"'Just turn round, sonny! Well, I declare if you are not ridiculous!
What kind of a rig have you on? Why, you look like priests! Are they
all dressed thus in the academy?'
"With these words old Bulba met his two sons who came home from the
Kief seminary to their father. His sons had just got down from their
horses. They were two sturdy fellows, still looking out from under
their brows just like fresh seminary graduates. Their strong,
healthy faces were covered with the first down, as yet untouched by
a razor. They were much embarrassed at such reception by their
father, and they stood motionless, with eyes fixed on the ground.
"'Stand still, stand still; just let me get a good look at you,' he
continued, as he turned them about. 'What long jackets you have on!
What a jacket! Who ever heard of such jackets before! Just let one
of you take a run, and see whether he would not tumble over,
entangled in his coat-tails.'
"'Don't laugh, father, don't laugh,' said at last the eldest.
"'See how touchy he is! And why, pray, shall not I laugh?'
"'Because! For even if you are my father, but if you laugh, by God,
I will thrash you!'
"'Well, well, well, did you ever! Is this the kind of a son you are?
How? Your father?' said Taras Bulba, stepping back in surprise.
"'Yes, even if you are my father. An insult I will stand from none.'
"'How then do you wish to fight me? Boxing?'
"'I don't care; any way.'
"'Well then, let us box,' said Bulba, rolling up his sleeves. 'I
would like to see what sort of a boxer you are.'
"And father and son, instead of greeting each other after the long
separation, began to give each other blows, now in the sides, now in
the ribs, now in the breast, now stepping back and looking about,
now coming forward again.
"'Just see, good people, the old fool has become crazy,' said the
pale, thin, good mother, who was standing on the threshold and had
not been able to embrace her darling boys. 'The children come home
after an absence of over a year, and he gets it into his head, God
knows what, to box with them.'
"'Yes, he fights finely,' said Bulba, stopping. 'Good, by God!' he
continued, catching a little breath. 'So, yes, he will make a fine
Cossak, even without preliminary trial. Well, welcome, sonny; come
kiss me.' And father and son began to kiss each other. 'Good, my
son. Thrash everybody as you have given it to me. Don't let him go!
But I must insist, yours is a ridiculous rig. What rope is this,
dangling down there!'"
17. Bulba is so pleased with his boys that he decides to take them the
very next day to the syetch, the republic of the Cossaks, and there
initiate them in the wild, glorious service. The mother's grief at the
unexpected loss of her boys, as well as the parting itself, is thus
described by Gogol:--
"Night had just enclosed the sky in its embrace; but Bulba always
retired early. He spread himself out on the mat and covered himself
with the sheep-skin; for the night air was quite fresh, and Bulba,
moreover, was fonder of warmth when at home. He soon began to snore,
and it was not long before the entire household did the like.
Whatever lay in the various corners of the court began to snore and
to whiz. Before everybody else fell asleep the watchman; for in
honor of the return of the young Cossaks he had drunk more than the
rest.
"The poor mother alone was awake. She nestled herself close to the
heads of her dear boys, who were lying side by side. She combed
their young, carelessly bunched-up locks, and moistened them with
her tears. She gazed upon them with all her eyes, with all her
feelings; she was transformed into nothing but sight, and yet she
could not look enough at them. She had fed them from her own breast.
She had raised them, had fondled them, and now she sees them again
only for a moment! 'My boys, my darling boys, what is to become of
ye, what is in store for ye?' she spake, and the tears halted on her
wrinkles, which had changed her once handsome face. In truth, she
was to be pitied, as every woman of that rough age was to be pitied.
Only a moment had she lived in love, only in the first fever of
passion, in the first fever of youth, and already her rough charmer
had forsaken her for the sword, for his companions, for the wild
excitement of war. During the year she saw her husband perhaps
two--three times, and then again for some years there was not even a
trace of him. And when they did come together, when they did live
together, what sort of life was hers! She suffered insult, even
blows. She received her fondlings as a kind of alms; she felt
herself a strange creature in this assemblage of wifeless knights,
to whom the loose life of the Cossaks had given a coloring sombre
enough. Youth flashed by her joylessly, and her beautiful fresh
cheeks and fingers had withered away without kisses, and were
covered with premature wrinkles. All her love, all her tenderness,
whatever was soft and passionate in woman, was merged in her into
the one feeling of a mother. With heat, with passion, with tears,
like a gull of the steppe, she was circling about her babes. Her
boys, her darling boys, are to be taken from her,--taken from her
never to be seen again. Who knows, perhaps at the very first battle
the Tartar shall cut off their heads, and she shall not know where
their castaway bodies are lying to be pecked in pieces by the bird
of prey, while for every drop of their blood she would have given up
her whole life. Groaning, she looked into their eyes, when almighty
sleep began to close them, and she thought to herself, 'Perhaps
Bulba will change his mind when he wakes, and put off the departure
for a day or two; perhaps he has decided to go off so soon because
he had taken a little too much.'
"The moon had for some time been shining from the high heavens upon
the whole court, its sleeping folk, the thick clump of willows and
the high wild oats in which was drowned the fence surrounding the
court. Still she was sitting at the head-side of her darling boys,
not taking her eyes off them for a moment, and not even thinking of
sleep. The horses, already feeling the morrow, had all lain down in
the grass, and ceased feeding. The upper leaves of the willows began
to whisper, and little by little a whispering wave descended along
them to the very bottom. But she was still sitting up till daybreak,
not at all tired, but inwardly wishing that the night might last
only longer. From the steppe came up the loud neighing of a colt;
red bars gleamed brightly along the sky....
"When the mother saw that at last her sons also were now seated on
their horses, she rushed to the youngest, in whose features there
seemed to be more of a certain tenderness, seized his spur, clung to
his saddle, and with despair in her eyes, she held fast to him. Two
robust Cossaks took gently hold of her and carried her into the
house. But when they rode out beyond the gates, with the lightness
of a wild stag, incompatible with her years, she ran out beyond the
gates, and with incomprehensible strength she stopped the horse and
embraced one of her sons with a kind of crazy, feelingless
feverishness. Again she was carried off.
"The young Cossaks rode in silence, and held back their tears in
fear of their father, who, however, was for his part not wholly at
ease, though he tried not to betray himself. The sky was gray; the
green was sparkling with a glare; the birds were singing as if in
discord. The Cossaks, after riding some distance, looked back. Their
farm-house seemed to have gone down into the ground. Above ground
were seen only the two chimneys of their modest house, and the tops
of the trees, along whose branches they had been leaping like
squirrels [in their childhood.] There still was stretched before
them that prairie which held for them the whole history of their
life, from the years when they made somersaults on its thick grass,
to the years when they would await there the black-browed Cossak
dame as she was tripping swiftly along with her fresh light step.
Now they see only the pole over the well, and the cart-wheel, tied
to its top, alone sticks out on the sky. And now the plain they had
just passed seems a distant mount, hiding everything behind it....
Farewell, childhood, and play, and all, and all!..."
18. I had hoped at first to be able to give you a few passages from this
noblest of epic poems which might give you some idea of its wild,
thrilling beauty: the jolly life at the syetch; the sudden
transformation of the frolicking, dancing, gambling crowd into a
well-disciplined army of fierce warriors, which strikes terrors into the
hearts of the Poles. I hoped to be able to give you Gogol's own account
of the slaying of Andrei, his youngest son, by Bulba himself, because,
bewitched by a pair of fair eyes, he became traitor to the Cossaks. I
wished to quote to you the stoic death, under the very eyes of his
father, of Ostap, the oldest son, torn as he is alive to pieces, not a
sound escaping his lips, but at the very last moment, disheartened at
the sea of hostile faces about him, crying only, "Father, seest thou all
this?" I wished to quote to you Bulba's own terrible death, nailed alive
to a tree, which is set on fire under him; the old hero, still intent on
the salvation of his little band, while the smoke envelops him, cries,
as he beholds the movement of the enemy, "To the shore, comrades, to the
shore! Take the path to the left!" But I found I should have to quote to
you the entire book; for there is not a single page of this poem from
which beauty does not shine forth with dazzling radiance. Homer often
nods in the Iliad, but in "Taras Bulba" Gogol never nods. And as the
painter of old on being asked to remove the curtain that the picture
might be seen replied, "The curtain _is_ the picture," so can I only say
to you, "Read 'Taras Bulba,' and it shall be its own commentary unto
you!"
19. With "Taras Bulba," Gogol had reached the height as a singer. On
this road there was no longer any progress for his soul, and to remain a
cheerful, right-glad singer in the midst of the sorrowing, overburdened
country was impossible to a man of Gogol's earnestness. For his first
and last end was to serve his country. 'Tis well, if he could serve it
by letters, equally well, if he could serve it by his simple life.
Gogol, therefore, now decided to devote the rest of his days to the
unveiling of the ills to which the Russian Colossus was subject, in the
hope that the sight of the ugly cancer would help its removal. Thus he
became the conscious protester, the critic of autocracy; and he became
such because his gifts were best fitted for such labor. For coupled with
his unsurpassed gift of story-telling was another distinct trait of the
Cossak in him,--the ability of seeing good-humoredly the frailties of
man; and his humor, undefiled by the scorn of the cynic, proved a most
powerful weapon in his hands. Ridicule has ever proved a terror to
corruption. But in the hands of Gogol this ridicule became a weapon all
the more powerful because it took the shape of impersonal humor where
the indignation of the author was kept out of sight, so that even stern
Nicolas himself, the indirect source of the very corruption satirized in
"The Revisor," could laugh, while a listener to the play, until the
tears ran down his cheeks and his sides ached. The corruption of
provincial officials, which is the natural sore following all
autocratic blood-poisoning, found merciless treatment at the hands of
Gogol in his comedy "The Revisor." Its plot is briefly as follows:--
20. The mayor of a small city receives suddenly the news that a revisor,
a secret examiner, is on the way from the capital to investigate his
administration. Quickly he assembles all the worthies of the town, the
director of schools, of prisons, of hospitals, all of whom have but too
guilty consciences, and they all decide on measures of escape from his
wrath. They march in file to the hotel where the supposed Revisor
lodges. There for some days had been dwelling a young penniless
good-for-nothing whom the officials mistake for the dreaded Revisor. The
young man is surprised, but soon accepts the situation, and plays his
part admirably. Presents and bribes are sent him from all sides; he
borrows money right and left, makes love to the mayor's wife as well as
to his daughter, and finally engages to marry the--daughter. The mayor
is happy and honored as never before, and relying upon the protection
of the Revisor outrages the community now more than ever. At last the
pseudo-revisor departs with all the gifts and loans, and in a few days
the real Revisor actually arrives, to the astonishment and dismay of the
officials, who till now had felt secure in their misdeeds.
21. "The Revisor" is indeed a great comedy, the equal of Griboyedof's
"Misfortune from Brains." As a comedy it is therefore the inferior of
none,--neither of Terence, nor of Molière. But as a work of art it
cannot rank as high as "Taras Bulba," because no comedy can ever be as
great a thing of beauty as an epic poem. What rouses laughter cannot
rank as high as what rouses tender emotion. Moreover, with the passing
away of the generation familiar with the corruption it satirizes, the
comedy often becomes unintelligible save to scholars. Hence the utter
valuelessness to us of to-day of the comedies of Aristophanes as works
of wit. Their only value to-day is as fragmentary records of Greek
manners. The comedy is thus writ not for all times, but only for _a_
time; while "Taras Bulba," though generations come and generations go,
will ever appeal unto men as a thing of imperishable beauty. But while
"The Revisor" is below "Taras Bulba" as a work of art, it is far above
it as a work of purpose, and has accordingly accomplished a greater
result. For "Taras Bulba" can only give pleasure, though it be read for
thousands of years after "The Revisor" has been forgotten. It will
indeed give a noble pleasure, at which the soul need not blush, still it
is only a pleasure. But "The Revisor" has helped to abolish corruption,
has fought the Evil One, has therefore done work which, transient though
it be, _must_ be done to bring about the one result which alone is
permanent,--the kingdom of heaven upon earth; the kingdom of truth, the
kingdom of love, the kingdom of worship. And whatever helps towards the
establishment of that on earth must be of a higher rank than what only
gives pleasure unto the soul.
22. The success of "The Revisor" spurred the young Gogol on to further
effort, and he now resolved to give utterance to protest against
another crying wrong of Russian life, which in its consequences was far
more disastrous to the country than official corruption. Gogol now
undertook to lay bare the ills of serfdom. His soul had long since been
searching for its activity a field as wide as life itself. With Gogol,
as with all lofty souls before they find their truest self, aspiration
ever soared above execution. Now, however, the time had arrived when his
gifts could execute whatever his soul conceived; and his mighty spirit
at last found fitting expression in "Dead Souls." Accordingly "Dead
Souls" is not so much a story, a story of an event or of a passion, as a
panorama of the whole country. In his search for Dead Souls, Tchichikof
has to travel through the length and breadth of the land; through
village and through town, through sunshine and through storm, by day and
by night, through the paved imperial post-road as well as through the
forsaken cross-lane. This enables Gogol to place before the reader not
only the governor of the province, the judge, and the rich landowner,
the possessor of hundreds of souls, but also the poverty-stricken,
well-nigh ruined landowner; not only the splendor of the city, but also
the squalor of the hamlet; not only the luxury of an invited guest, but
also the niggardliness of the hotel-boarder. "Dead Souls" is thus a
painting in literature,--what Kaulbach's "Era of the Reformation" is in
history. And the originality of the execution lies in the arrangement
which presents Russia in a view unseen as yet even by Pushkin, who knew
his country but too well. Gogol may be said to have discovered Russia
for the Russian, as Haxthausen discovered it for the West, and as De
Tocqueville discovered America for the Americans. "Great God!" exclaimed
Pushkin, on reading "Dead Souls," "I had no idea Russia was such a dark
country!" And this is the characteristic of this among the greatest of
paintings of Russian life,--the faithful gloom which overhangs the
horizon. In spite of its humor, the impression left on the mind by "Dead
Souls" is that of the sky during an equinoctial storm; and on closing
the book, in spite of your laughter, you feel as if you had just
returned from a funeral. The work is conceived in humor, designed to
rouse laughter, but it is laughter which shines through tears. It is the
laughter of a soul which can no longer weep outwardly, but inwardly. It
is the same laughter which Lessing indulged in when his wife and child
were snatched from him both at once. For six long weary years he had
battled with poverty, disappointment, and despair, to reach at last in
joy the goal of his life; he weds at last his beloved dame, and lo, the
close of the first year of his paradise finds mother and babe lying side
by side--lifeless. Lessing laughs. He writes to a friend: "The poor
little fellow hath early discovered the sorrows of this earth, so he
quickly hied himself hence, and lest he be lonely, took his mother
along." There is laughter here, indeed, but the soul here laughs with a
bleeding, torn, agonized heart. It is the same laughter which was roused
among the disciples of Christ when they heard their Master utter the
grim joke, "Verily, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
the needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." Such
laughter is Gogol's in "Dead Souls." Gogol had now learned to
comprehend the words of his friend Ivanof,--"Christ never laughed."
23. I dwell on this phase of Gogol's laughter, because Gogol in his
"Dead Souls" unconsciously recognized that behind everything laughable
there is at bottom not a comedy but a tragedy; that at bottom it is the
cold head only which laughs, and not the warm heart. Think, and thou
shalt laugh; feel, and thou shalt weep. Judgment laughs, sympathy weeps.
Sin, wickedness, O my friends, is not a thing to laugh at, but a thing
to weep at; and your English humorists have not yet learned, when they
must laugh at vice and sin, to laugh at it with a heart full of woe.
Swift is steeped in vinegar; Fielding's humor is oiled and sugar-coated;
Dickens can never laugh unless with convulsive explosion; Thackeray
sneers, and George Eliot is almost malicious with her humor; and the
only man in English literature who is sick at heart while he laughs is
not even counted among the humorists,--Carlyle. In English literature
the laughter of Cervantes in Don Quixote is unknown; but the humor of
Cervantes is nearest that of Gogol. Gogol's laughter is the laughter of
a man who so loves his fellow-men that their weakness is his pain; and
the warmest corner in all Russia for the very men Gogol satirizes would
doubtless have been found in his own heart. It is this spirit in which
"Dead Souls" is writ which makes "Dead Souls" a model for all humorous
writing.
24. I can give you, however, no nobler example of this laughter through
tears by Gogol than the following closing passage from his "Memoirs of a
Maniac." You remember that during his stay at St. Petersburg, Gogol fell
in love with a woman far above his social rank. In this piece of only
twenty pages Gogol paints the mental condition of an humble
office-scribe, who, falling in hopeless love with the daughter of his
chief, loses his poor mind. After various adventures he at last imagines
himself King Ferdinand of Spain, is locked up in an asylum, and is
beaten whenever he speaks of himself as the king. And this is the last
entry in the poor maniac's diary:--
"No, I no longer can endure it. God, what are they doing to me! They
pour cold water on my head! They neither mind me, nor do they see
me, nor do they hear me. What have I done to them? What do they wish
of poor me? What can I give them? I have nothing. I have no more
strength. I no longer can endure all their torment; my head is
afire, and all around me is in a whirl. Save me! Take me! Give me a
span of horses swift as the wind! Get up, driver; ring, little bell;
off ye horses, and carry me off from this world! Away, away, that I
see nothing more,--nothing. Ha! there is the sky vaulting before me;
a star sparkles in the distance; there rushes the forest with its
dark trees, and the moon. A gray fog spreads under my feet; a string
resounds in the fog; on one side is the sea, on the other Italy; now
Russian huts are already in sight. Is this my home which rises blue
in the distance? Is it my mother sitting at the window? Dear mother,
save your poor boy; drop a tearlet on his sick head. See how they
torment him; press your poor orphan to your breast! There is no
place for him on this wide earth! He is chased! Dear mother, have
pity on your sick babe!... By the way, do you know, the Emperor of
Algeria has a wart under his very nose!"
25. With the completion of the first part of "Dead Souls," Gogol had
reached the height as a protester. He had now exhausted this side of
his life,--the side which was the essence of his being, the side which
made him the individual person as distinct from the rest of men. After
the first part of "Dead Souls" his message unto men was a thing of the
past. Henceforth, whatever he could do, could only be a repetition of
his former burning words, and hence only a weaker utterance. This is
precisely what happens to most men of letters when they persist in
speech after naught is left them to say. You need only be reminded of
Bryant in this country, who had exhausted all the music of his soul in
his younger days, and of Tennyson in England, who as shadowy Lord
Tennyson can only ignobly borrow of marrowy Alfred Tennyson. But Gogol
was too conscientious an artist to allow himself to become prey of such
literary sin. If produce he must, it shall be no repetition of his
former self, but in a still higher field than mere protest. Accordingly,
he attempted in his second part of "Dead Souls" to paint an ideal
Russia, just as in the first part he had painted the real Russia. Here,
however, he undertook what was above his genius: the skylark is indeed a
noble bird, but is unfit for the flight of the eagle. Who was by nature
only a protester could not by sheer force of will be transformed into
the idealizing constructor. And of this, Gogol himself soon became
aware. To the very end he was discontented with his second part, and
finally, before his death, gave it over to the flames.
26. The heavenly spark which gleamed within him could not, however, be
put out. Letters proper he at last indeed forsook, but he now became
profoundly religious; he gave up all his possessions to the poor, and
when he needed moneys wherewith to make a pilgrimage to what was to him
a veritably Holy Land, he had to publish some of his intimate
correspondence.
27. This work proved the bitterness of the rest of his days. It roused a
clamor against the poor author altogether out of proportion to the
slight merit of the work. Gogol was denounced on all sides as a
renegade; the relentless accuser of autocracy in "The Revisor" could
not be forgiven for the spirit of Christian humility and resignation to
the will of God which breathed from these letters. It was in the
forties. Those were the days when a Hegelian wave went over Russian
minds. God had been philosophized away to make place for the Absolute,
and even school-boys came home to announce the astounding news that
there was no longer any God. Who was not a doubter, a disbeliever, was
unhesitatingly declared an imbecile; and Gogol's correspondence,
breathing as it does the spirit of the deepest godfulness, came upon his
friends like a note of discord at a concert. His friends declared him
insane, and all manner of advice offered, which could not fail to make
him truly insane. The already melancholy Gogol now became lonely,
dejected, and sought consolation now more than ever in fasting and
prayer. Poor Gogol had not yet learned that complete salvation is found
not in praying, but in doing. While his ills therefore increased his
devotion, his devotion likewise in turn increased his ills; his body
became emaciated, his mind was wrecked, and early in 1852 he was found
one morning starved to death, prostrated before the holy images, in
front of which he had spent his last days.
28. Next to Tolstoy, Gogol is perhaps the most lovable figure in Russian
literature. I say lovable, because he was at bottom a hapless man,--a
man who had fed on his own mighty heart. There is a Carlylesqueness
about his woe that makes his life immeasurably pitiful. Pushkin's sorrow
one finds it difficult to lament deeply, since it was mostly of his own
making; but Gogol's was the sorrowful lot of all heaven-aspiring souls
who have not yet attained the last, safest haven of rest in God,--that
haven from which the soul no longer cries in agony of spirit, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" but rather, "Father, thou knowest
wherefore all this is; thy will be done!" His soul in its loneliness and
restlessness knew nor sympathy nor appreciation of what was to him _his_
deepest life; and this the loving soul ever craves most hungeringly.
When the great soul had departed, gone irrevocably, men readily enough
recognized that the light of Israel had gone out; but the recognition
came too late, the love came when it could no longer heal his wounded
spirit.
29. My friends, "Taras Bulba" will thrill your soul with inexpressible
beauty. Gogol's "Revisor" will amuse you. His "Dead Souls" will instruct
you; but his life, if you study it faithfully, should prove his greatest
work unto you, for it should stir you,--stir you to tenderness, stir you
to sympathy, stir you to compassion for those sufferers, the like of
Gogol, who are never wanting, in whatever age, in whatever clime, in
whatever walk of life. Would to God, my friends, you could carry away
from Gogol's life with you this lesson: In your very midst, perhaps this
very day, there doubtless walks among you some mighty spirit, some
hungry soul. Seek him out, find him out, that not of ye at least shall
be said those immeasurably sorrowful words which could be said of the
countless friends of Gogol,--they came with their sympathy--too late!