a youth spent in poverty and misery: he endured four years' hard labour, six years in exile; he was for ever on the verge of financial ruin; his wife, his brother and his best friend all died within a very short time of one another; he was attacked and harassed on all sides; he wrote under the very worst possible conditions, starving, ill and pressed for time. Tolstoy was a heretic and a materialist; Dostoievsky was a devout believer in Christianity; and a mystic. Tolstoy was narrow, while Dostoievsky was one of the most broadminded men who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the supernatural. Dostoievsky lived as Blake did among the unknown, and seemed to regard this world only as fantastic and unreal. Tolstoy was eaten up with pride; Dostoievsky preached and practised a humility almost Christ-like. Tolstoy hated and did not understand Art; Dostoievsky was superbly Catholic and cosmopolitan in his tastes. Tolstoy was characterised by a magnificent intolerance, Dostoievsky by a sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamt of giving all to the poor, and did nothing, while Dostoievsky shared every moment of his life with the lowest criminals: and finally Tolstoy was purposely autobiographical from start to finish, whereas from Dostoievsky we learn nothing whatever from his books. He was as objective as Shakespeare. He does not care to talk about himself. This does not mean that he does not reveal himself in his books. He does, and Christ-like indeed is the character that emanates as the result ... but he does not see himself in all his main characters as Tolstoy does. His sufferings did not make him cynical or cruel; once when a gushing young lady accosted him with "Gazing at you I can trace your suffering," he replied: "What suffering?" He drew but little on his personal experiences. He was passionately Slavophil, and therefore opposed in that to Turgenev, whose genius none the less he perceived and revered.

He was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's daughter, born in a charity hospital at Moscow, brought up in the direst penury. He was, like Goldsmith, quite thriftless, and unable to realise the value of money. Of a confiding nature and withal kindly, he was at the mercy of all those who found it worth while to take advantage of him. Tolstoy, as you will remember, was thrifty and domestic, while Dostoievsky was profuse and a houseless vagabond. Yet another point of divergence. Tolstoy thinks that he hates money, but money loves him. Dostoievsky thinks that he loves money, and money flees from him. As Merejkòvski so neatly puts it, all worldly advantages in Tolstoy are centripetal, in Dostoievsky centrifugal. Tolstoy was careful in spite of the apparent passionateness of his impulses never to overstep the mark; Dostoievsky was for ever giving rein to irregularities and vices: Middleton Murry suggests that he gave way to these on purpose to show his oneness with man in a world to which he could never accustom himself. His first novel, _Poor Folk_, was a prodigious success, which made the failure of the second, _The Double_, all the more terrible to him. From this time his literary career became a life-long and desperate struggle to re-establish himself in the good graces of his fellow-countrymen. Having allied himself about this time with the Petrachevsky circle of socialists and Slavophils, he was one evening led to declaim Pushkin's _Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom_, and in the discussion that followed is said to have declared that if reform could only come through insurrection, "Then insurrection let it be." This was enough to lead to his arrest, and on 22nd December 1849 he was taken with twenty-one others to the scaffold to be executed. All the prisoners were stripped to their shirts in twenty-one degrees of frost and the death sentence was read out. They were then bound in threes to stakes and prepared themselves for death. Suddenly they were unbound and informed that the Tsar had commuted the penalty of death to that of hard labour. But the strain had been too much. From this moment Dostoievsky looks back on a world that he had so nearly left that he could never quite believe that he belonged to it. His four years in Siberia is turned to magnificent use, as we see in _The House of The Dead_, where we see criminals behave exactly as English Public School boys: we never regard them as miscreants, always as unfortunate victims of adverse circumstances. After these terrible times were over he served for three years as a private soldier and was promoted to be an officer. He turned his back on Socialism because of its materialism and atheistic tendency. He had only joined this section of the community because his nature ever made him seek out what was most difficult, disastrous, hard and terrible. During his imprisonment his epilepsy became more pronounced and his fits recurred with alarming frequency. But there was something lofty and jubilant, a sort of religious revelation which he experienced when the sacred sickness was on him that coloured all the rest of his life.

Then suddenly it was as if something had been rent asunder before him, an unwonted inward light dawned upon his soul, he says in one of his descriptions. Again we are led to a comparison with Tolstoy, for whom with his superb animal vitality the light of death is thrown on life from without, whereas for Dostoievsky the revealing light comes from within. Life and death are one to him; to Tolstoy they are in eternal antagonism.

The former with the eyes of the spirit world looks on life from a footing which to those who live seems death, while the latter looks at death from within the house of life with the eyes of this world.

From his earliest youth Dostoievsky was an omnivorous reader, revelling in and appreciating not only Homer, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Schiller and Hoffmann, but also all the great French classics of the seventeenth century: throughout his life he kept alive his passion for universal culture. He is at once that most curious anomaly, the most Russian of the Russians, and yet the greatest cosmopolitan, and herein once more shows his complete difference from Tolstoy, who, trying to become cosmopolitan, ended by living more completely limited by place and time and nationality than almost any other writer we know. The enthusiasm for the distant simply did not exist for him: every fibre and root in him is fixed in the present. He visited Italy and brought therefrom no impressions. He is unable to appreciate either Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Wagner or Beethoven. He even comes to regard all his own work as bad art, with the exception of two tales which are easily his weakest. He was never a man of letters as Dostoievsky was. All his life he was ashamed of literature, while Dostoievsky loved it. He was proud of his calling and counted it high and sacred, though he valued his creations in terms of cash.

"Many a time," he writes, "the beginning of a chapter of a novel was already at the printer's and being set up while the end was still in my brain and had to be ready without fail next day. Work out of sheer want has crushed and eaten me up."

He complains that Turgenev, who has two thousand serfs, gets a hundred and fifty pounds, while he, needy as he was, got only thirty-eight pounds. "Poverty forces me to hurry, and so, of course, spoils my work." Endlessg rows of figures and accounts, interspersed with desperate entreaties for help, fill all his letters.

He edited a paper, the _Vremya_, which met with some success and promised a regular income. Without warning the periodical was prohibited by the censor for publishing a quite harmless article on Poland. Undaunted, he started another venture, the _Epocha_, which incurred the wrath not only of the Government but also of the Liberal party. It was at this time that his brother Michael, his dearest friend Grigoviev, and his first wife, Maria, all died.

"And here I am left all alone," he writes, "and I feel simply broken. I have, literally, nothing left to live for." The _Epocha_ failed, its editor became temporarily insolvent, having debts amounting to one thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven hundred pounds in debts of honour. He starts feverishly on a novel to begin to pay the load off. In the end, to avoid the debtors' prison, he is forced to fly the country. He spent four years of incredible extremes of want abroad, pawning even his "last linen" to keep going.

"They expect literature of me now," he moans. "Why, how can I write at all? I walk about and tear my hair and cannot sleep of nights. They point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them see the state in which I have to work."

And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him, starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circumstances which would have crushed him.

"I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'"

And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers, harassed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wrote _Crime and Punishment_, _The Idiot_ and _The Possessed_, and even planned _The Brothers Karamazov_.

He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and criminal depths of the human heart, especially the passion of love in all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual passion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, "the she-spider who devours her own mate," in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.

At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:

"At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery. My squalid passions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of secretiveness: I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met, recognised."

Sexual passion appears with him at times a cruel, coarse, even animal force, but never unnatural or perverted.

To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of Dostoievsky in the words, "Live decently I cannot."

He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen shillings a month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.

"'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have overshot the mark.'"

The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.

When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.

"But where is Sonia? I want Sonia."

On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the message that he leaves for us to pick up?

"'Love all God's creation--every grain of sand,'" says Zossima, "'every leaf, every ray of God, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at God's secret in things.'"

Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we hear.

Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a single day he can make us feel that we have lived through æons.

Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.

Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that "she does not condescend to be clever." Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion, abstract thought may be passionate: all passions and misdeeds in his work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the main, God. They are all "God-tortured." This insatiable religious thirst is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of the soul.

Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths hitherto undreamt of and unplumbed.

He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he depicts for us.

"What matter if it be a morbid state?" he writes. "What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?"

This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the final emancipator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look forward to recognition as a prophet.

Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia, whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become strangely fantastic and bizarre.

"I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art," he confessed, "when, so to speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the real."

This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.

The demon Smerdyakov in _The Brothers Karamazov_ pines for solidity, corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.

"'I am dreadfully fond of realism--realism, so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become superstitious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in all that she believes.'"

As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennui--magnificently bored. Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners. Dostoievsky is always trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon really tries to explain his point of view.

"'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with them all "Hosanna," there already escaped, there already broke from my breast ...

"'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But common-sense--my most unfortunate quality--kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pass. For what, I asked myself at the time, what would have resulted after my "Hosanna"? That instant all would have come to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break out into a "Hosanna" and instantly the indispensable minus quantity would vanish. Reason would begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown which will be the purer of the two.'"

Samuel Butler in a note called _An Apology for the Devil_ says: "It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books." After reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ we may take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.

That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion. And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds that he cannot accept the world as God has made it. That any innocent child should have to suffer makes any question of future recompense intolerable. It is not that he does not accept God, he most respectfully hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can obliterate needless suffering.

Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: "'Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it.'" That is the secret of Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness and light, good cheer and reasonableness.

In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. "Be no man's judge: humble love is a terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and be not afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children and as the birds."

The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.

"His friends were exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

IX

TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

Tolstoy was born in the estate of Yàsnaya Polyàna: after the death of his father in Moscow, where they went when he was nine, the novelist returned to his home and graduated at the University of Petrograd in 1848, and shortly afterwards entered the army, and was stationed in the Caucasus, where he began his literary career. He took part in the Crimean War and afterwards settled in Petrograd, where he grew more and more dissatisfied with existing conditions. In 1862 he married and returned once more to Yàsnaya Polyàna. Here he devoted himself to the education of the peasants and edited an educational paper: soon afterwards he assumed a negative attitude to all progress and wrote many novels. Later he urged men to occupy themselves in manual labour, and in the year of his death left his home to put his theories more completely into practice, but died at a wayside railway station. Everything that Tolstoy wrote is autobiographical, so it is unnecessary to dwell further on the bare facts of his life. Like all Russians, he acts upon impulse; unlike Oblòmov, he is first of all the man of action: he asks himself with unwearying persistence, "What is the purpose of my life?" and his answer is: "The purpose of my life is to understand, and as far as possible to do, the will of that Power which has sent me here, and which actuates my reason and conscience." He seeks goodness rather by the head than the heart; he begins with the understanding. As a novelist he keeps closer to actual life than the others, because he has lived his incidents before he writes about them. He is first and foremost a seeker after God: he abjures literature and art through pride, and thinks that truth is to be found only in working like a peasant: he was unable himself to do this because his wife refused to allow him to. "For ourselves we may do what we like, but for the sake of our children we may not," was her contention.

No man ever more truly exemplified the meaning of Bacon's aphorism that "he that is married hath given hostages to fortune."

He had the pride of Lucifer or Lèrmontov's Demon, and yet he spent his life searching for the ideal humility of Dostoievsky's Myshkin, the pure fool, the divine idiot.

He starts by advocating non-resistance to evil, and ends by passionately resisting it.

From the beginning we find in him a supreme love of himself, a man interested only in Russia, an amazing lack of sympathy with culture, an astonishing want of taste (a lover of Dumas in his youth, he later on pins his faith to George Eliot and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_). He was quite ignorant of life owing to his wealth.

But by far the most outstanding characteristic of this genius is his perfect paganism: he is always seeking for the divine in the animal. Like so many great Russians, he changed his whole life at one period of his existence.

In 1879 he explains this in a most illuminating passage:

"Five years ago something very curious began to take place in me: I began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know how I was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then, 'What next?' I had lived and lived, and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice: I saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but destruction. With all my might I endeavoured to escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my boot-laces, that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my room when undressing alone at night; and ceased to take a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing myself of life."

He was saved from this mood by becoming friendly with the labouring classes.

"I lived in this way, that is to say, in communion with the people, for two years; and a change took place in me. What befell me was that the life of our class--the wealthy and cultured--not only became repulsive to me, but lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments, science and art itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realised that it was all self-indulgence, that it was useless to look for any meaning in it. I hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become clear to me."

Here as always he unfolds to us all that he knows about himself.

At one moment self-conscious, good and weak, he controls himself, repents, and cultivates loathing of himself and his vices; at another, unconscious, wicked and violent, he fancies himself a great man, who has discovered for the welfare of all mankind new truths, and with a proud consciousness of his own merit looks down on other mortals. In other words, he is imbued in one mood with self-love, in another with self-hate. It is always self.

Then come those twenty happy years immediately after his marriage, years of complete isolation and happiness, in which he learnt to live according to "the one truth, that you must live in such a way as may be best for you and your family."

In the words of Ecclesiastes: "He undertook great things: he built himself houses, and planted vineyards, he made gardens and groves, and placed in them all manner of fruit trees, he made himself cisterns for the watering of the groves, he got himself men-servants and maid-servants ... and he became great and rich, and wisdom dwelt with him."

And yet there lies the dread of death lurking always in the dim background. Brave enough when confronted with actual danger, he was yet terrified at the thought of passing into nothingness. The truth as he came now to see it consisted in casting out the desire of lands and money; so he determined to leave his home, his wife, his children, his lands, to give away his six hundred thousand kopecks and become a beggar.

"I shall look," he says, "for my friends among the peasants. No woman can stand to me in the place of a friend. Why do we deceive our wives by pretending to consider them our best friends? For it certainly is not true. Woman is, in all respects, morally man's inferior."

"Nowadays," writes his biographer, "Leo behaves to his wife with a touch of exactingness, reproachfulness, and even displeasure, accusing her of preventing him from giving away his property, and going on bringing up the children in the old way. His wife, for her part, thinks herself in the right, and complains of such conduct on her husband's side. In her there has involuntarily sprung up a hatred and loathing of his teaching and its consequences. Between them there has even grown up a tone of mutual contradiction, the voicing of their complaints against one another. Giving away one's property to strangers and leaving one's children on the world, when no one else is disposed to do the same, she not only looks on as out of the question, but thinks it her duty as a mother to prevent."

"'Should I not have gone with him,' she cries, 'if I had not had young children? But he has forgotten everything in his doctrines.'"

Then comes the final decision.

"Leo's wife, in order to preserve the property for her children, was prepared to ask the authorities to appoint a committee to manage the property. Not wishing to oppose his wife by force, he began to assume towards his property an attitude of ignoring its existence; renounced his income, proceeded to shut his eyes to what became of it, and ceased to make use of it, except in so far as to go on living under the roof of the house at Yàsnaya Polyàna."

His wife continues to look after his wants and turns a blind eye to his doctrines; she is always ready to help him. Even if he seems ungrateful and says that his wife is no friend of his, she finds comfort in the realisation that he cannot get along without her for a day, and that she has made him what he is. Life becomes one golden holiday: there is an air of infectious jollity pervading the household. He finds sheer animal delight in his physical vigour, and yet ... and yet.... Is he not thinking of himself (as usual) when he writes:

"One refined life, led in moderation and within the bounds of decency, of what is commonly called a virtuous household, one family life, absorbing as many working days as would suffice to maintain thousands of the poor that live in misery hard by, does more to corrupt people than thousands of wild orgies by coarse tradesmen, officers or artisans given to drunkenness or debauchery, who smash mirrors and crockery for sheer fun."

It was at this time that he found out that his books were becoming a source of commercial prosperity to him. At first he refused to listen when there was talk of money in connection with his books, but the Countess, to secure the future of her children, stood firm.

Tolstoy was, as is well known, remarkable for the few friendships which he formed. The notable exception is, of course, Turgenev, who wrote of him: "His chief fault consists in the absence of spiritual freedom. He is an egotist to the marrow of his bones." Despite his constant asseveration that he always confesses everything, this is the one trait he dare not divulge, even to himself.

Dostoievsky calls him "an ordinary Moscow fop of the upper class," "an empty and chaotic soul," _fainéantise_ ... but he was more, much more than this. As Merejkòvski says, he came very near to solving the supreme mystery, to lifting the veil in the Holy of Holies.... In the end despairingly he has to cry: "I am a fallen fledgling lying on my back and crying in the high grass." He finds nothing, no faith, no God, for all his seeking. His path lay in pursuing his ideal through things terrestrial, in carrying on those moments when he rolled in self-admiration in his tub as a naked child, when he felt the fresh touch of the cherry-tree boughs, like a child's kiss, against his face.

In all literature there is no writer equal to Tolstoy in depicting the human body. He is accurate, simple and as short as possible, selecting only the few small unnoticed facial or personal features, and producing them gradually he distributes them over the whole course of the story.

The wife of Prince Andreï in _Peace and War_ is for ever recurring to our memory owing to the fact that we are constantly reminded of her short downy upper lip. Prince Andreï's sister, too, is always fixed in our minds owing to her trick of flushing in patches and walking heavily. There are countless instances of this. There is the long thin neck of Verestchagin, the swollen neck of Prince Andreï, the rotundity of Platon Karataev, the little white hand of Napoleon. All these details are impressed upon us with unwearying insistence until we come to realise that this is Tolstoy's peculiar method of unfolding before us the psychology of his characters. He has the gift of insight into the body of his _dramatis personæ_. Think for a moment of Anna Karènina. Trait is added to trait, feature to feature ... she has red lips, flashing grey eyes, and most noticeable of all, her hands are made to express her more even than her face. In them lies the whole charm of her person, the union of strength with delicacy.

We learn that she always held herself exceptionally erect, that she has a quick, decisive gait, when she dances she has a distinguishing grace, sureness and lightness of movement. Tolstoy emphasises again and again the roundness of her arms, the unruliness of her curls; the traits are so harmonised that they naturally and involuntarily unite, in the fancy of the reader, into one living, personal whole. We feel how easy and pleasant it is to the author to describe living bodies and their movements, not only of people, but also of animals. Even the Tartar footmen who wait on Levine are said to be broad-hipped, an unnecessary touch which shows us how much this sort of bodily accentuation can be carried to excess.

For there is no doubt that Tolstoy relies on gestures where another writer would have had recourse to words. He uses this convertible connection between the external and the internal with inimitable art and exquisite effect. It is the silent smile of Natasha which decides the fate of Pierre far more effectively than any words.

So peculiar is this gift that it has been said that the nervous susceptibility of people becomes different after reading Tolstoy's works. He notices what has escaped everyone else, and uses his discovery with a subtlety of effect that is startling. Thus it is to him that we are indebted for the simple but none the less surprising fact that a man's smile is reflected not only in his face, but also in the sound of his voice.

Thus Platon Karataev says something to Pierre "in a voice changed by a smile." Tolstoy was the first to notice that horse-hoofs have the queer effect of giving, as it were, a "transparent sound." As we should expect from so "animal-loving" a man, Tolstoy sounds every note in sensation. He is equally able to fathom the sensation of her bared body to a young girl, before going to her first ball, and the feelings of an old woman worn out with child-bearing, and those of a nursing mother who has not yet severed the mysterious connection of her body with that of her child. Even the sensations of animals are familiar to him. Not the least of his gifts to us is that he gave us new bodily sensations. He is the greatest portrayer of the physico-spiritual region in the natural man: that side of the spirit which most nearly approximates to the flesh. He is a man of the senses, half-pagan, a fraction Christian: in the region of pure thought, where Dostoievsky walked at ease, superbly master, he is totally at a loss. But within the limits of the animal in man he is the supreme artist of the world.

In _War and Peace_ Tolstoy meant to give us what is commonly known as an historical novel: on laying it down we feel, not that we have lived in an age long past side by side with Napoleon, or fought at Borodino, but that these characters have been transplanted to our own age, and that he is depicting men and women whom we already know very well. The poverty of his historical colouring is amazing: where he depicts reality, the "natural" man, his language is distinguished by unequalled simplicity, strength and accuracy, but directly he gets on to the subject of abstract psychology he is lost; his very language seems to become helpless. When he leaves the passions of the heart for the passions of the mind he becomes obscure, ungrammatical and false. Compare Irteniev, the hero of _Childhood and Youth_, with Nekhlindov in _Resurrection_. The former is distinct, unforgettable, alive ... the latter a lifeless abstraction, a dreary megaphone. He cannot create human souls with anything like the success he achieves with human bodies.

We see this best of all in the case of Natasha, in _War and Peace_. She seems at the end of the book to have lost her soul in her body, and become a mere prolific she-animal, living solely for her children and husband. She has become divinely fleshly. "'We may run risks ourselves, but not for our children,'" she remarks to Pierre when he wishes to give away his property, echoing what Tolstoy's own wife said to him on a similar occasion.

Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon--all pass forgotten as if written on sand, but Natasha remains, Natasha, the eternal mother, triumphantly waving "swaddling clothes, with a yellow stain instead of a green," the divine animal. The swallowing up of the human individual in the universal is Tolstoy's unvarying theme. Natures swallows up Uncle Yeroshka ("I die and--the grass grows"), child-bearing absorbs Natasha, sinful, destroying love swallows up Anna Karènina. She is all compact of love. Her words are poor: Tolstoy is always poor in dialogue. His excellence lies, as may have been guessed, in descriptions. One might almost say that his characters only speak because the mechanical conformation of their mouths admits of it.

What do we know, for instance, of Anna? What does she think about Children, People, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death and God? We don't know. But, on the other hand, we do know exactly how her slender fingers taper at the end, what a round, polished neck she has, how her curls flutter on her neck and temples; every expression of her face, every movement of her body we do know.

He probes the human till he reaches the animal, and so, as in the case of Vronsky's mare, Frou-frou, he probes the animal till he reaches the human. He brings the likeness of God to the image of the beast.

There are in Tolstoy's books no heroes, no characters, no personalities ... and hence there is no tragedy, no catastrophe, no redeeming horror, no redeeming laughter. The principals are all clever, honourable, good, simple, naïve or kindly, yet we never feel at home with them. There is always present that feeling with us that he lacks spiritual liberty, as Turgenev said. It is due entirely to his too great sense of the body, too little sense of the spirit.

X

TCHEHOV (1860-1904)

Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupassant is to French, but he has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with the middle classes, minor officials and the professional classes. Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like "ennui," "greyness," and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed playing vint.

Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had sunk back into torpor: the disease of Oblòmovism had a firm grip of them.

He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a good education, finishing at the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing, which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year in artistry.

His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life, especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the all-pervading meanness of everyday life.

I will treat first of his dramas.

The Russians, it must be premised, go to the theatre to see what they would see off the stage: they are incurably realistic. They do not take a delight, as we do, in huge catastrophes: they like to see the trivial incidents of ordinary life reproduced with life-like accuracy on the stage.

He wrote in all eleven plays, five of which are serious: the remaining farces need not detain us. He discovered that life can be made interesting and dramatic with indulging in heroics. He is always human, and makes us feel moods and sensations over again which we have often felt before. He seems, in other words, to make his plays out of nothing, without having recourse to action or any extraordinary phenomena.

We are not introduced to men and women stripped of the masks which they wear in ordinary life: his characters behave exactly as they would off the stage, and betray themselves as people do by a phrase, a gesture, the humming of a tune and the smell of a flower.

In The _Seagull_ we are introduced to the family of Sorin, whose sister is a famous actress called Arkadina. Preparations have been made for some private theatricals written by Arkadina's son, Constantin. The chief part is to be played by Ina, the young daughter of a neighbour who is in love with Constantin, who is full of ideals about reforming the stage. A well-known writer, Trigorin, a man of about forty, is staying with Sorin at the time.

The play is acted: Arkadina labels it decadent; Constantin gets annoyed. Ina after the performance is introduced to Trigorin. The daughter of an agent who has witnessed the performance (her name is Masha) confesses to a doctor visitor that she is in love with Constantin, and the curtain falls on Act I.

The second Act takes place in the same house. Constantin brings in a dead seagull, and lays it at Ina's feet as a symbol which she fails to understand.

Trigorin in the course of a conversation with her tells her what it feels like to be a famous author.

"'What is there so wonderful about it? Like a monomaniac, who is always thinking day and night of the moon, I am pursued by the one thought which I cannot get rid of, I must write, I must write, I must. I have scarcely finished a story when I must write a second, then a third, then a fourth. I write uninterruptedly, I cannot do otherwise. What is there so wonderful and splendid in this, I ask you? It is a cruel life. I get excited with you and all the time I am remembering that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud which is like a piano, and I at once think that I must remember to say somewhere in the story that there is a cloud like a piano.

"'When I write it is pleasant, and it is nice to correct proofs: but as soon as the thing is published I cannot bear it, and I already see that it is not at all what I meant, that it is a mistake, that I should not have written it at all, and I am vexed and horribly depressed. The public reads it, and says: "Yes, pretty, full of talent, very nice, but how different from Tolstoy!" or "Yes, a fine thing, but how far behind _Fathers and Sons_: Turgenev is better." And so, until I die, it will always be "pretty and full of talent," never anything more: and when I die my friends as they pass my grave will say: "Here lies Trigorin; he was a good writer, but he did not write so well as Turgenev."'"

This reads like that very rare thing in Tchehov, a confession of the author himself.

However that may be, Ina replies that to her it is none the less a most wonderful gift that he possesses. For her part, for the joy of being an artist she would bear the hate of friends, want and disappointment. Trigorin then notices the seagull and is driven to turn it into copy at once.

"'An idea has occurred to me,'" he says, "'for a short story. On the banks of a lake a young girl lives from her infancy. She loves the lake like a seagull, she is happy and free: unexpectedly a man comes and sees her and out of mere idleness kills her, just like this sea-gull.'"

That is the end of the second Act.

In the third Act Ina has fallen in love with Trigorin. Constantin out of jealousy has tried unsuccessfully to kill himself and challenged Trigorin to a duel, of which he takes no notice. After a quarrel with his mother, which is made up, Constantin is inspired to take up the threads of life again. We now discover that Trigorin has been and is Arkadina's lover. Ina tells the famous author that she is going to follow him to Moscow and they part on a note of passion. Two years elapse.

In the fourth Act we find that Constantin has become famous: Ina has gone on the stage and failed. She has had a child (which died) by Trigorin: he has returned to Arkadina and deserted Ina, who has been thrown over by her parents too. She enters and tells her story, and Constantin declares that he still loves her in spite of all, but she is still in love with Trigorin. Constantin, hearing this, can bear up no longer, but shoots himself.

Such is the rather grim plot: the characterisation is well-nigh faultless, especially of Arkadina, the loving mother, who is quite unable to appreciate her son's talents, and of Trigorin, the weak, vain egoist, who is without a vestige of ill-nature or malice.

_The Cherry Garden_ was his last play and sounds a note of hopefulness which re-echoes through all his stories. Though the present may be black and bitter, Tchehov always looks to a future where ideals shall once more reign.

In the first Act we see the return of a lady who is heavily burdened with debts to her estate in South Russia. It is the month of May and the cherry orchard is in full blossom. We get the exact atmosphere of the arrival of people from a journey and the return of a family to a home from which it has long been absent.

The lady, Ranievskaia, is a child in financial matters and, Micawber-like, imagines that someone or something will turn up to extricate her out of her difficulties. A merchant neighbour of singular astuteness propounds a solution. If they cut down the cherry-trees and let the land for villa holdings they will ensure an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year at least. They regard this idea as quite out of the question. They refuse to listen to such a ridiculous suggestion. They revert to their Micawber-like attitude and wait for an aunt to die and leave them a legacy and something of a like nature.

In the third Act we arrive at the day of the auction when their house and property are to be sold over their heads. Nevertheless they are holding a dance in spite of it. The merchant enters and announces that he has bought the cherry orchard.

In the last Act we see them leaving their house for ever; the trees are already being cut down and the house is going to make room for neat suburban villas. The pathos and naturalness of this Act are extraordinary. Every character in the play lives. It is historical and at the same time symbolical, because it shows us why the landed gentry in Russia has ceased to have any importance and how these unpractical, amiable people must go under when faced by energetic, rich, self-made men. The play seems to be about nothing and yet every casual remark has always a definite purpose.

_Three Sisters_ represents the intense monotony of provincial life, relieved momentarily by a passing flash, and then rendered doubly grey by the disappearance of the flash. A regiment of artillery comes to the garrison of a small town. One of the three sisters, Masha, has married a schoolmaster: the two others, Irina and Olga, are living with their brother, who is a professor. Irina is in the telegraph office, Olga teaches. They live for one thing only, to get away and settle in Moscow. They only remain on Masha's account. Masha's husband is an exceedingly tedious schoolmaster, who is always reciting tags of Latin. Once his wife thought him the cleverest man in the world, now she thinks of him as the kindest but most tedious.

When the play begins we hear of a new commander appointed to the battery. His name is Vershinin and he is married to a half-mad woman. Other officers are Baron Tuzenbach and Major Soleny. The former is in love with Irina, who is willing to marry him but does not love him. Masha falls passionately in love with Vershinin. The Major is jealous of Tuzenbach. Suddenly the battery is transferred to some remote corner of the country. Soleny challenges the Baron and kills him. The three sisters are left alone, Vershinin bidding a passionate farewell to Masha, who does not even trouble to hide her grief from her husband. He in a most pathetic way tries to console her: Ina does not care even when she is told of the death of the Baron ... and so the sisters are left to go on working in their misery, deprived even of the flash which promised to lend some colour to their existence. It is, of course, impossible to deny that these plays are laden with gloom, but it is the darkness of the last hour before the dawn. Tchehov never despairs: he has an invincible trust in the coming day. He shows us how difficult life is, that there is nothing to be done but to continue working as cheerfully as we may, but in doing so he fulfilled the first condition of all great writing: he never failed to interest, and consequently his plays are, in spite of their sombreness, a never-failing fount of inspiration and æsthetic delight.

As a short story-writer he has certainly no equal in Russia and few in any other country.

Owing to the indefatigability of Mrs Constance Garnett we now possess eight volumes, all containing priceless cameos of Russian life, ranging through the humorous, the bizarre, the mystic, the unconventional and lawless to the pathetic, poignant and dramatic.

He is unflinching in his realism, but passionately devoted to his search for truth and full of a poet's sensitiveness to beauty. He is softer, warmer, altogether kindlier than Maupassant. Even the odious characters are seen through the eyes of a kindly creator who never descends to hardness or bitterness. Indeed this faculty of refraining from judging others is almost the most peculiar feature of Russian writers taken as a whole. They are many degrees nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than any other Christian country, if this virtue is really so valuable as the New Testament insists. There is nothing cynical in Tchehov's melancholy. He accepts the world with all its glaring, tangled skein of inconsequences and wickedness and foolishness and humorously transcribes what he sees in a mood of cool, scientific passivity blending with the sensibility of a sweet, wholesome, responsive nature. Unlike Dostoievsky, he seldom identifies himself with his unfortunate characters.

The first story in the series edited by Mrs Garnett is _The Darling_, which treats of a woman who shares her first husband's anxiety about his theatre; throws herself into the interests of the timber trade in which her second husband works; under the influence of her third begins to regard the campaign against the foot and mouth disease as the most important matter in the world and is finally left engrossed in grammatical questions and the interests of the little schoolboy in the big cap.

She devotes herself with her whole being in each case to the man and the cause he represents. And Tolstoy in his criticism thinks that Tchehov set out to scoff at her inconstancy. Yet do we laugh at Dryden's frequent change of front? Is it not a sign of life and growth to throw oneself heart and soul into whatever pursuit may be immediately to one's hand? Certainly she loves absurd people, but love is sacred whatever the object of the affection. "He, like Balaam," says Tolstoy, "intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless. And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her."

But I do not feel convinced in my mind that Tchehov meant Olenka to excite our disgust or careless laughter. Where she loves there she loves whole-heartedly: her life is a blank, ready to take any impress, nor does she seek to erase any one of them until it is irrevocably removed from her. There are innumerable little touches deftly sketched in which make us feel not the ridiculousness or emptiness of the Darling, but rather love her for her sensibility and power of loving.

The main attraction of Tchehov for normal English readers is the shrewd psychology and the quick lightning flashes of nimble wit with which the text is strewn. As with his plays, so in his tales there is practically no plot. Passions spin the plot and mere catastrophic incident is not required.

In _Ariadne_, for instance, we are more intrigued by the conversations about women in general (a favourite topic of conversation among the Russians) than by the events that take place. Listen, for instance, to this point of view:

"We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. But the trouble is that when we have been married for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again--disappointment, again--reputation, and in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men."

There are moments, too, when we could find it in our hearts to wish that Tchehov had given rein to his obvious gifts for scenic description: so many writers indulge in an orgy of nature panegyrics that we rarely want more from any man, and Tchehov very wisely subordinates everything to his main theme, but all the same we could well do with more of this sort of thing:

"Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water chatters noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flower-beds, bee-hives, a kitchen garden, and below it a river with leafy willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless look as though they had turned grey: and on the other side a meadow, and beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine forest. In that forest delicious reddish agaries grow in endless profusion, and elks still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know, when the sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and beyond the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, while they play the piano indoors and the stream babbles ... when there is such music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to sing aloud."

But it is for little character sketches like this of Lubkov, who "would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: 'It would be nice to have tea here,'" that endears Tchehov to us so conclusively.

It is certainly sound psychology and good for a young lover to learn by heart (it would save endless heartaches and a thousand other natural shocks the flesh is heir to if they did) this aphorism: "A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness."

It is with more than a thrill of delight that we read of so exquisitely apt a simile as that for the girl who had refused a wealthy but utterly insignificant prince and then immediately fretted at her decision. "Just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of krass with cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of the prince."

The story from which these extracts are taken is an amazingly true psychological study of a girl whose coldness only made her more sensual: she lived solely for the purpose of attracting men, was deceitful when deceit was unnecessary, able to appear cultured in society and yet be in reality superstitious, bigoted, illiterate and devoid of all taste.

"'She is half a human beast already,'" says the misogynist, who had given up everything to please Ariadne, speaking of educated women generally. "'Thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human genius has been lost again: the woman gradually disappears and in her place is the primitive female ... of course a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine? To get on terms with a woman is easy enough,'" he concludes. "'You have only to undress her: but afterwards what a bore it is, what a silly business.'"

And now by way of a change let me just lightly give the plots of the following few stories. In _Polinka_ we are simply invited to listen to the conversation over the counter of a little milliner and a draper's assistant who loves her and objects to her being led astray by a young medical student. The poignancy of the tale lies in the fact that the conversation, which is quite tragic, has to take place in public and therefore covered by discussions about buttons and corsets.

_Anynta_ describes the misery of a kept mistress of a medical student who is tired of her.

_The Two Volodyas_ shows us a girl who has married one elderly Volodya pining for the affection of another Volodya, who treats her as a child who has to be humoured. He told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed: "Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay ... tara-ra-boom-dee-ay."

_The Trousseau_ gives us a pathetic picture of a wife and daughter in some dull, out-the-way place preparing year in, year out, material for her "bottom drawer," the girl after all dying before she met anyone who wanted to marry her.

_The Help-Mate_ describes the doings of a suspicious husband who finds that his wife is corresponding secretly: he offers to set his wife free in order that she may marry her lover. We hear of a mother-in-law who aids her daughter in her immorality delightfully touched in in a phrase that cuts like a lash: "A stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything: if her daughter were strangling someone the mother would not have protested but would only have screened her with her skirts."

The wife refuses to accept a divorce because it will lower her status and perhaps her lover will throw her over. He is younger than she is.

In _An Artist's Story_ we get some invaluable hints on the problem of the education of the masses.

"'The whole horror of their position,'" says the artist, "'lies in their never having time to think of their souls, of their image and resemblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block for them every way to spiritual activity--that is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth living--the people must be freed from hard physical labour: we must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields, but may also have time to think of God--may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity, the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day. What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. If one must cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause--physical labour--and then there will be no disease. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.'"

The story itself, however, concerns the love of an artist for a girl who disobeys the dictates of her heart and gives up her happiness at her sister's behest without question. The passage where the artist hears that his chance of real abiding love has been snatched from him is peculiarly Tchehov-like at his most poignant. He goes, full of hope and ecstasy, to meet his beloved and hears her sister, who dislikes him, giving a dictation lesson.

"'God ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating.... "'God sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow ... a piece of cheese ... Who's there?' she called suddenly, hearing my steps.

"'It's I.'

"'Ah! Excuse me. I cannot come out to you this minute: I'm giving Dasha her lesson.'

"'Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?'

"'No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,' she added after a pause. 'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese.... Have you written it?'

"I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of 'A piece of cheese ... God sent the crow a piece of cheese.'"

In _Three Years_, a somewhat longer tale, we read of the gradually waning affection between husband and wife and their reconciliation.

Very deftly does the author show us the difference between the passion which Laptev felt for Yulia at the beginning and his feeling at the end when she tells him how dear he is to her: though he kept smiling at her and her beautiful neck with a sort of joyous shyness as a sign of the new birth of his love, yet we read that when she put her arm round his neck he cautiously removed her hand. The mingled emotions are exquisitely rendered.

His longest story is _The Duel_ and in it we hear of a neurasthenic, Laevsky, who finds that "'living with a woman who has read Spencer and followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Kulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception.'" He tries every means in his power to raise money by loan to leave the Caucasus and his mistress: there is a clear-headed, cold-blooded zoologist called Von Koren who despises Laevsky for his degeneracy. He thus analyses Laevsky's character:

"'His existence is confined like an egg within its shell. Whether he walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards, slippers and women. He has had great success with women and therein lies his noxiousness. He is a failure, a superfluous man, a victim of the age.'" Meanwhile Laevsky's mistress had been philandering with other men. He discovers her infidelity just when he is on the point of fighting a duel with Von Koren. He was wounded but slightly and became reconciled to his wife, while Von Koren was the one to go away, leaving lover and mistress almost happy in each other's society.

_Mire_ is a horrible story about two men neither of whom was able to resist the fascinations of a Jewess prostitute.

_Neighbours_ is an account of a visit paid by a brother to his sister who had run away with a married man: his first intention is to wreak his vengeance on her lover for the dishonour he had brought upon his house, but he remains as their friend.

_At Home_ gives us a picture of the dull monotony of life in the country: a girl returns to her aunt's house and out of sheer boredom is induced to marry the local doctor.

_Expensive Lessons_ shows the unrequited passion of a research student for a poor French governess whom he had hired to teach him French.

_The Princess_ tells of a rich girl who likes to see others happy and revels in the thought that she is the means of making many content who otherwise would not be. She is taken severely to task by a doctor who tries to show her her true character as seen by her inferiors. '"You look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea: you have nothing except aversion: your philanthropic work has been a farce from the beginning. There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets.'" He says too much, is frightened and apologises, and the Princess goes from him once more reinstated to her former position of Lady Bountiful in her own mind. "'How happy I am!'" she murmured, shutting her eyes. "'How happy I am!'"

_The Chemist's Wife_ is a charming trifle dealing with a country town in which an officer and a doctor knock up a chemist late at night on the pretext of wanting some peppermints, in reality to talk to the pretty young wife of the chemist. She is flattered: adventure has at last come her way: she stays some time downstairs talking to them while her husband sleeps. Reluctantly her visitors leave her, and when she is once more in bed return, this time waking her husband, who attends to them himself.

"Two minutes later the chemist's wife saw Obvyosov go out of the shop, and after he had gone some steps she saw him throw the packet of peppermints on the dusty road. The doctor came from behind a corner to meet him ... they met, and gesticulating, vanished in the morning mist."

"'How unhappy I am!'" said the chemist's wife, looking angrily at her husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. "'Oh, how unhappy I am!'" she repeated. "'And nobody knows, nobody knows.'

"'I forgot fourpence on the counter,'" muttered the chemist, pulling the quilt over him. "Put it away in the till, please....'" And at once he fell asleep again.

In _The Lady with the Dog_ we get one of those notes of optimism which are so characteristic of Tchehov just where the normal writer would be pessimistic.

"The monotonous hollow sound of the sea, rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us: in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection."

The story is about a married man who conceives a violent passion for a married woman whom he meets while on holiday.

"Anna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends: it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband: and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both."

By far the greater number of Tchehov's tales deal with the illicit loves of married women: young girls are compelled to marry husbands who are distasteful to them, and in after years they revenge themselves by giving themselves to sprucer, cleaner, stronger men who flit into and out of their lives only too quickly.

In _A Doctor's Visit_ Tchehov harks back again to a subject which is always dear to him, the uselessness of modern labour. In this case two thousand workpeople work without rest in unhealthy surroundings making bad cotton goods ... for what purpose? The factory owner's family are unhappy: "the only one who enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, the governess, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez. All these five blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink Madeira."

The doctor who is called in to attend the daughter of the house ventures on a criticism of present-day life.

"'Our generation sleep badly, are restless, talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are right or not. For our children or grandchildren that question will have been settled. Things will be clearer for them than for us. Life will be good in fifty years' time.'"

_Ionitch_ shows us Tchehov in another characteristic vein. Here he indulges in one of his favourite tricks, that of divulging the foolishness of his _dramatis personæ_ through their idiotic conversation. Ivan Petrovitch is an irritating buffoon whose idea of wit is to repeat _ad nauseam_ phrases like "How do you do, if you please?" and "Not badsome."

Tchehov's sense of irony is well shown in the following passage which occurs in this story:--

"Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces and Vera Iosiforna read her novel. It began like this: 'The frost was intense ...' The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions.... It was comfortable in the soft deep arm-chair: the lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and laughter floated in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was difficult to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain. Vera read how a beautiful young countess founded a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and fell in love with a wandering artist: she read of what never happens in real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen ... it was comfortable, and such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind one had no desire to get up.

"'Not badsome' ... Ivan said softly."

"Hugeous," "Thank you most dumbly," were among the sallies of wit which Ivan hurled at his audience from time to time.

The object of the story is as usual to emphasise the uselessness of the narrow lives of the inhabitants of a provincial town where men and women did absolutely nothing, took no interest in anything and looked askance at anyone who tried to speak intelligently on any topic of importance. There was nothing to do except eat and play vint. Tchehov shows us these people growing older but otherwise changing not at all, dragging down to their level even those who in their youth endeavoured to break loose from the bondage of aimlessness and inertia.

There is, however, a side of Tchehov which one would not expect in so relentless a realist. In _The Black Monk_ we cross the border of the unseen and are in the society of mystics. No writer has so severely handled those who rely on old wives' fables and ignorant superstitions, but in this story he probes far down into the spiritual world and comes into line with Dostoievsky in a field which we are astonished to see him approach.

The phantom that appears periodically to Kovrin and so enhances his happiness may be an hallucination: it is completely in the vein of Smerdyakov and Ivan _The Brothers Karamazov_, though the conclusions are very different.

"'And what is the object of eternal life?'" asks Kovrin of the black monk, and the spirit answers: "'As of all life--enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said: "In my Father's house there are many mansions."'"

One of Tchehov's most remarkable traits is his capacity for getting right inside the very body of his characters. In _An Anonymous Story_, with a sureness of touch that we can only wonder at, he paints for us the hardships of a flunkey's life. Just as Turgenev seems to have been able to see into the most secret recesses of a young girl's heart, so Tchehov can put on the guise of an old man or a young boy lover, a jealous wife or an unfaithful husband, a garrulous father or a feckless waster at will, and actually become them for ten, twenty, fifty pages at a time without once giving us a chance to doubt the truth of his creation.

There are moments when we imagine that he leans rather to that side of life which we associate with authorship, hatred of domesticity. So many of his characters fall foul of conjugal relationships, but it is one of his worst characters who says that love is only a simple physical need, like the need for food or clothes, and instances the French workman who spends ten sous on dinner, five sous on wine, five or ten sous on women, and devotes his brain and nerves entirely to his work, and it is surely the voice of Tchehov himself who replies: "'Your everlasting attacks on female logic, lying, weakness and so on--doesn't it look like a desire at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may be on the same level as your attitude to her?'"

There are many places in this long "anonymous story" where Tchehov himself seems to be speaking to us across the footlights. It is his voice again that I hear in Zinaida's "'The meaning of life is to be found only in one thing--fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it. That's the meaning of life. In that alone or in nothing.'"

In the pseudo-valet's "'One can serve an idea in more than one calling. If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one, one may find another.'" And once more in "'Man finds his true destiny in nothing if not in self-sacrificing love for his neighbour.'" And lastly in the same man's "'All I ask for is an objective attitude to life: the more objective, the less danger of falling into error. One must look into the root of things and try to see in every phenomenon a cause of all the other causes. We have grown feeble, slack--degraded, in fact. Our generation is entirely composed of neurasthenics and whimperers: we do nothing but talk of fatigue and exhaustion. Life is only given us once and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play a striking, independent, noble part: one wants to make history so that those generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse.... Why should my ego be lost?'"

But if I had to select one characteristic story of Tchehov's to illustrate his method more perfectly than any other I should choose _The Husband_. It is simply on account of a tax-collector and his wife going to a dance held in honour of the coming of a regiment to the town. The wife under the influence of the music, the drink and the unaccustomed society begins to revel in the function: her husband immediately orders her to return home, merely to satisfy a whim.

The final paragraphs of the story, in which we see the wretched couple walking home in the dark, the mud slushing under their feet, choking with hatred of each other, are inimitable.

The fourth volume of tales is called _The Party_, and contains a wonderful story called _Terror_, in which we again get Tchehov's favourite plot of a man making love to his friend's wife.

The terror lies in the fact that the man loves his wife while she is indifferent to him and gives herself to her husband's friend, who leaves her as soon as he has won her.

In _A Woman's Kingdom_ he reverts to machinery and capital, and in passing introduces a very sound criticism of Maupassant's work.

_The Kiss_, which is just the story of an officer being kissed in the dark in mistake for somebody else, is a supreme example of Tchehov's genius in making a completely successful story out of the merest trifle.

_The Teacher of Literature_ is a man who chafes, as so many of Tchehov's heroes do, at the littleness of life. "I am surrounded," he writes in his diary, "by vulgarity, and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women.... There is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and distressing than vulgarity. I must escape--I must escape."

In volume five _The Wife_ is a poignantly pathetic story of a man who loves his wife desperately but meets with no response to his affection; it differs from other tales of the same sort in that the wife in this case states most plainly and forcibly exactly why they fail to get on.

"'You bring suffocation, oppression,'" she says, "'something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree. Law and morality are such that a self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend her life in idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and to receive board and lodging from a man she does not love.'"

_Difficult People_ shows us, as Tchehov is fond of doing, a family in the process of bickering and squabbling from day to day.

_The Grasshopper_ is the picture of a married girl who jumps from one lover to another, only realising the purity and greatness of her husband when he dies heroically.

_A Dreary Story_ is the notebook of an old man who is about to die, having achieved fame but not found happiness. In this story there is a magnificent description of the fascination of lecturing.

"'No kind of sport,'" he concludes, "'no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.'"

We feel again that some autobiographical thread of the author's is creeping in when he makes his old man say: '"I am interested in nothing but science. I still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man: that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature.'"

The remaining stories in the volume, which are peculiar in that they are linked by having characters in common, dwell on the evils of Tchehov's days, the listlessness of the educated public, the refusal to break out of the case or the groove, the general hypnotism and blindness to suffering of the so-called happy.

"'There ought to be,'" says the hero in _Gooseberries_, "'behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people.'"

We learn in _About Love_ that Tchehov's apprenticeship to medicine "taught me one invaluable lesson as an artist, to individualise each case."

In the sixth and last volume we have _The Witch_, which gives its name to the volume, which is parallel with _The Chemist's Wife_ in that it again shows a wife dissatisfied with her husband endeavouring to secure a moment's romance with a postman who has lost his way.

_Peasant Wives_ dwells on the unfaithfulness of women, and in _Agafya_ he reverts to the style and plot of _The Witch_.

_Gusev_ is a horrible story of a man dying at sea: when dead his body is sewn up and thrown into the water, where he is eaten by a shark.

_In the Ravine_ is a picture of a girl not very different in her calculated brutality and heartlessness from Regan and Goneril: it is one of the most powerful stories that Tchehov ever wrote.

As a short story-writer Tchehov stands in a unique position. He relies very little on plot, he is interested only in characters: every one of his creations stands out definitely and clearly, and though he points no moral it is easy to come to quite certain conclusions with regard to his own view on life.

He obviously regards women as frail, easily dissatisfied, just as he looks upon the men of his age as invertebrate, lacking in energy, ideals, or any sense of the nobility of work.

His scenic descriptions are clear-cut and beautiful, not less effective because they are so sparingly used.

He is obviously puzzled by the why and wherefore of existence, and refuses to shut his eyes when he finds himself confronted by uncomfortable truths.

But his main feature is his incurable optimism. He has no very great opinion of the men of his own day, but it is easy to see that he has unbounded faith in the future, and to stigmatise such a writer as "gloomy" only betrays the impotence and wrong-headedness of the critic.

Transcriber's note:

_Underscores_ have been used to indicate _italic_ fonts. Inconsistent hyphenation has been left as it was written. Dialect has been left as written, e.g. täake. However obvious typos (outside of speech) have been corrected.