By G. K. CHESTERTON.
It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is
called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only
simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a
great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical
drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel
its modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction. It has
produced its Gissing without producing its Scott. Everything that is
most sad and scientific, everything that is most grim and analytical,
everything that can truly be called most modern, everything that can
without unreasonableness be called most morbid, comes from these fresh
and untried and unexhausted nationalities. Out of these infant peoples
come the oldest voices of the earth. This contradiction, like many
other contradictions, is one which ought first of all to be registered
as a mere fact; long before we attempt to explain why things contradict
themselves, we ought, if we are honest men and good critics, to
register the preliminary truth that things do contradict themselves.
In this case, as I say, there are many possible and suggestive
explanations. It may be, to take an example, that our modern Europe is
so exhausted that even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is
difficult for every one except the most robust. It may be that all the
nations are tired; and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest
are not too tired to say that they are tired. It may be that a man
like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people
left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism.
It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal
spirits that they can really feast high and drink deep at the ancient
banquet of pessimism. This is one of the possible hypotheses or
explanations in the matter: that all Europe feels these things and that
they only have strength to believe them also. Many other explanations
might, however, also be offered. It might be suggested that
half-barbaric countries like Russia or Norway, which have always lain,
to say the least of it, on the extreme edge of the circle of our
European civilisation, have a certain primal melancholy which belongs
to them through all the ages. It is highly probable that this sadness,
which to us is modern, is to them eternal. It is highly probable that
what we have solemnly and suddenly discovered in scientific text-books
and philosophical magazines they absorbed and experienced thousands of
years ago, when they offered human sacrifice in black and cruel forests
and cried to their gods in the dark. Their agnosticism is perhaps
merely paganism; their paganism, as in old times, is merely
devilworship. Certainly, Schopenhauer could hardly have written his
hideous essay on women except in a country which had once been full of
slavery and the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are
tricking us altogether, and are hiding in their current scientific
jargon things that they knew before science or civilisation were. They
say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably, that they
are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they describe scenes
which are sickening and dehumanising in the name of art or in the name
of truth; but it may be that they do it in the name of some deity
indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror before the
beginning of history.
This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly
disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one broad truth
in the matter which may in any case be considered as established. A
country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing
revolution in revolutionists than any country of the type of England or
America. Communities highly civilised and largely urban tend to a
thing which is now called evolution, the most cautious and the most
conservative of all social influences. The loyal Russian obeys the
Czar because he remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance. The
disloyal Russian frets against the Czar because he also remembers the
Czar, and makes a note of the necessity of knifing him. But the loyal
Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they
are there. Their operation has become to him like daylight, or
gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal
Englishmen; there are no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic
management of England is so complete as to be invisible. The thing
which can once get itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.
Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not
because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are
not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all Russians--are in
that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible and which makes
religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To
be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is
necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe
or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of
what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic
righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold)
there never will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to
put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which they call
progress.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other
Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a
simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a
rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new. We cannot in
our graduated and polite civilisation quite make head or tail of the
Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the
tale of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the
superman. We hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite
certain whether his protest is the protest of the first anarchist
against government, or whether it is the protest of the last savage
against civilisation. The cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or
necessity has done much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but
time has left them one thing which it has not left to the people in
Poplar or West Ham. It has left them, apparently, the clear and
childlike power of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is
a tramp, a man of the people, and also a critic and a bitter one. In
the West poor men, when they become articulate in literature, are
always sentimentalists and nearly always optimists.
It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky writes in
such a story as this of "Creatures that once were Men" are to the
Western mind children. They have, indeed, been tortured and broken by
experience and sin. But this has only sufficed to make them sad
children or naughty children or bewildered children. They have
absolutely no trace of that quality upon which secure government rests
so largely in Western Europe, the quality of being soothed by long
words as if by an incantation. They do not call hunger "economic
pressure"; they call it hunger. They do not call rich men "examples of
capitalistic concentration," they call them rich men. And this note of
plainness and of something nobly prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky,
the most recent and in some ways the most modern and sophisticated of
Russian authors, as it is of Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of
mind. The very title of this story strikes the note of this sudden and
simple vision. The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily
Telegraph says, of men living in a slum, that "their degeneration is of
such a kind as almost to pass the limits of the semblance of humanity,"
and we read the whole thing with a tepid assent as we should read
phrases about the virtues of Queen Victoria or the dignity of the House
of Commons. The Russian novelist, when he describes a dosshouse, says,
"Creatures that once were Men." And we are arrested, and regard the
facts as a kind of terrible fairy tale. This story is a test case of
the Russian manner, for it is in itself a study of decay, a study of
failure, and a study of old age. And yet the author is forced to write
even of staleness freshly; and though he is treating of the world as
seen by eyes darkened or blood-shot with evil experience, his own eyes
look out upon the scene with a clarity that is almost babyish. Through
all runs that curious Russian sense that every man is only a man,
which, if the Russians ever are a democracy, will make them the most
democratic democracy that the world has ever seen. Take this passage,
for instance, from the austere conclusion of "Creatures that once were
Men."
Petunikoff smiled the smile of the conqueror and went back into the
dosshouse, but suddenly he stopped and trembled. At the door facing
him stood an old man with a stick in his hand and a large bag on his
back, a horrible odd man in rags and tatters, which covered his bony
figure. He bent under the weight of his burden, and lowered his head
on his breast, as if he wished to attack the merchant.
"What are you? Who are you?" shouted Petunikoff.
"A man ..." he answered, in a hoarse voice. This hoarseness pleased
and tranquillised Petunikoff, he even smiled.
"A man! And are there really men like you?" Stepping aside he let the
old man pass. He went, saying slowly:
"Men are of various kinds ... as God wills ... There are worse than me
... still worse ... Yes ..."
Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from humanity,
Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and essential value of the
human being which is far too commonly absent altogether from such
complex civilisations as our own. To no Western, I am afraid, would it
occur when asked what he was to say, "A man." He would be a plasterer
who had walked from Reading, or an iron-puddler who had been thrown out
of work in Lancashire, or a University man who would be really most
grateful for the loan of five shillings, or the son of a
lieutenant-general living in Brighton, who would not have made such an
application if he had not known that he was talking to another
gentleman. With us it is not a question of men being of various kinds;
with us the kinds are almost different animals. But in spite of all
Gorky's superficial scepticism and brutality, it is to him the fall
from humanity, or the apparent fall from humanity, which is not merely
great and lamentable, but essential and even mystical. The line
between man and the beasts is one of the transcendental essentials of
every religion; and it is, like most of the transcendental things of
religion, identical with the main sentiments of the man of common
sense. We feel this gulf when theologies say that it cannot be
crossed. But we feel it quite as much (and that with a primal shudder)
when philosophers or fanciful writers suggest that it might be crossed.
And if any man wishes to discover whether or no he has really learnt to
regard the line between man and brute as merely relative and
evolutionary, let him say again to himself those frightful words,
"Creatures that once were Men."