Apart from the influence of politics, the greatest spiritual influence
that Russia and America have had on the world for a century past
has been manifested through their respective literatures. It is to
this field that we must now turn, for the most striking series of
our parallels. This literature has been, in both cases, something so
entirely apart in its inner development from anything produced in
Europe before the end of the eighteenth century, that we cannot apply
to it the traditional standards of European criticism. Unlike what has
been the case in European literatures, the literary form itself has not
emerged from the sociological and moral factors generally prevailing at
the moment. Rather has it been used as a weapon of protest, as a means
for overcoming the stultification of the environment, in both America
and Russia. It has been essentially revolutionary, dictated by a small
protesting minority, rather than rooted in the traditional lore of the
soil.
At the close of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the mind of
Europe became divided between the rival claims of absolutism and
of radicalism. A wave of romantic sentiment, of revolutionary storm
and stress, with its longing for a past that could no longer exist,
together with its intense democratic feeling for the forgotten folk
sources of art, swept over England and Germany, and began to appear
in France. It made impossible henceforward the frigid artificialities
of form displayed in the poetry of Pope and Johnson, the dramas of
Voltaire, the essays of Addison and Fontenelle, the epic of Klopstock.
And it was from this rising wave of Romantic sentiment that both
America and Russia started on their careers as independent producers
of literature. They have continued on their way as literary countries
thanks altogether to nineteenth-century romanticism. Without some
understanding of the struggle between romanticism and realism, their
literary history does not make sense, it has neither cohesion nor
development. It is true that both countries have produced devotees of
classical form, but for the most part in the shape of critics, not
creators. The underlying genius of both countries has been unable
to accept the European tradition, even when it was imitated; it has
forced itself into alien moulds only to burst them. One cannot deny for
example that Whitman’s poems are poems, nor that Dostoevsky’s novels
are novels. Only they correspond to nothing either in form or content
or mental attitude that was done before them as poems and novels.
The word itself, freed from considerations of economy, tradition,
and classical usage, makes here its own form; arbitrary, intensely
personal, always stumbling and shambling on the brink of incoherence.
It is therefore impossible to write a just and final literary history
of either country. In this field everyone is a partisan. According to
whether the critics’ prepossessions are for literature that reflects
that social struggle, or for finished beauty of form, or for profound
and tragic revelation of unsuspected depths of life; according to
whether the critic of Russian and American literature is primarily a
social reformer, an academic humanist, or an advanced radical theorist,
the judgment will fall. Kropotkin cannot endure the later Dostoevsky;
hundreds of American professors cannot endure Whitman. The utmost that
can be done is to let one literature illuminate the other, to show how
the same psychological factors produce often closely corresponding
results, to draw parallels between those portions of the literature
of both countries that have most closely affected Europe. So only
do we get any insight into the mysteries of the Slav and American
soul. Only in literature is so close an insight possible; in American
painting and architecture, and in Russian dance and music, we have
also national expressions, but limited, tentative, and owing to their
fundamental differences in formal approach (the static and plastic as
against the auditory and agitated) very difficult of comparison. It is
possible in some respects to bring the products of the written word in
each European country together; we can for example set up a comparison
between the drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, the drama of Corneille
and Racine, the drama of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. But it would be
far more difficult if we tried to compare sculpture and painting as
practised in the three countries mentioned over that period. So in the
case of Russia and America, we must concentrate on the written word as
being the most accessible and comprehensible means of comparison.
We may admit at the outset that to most observers modern Russian
literature is far richer in individual talent, and in works of high
ability, than American literature has hitherto been. This is due to the
working of three very important factors. In the first place, Russia
from the outset had a racial, soil-rooted language of its own and was
not forced to transform traditional English modes of expression to fit
an altered environment, or to teach an immigrant population. In the
second, the fact that political discussion of every sort was forbidden
in Russia during most of the period under review, while America has
lived in a perpetual atmosphere of constant political agitation,
made many more choose the profession of authorship in Russia, while
in America it tended to make many who might have been writers, into
politicians, orators, publicists. In the third place, before beginning
to create a modern literature on her own account, Russia had already
a rich folklore and legendary history of the past to draw upon. In
the case of the Americans, the folklore and traditions of the early
Indians, even of the French and the Spanish settlers, were in a sense
so foreign to the dominant English-speaking psychology, that they could
not be used, except as exotic colour. The result was that to this
day the American writer, with all the ability in the world, has less
material to his hands. Homer could not have been Homer had he come to
Greece from, let us say, Egypt, without understanding or appreciation
of the past. The American writer is more frequently found in that
predicament than the Russian. He has neither a tradition of folklore to
fall back upon for the past, nor essentially an individual experience,
out of which to build up his present day. Only too frequently in
America a usable past (to borrow the phrase of a well-known American
critic) and a meaningful present fail to coincide to produce the
literary masterpiece.
Yet a parallel between both countries is not only necessary, but
psychologically illuminating. This parallel will follow the lines of
the historical parallel, already tentatively traced for the outward
events, in the first book of this study. Here too we will see two
forces starting from opposite poles approaching a coincidence only
to diverge and to again approach coincidence. Here too we watch the
interplay of the same underlying climatic and soil factors on extremely
mixed races that start life under widely different political and social
constants. What is more, this parallel supplements and completes the
other. It enables us to disentangle the essentially Slavic element from
the essentially American element of the two cultures. It may even show
how these two forces operating freely in the world for a century and a
half, like the opposing poles of an electric battery, may ultimately be
reconciled, if not in the field of the practical, at least in the field
of the ideal; how they not only closely correspond to each other, but
ultimately become one.
2
The first stirrings of independent American literature (as distinct
from Colonial literature, or Red Indian traditions) appear most
clearly in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The first stirrings
of Russian literature as distinct from a few court writers such as
Derzhavin in the Catherine period, to whom might be added Catherine
herself (although she wrote in French), and the remnants of old
Slavonic traditions, appear in the writings of Krylov. What strikes us
instantly about these two writers--the penniless American journalist
who steadily climbed the ladder of success until he reached the top,
and the son of the poor army officer who likewise spent a lifetime
in journalism to emerge at last as a sort of social lion--is the
curious impression of shrewd, canny and independent worldly wisdom
that emerges from the pages of both. Neither is a literary hero, nor
an independent creator, nor a prophet. Both have a utilitarian side,
a leaning to moral teaching, closely allied to a great deal of homely
common sense. It is true that Franklin spent much of his energies in
political agitation and in scientific research, which detracts from
his magnitude as an author. But as has already been pointed out, the
same field was not open to the Russian, with the result that his satire
is both sharper and tenser. Yet Franklin’s “Autobiography” is a fable
of the industrious apprentice making his way through the ranks of
Colonial society, as Krylov’s so-called fables are real pictures of
the artificial and vain social order (shaken by the French Revolution)
in which Krylov, the idle and pleasure-loving, found himself. Both
contain elements of poetry, but these elements are of small importance
as compared to the prose content. And both were, precisely because they
limited their aims to what was immediately possible, rather than to
what was the ideal statement, immensely popular.
From such small beginnings American and Russian literature emerged on
the world’s stage with Alexander Pushkin and Washington Irving. It may
seem to the casual and purely objective observer that no parallel is
at all possible between these two men. Irving was simply an agreeable
minor writer, with a prose style of considerable urbanity and charm,
who happened for a time to be ranked above his merits abroad as at
home, and who now is conveniently forgotten; whereas Pushkin was above
all a great and original poet. Yet this verdict which might be passed
by nine out of ten European literary critics is, quite possibly, a
false one. Of the two writers it is Irving who is the most original, as
he had none of the stock of folklore or of ancient tradition to go on;
all that had been swept away from under his feet by the Revolution, and
had to be discovered or invented afresh. He was in the position of an
artist who has to paint a new picture on a blank canvas without either
brushes or colors. On the other hand, Pushkin could simply use the old
material that lay to his hand, and his task was merely to interfuse it
with a new revolutionary spirit. If we can think of Irving as detached
from European literature as Pushkin was; if we can remember that living
on the Hudson, he was as socially remote from the world of Addison and
Goldsmith, whom he admired, as Pushkin in the Caucasus was remote from
Byron and Sterne whom he worshipped, we can reach a juster estimate of
the achievement of both men.
There is a feeling of nostalgia for the past that, particularly in
autumn, assails one in such a new country as America with even greater
force than anywhere in Europe. To the European, especially to the
dweller in a cosmopolitan city, the relics of the Middle Ages, the
richness of the Renaissance, the courtliness of the eighteenth century
are, after all, dead and vanished remnants of a force that has long
since flowed into other channels. But to the American who has never
known them, these things appear under their most Utopian aspect, as
examples of a life full of leisure, where work was despised, people
were free, natural and gracious, and harmony with inner and outer
nature was achieved. The American is afflicted therefore with an
incredible nostalgia for the past, the European past, but the country
he sees about him offers no past at all but that of the wilderness,
of the pioneer and the Indian. He therefore aims, according as he
is sensitive to beauty, or fundamentally in discord with his own
surroundings, either to transfer the riches of Europe bodily to his
shores and to strive to live in the midst of them; or to revert to pure
and simple savagery. The first path was that trodden by Irving; the
second was that chosen by Cooper.
The quality that made Irving a classic author during his lifetime and
that kept him so, arose from his overwhelming grace of expression.
Around the poor and threadbare material of folklore at his disposal he
threw the beauty of an incomparable style, a manner of telling that
makes of him still the most readable of American authors. “Rip Van
Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The History of New York” are
all minor incidents of life, enlarged and expanded to their utmost
limit, avoiding the tensity of great tragedy, but crammed with the
humor of a disillusioned romanticism. They are not, like the works of
their contemporary Scott, direct assimilations and fresh re-creations
of the material of the past. Irving stands aloof from his own fantasy,
and warns us that this is how life may have been once lived, but
that after all life cannot go on in this way. Thus an undercurrent
of melancholy is unavoidable to the careful reader of these stories.
When Irving’s heart is more closely engaged, as in his fantasies of
the Alhambra, he becomes at once even more supreme as an artist, but
less human in range. He seems to be thinking always that all this
enchantment is purely imaginary, and that his people are not real
men and women. His Alhambra is not so much a castle in Spain, as a
castle in the air. Later Irving tried to remedy this defect by writing
objective history, and busied himself with the life of Columbus, of
Washington, of Astor. But even here he was dogged by the curious
unreality that is the fate of the romantic who cannot find romance in
the world that is about him, or in his own immediate race-memories.
His Columbus is a mediæval stained-glass saint. His Washington is a
classical plaster-cast. Only his Astor has any reality. Thus Irving’s
later works are inferior to his earlier. He was not equipped to draw
men of action but only such dreamers as Rip Van Winkle and Wouter van
Twiller. And an underlying mistrust of women--explainable by the fact
that Irving was a bachelor with several unsuccessful love-affairs to
account for--emerges equally from these classically built pages.
The problem that Pushkin set himself to solve was, in all essentials,
similar to the problem that bothered Irving. Only in Pushkin’s case
there was no lack of material for his talent--rather the reverse,
which explains why, in his short and disordered life, he was able
to turn out so much that is memorable. Pushkin’s question was how to
put this material into classic form, how to make it appear light,
graceful, easy and charming. That he solved this question, and wrote
works of great exhilaration and formal perfection in his youth, in a
language which was before his day barely more than a barbaric dialect,
is the considered verdict of everyone who knows Russian. But this
achievement did not satisfy Pushkin. He did not believe in the world
that he himself had created, and an endless succession of folk-heroes,
of Russians and Ludmillas, could not satisfy him for long. His private
attitude was atheistic and what is more anarchistic, as is indicated by
the obscene Gabriliad and many another youthful poem. As he grew older
he tried more and more to find a world in which to believe, with the
result that this scion of the nobility took to posing as a peasant,
and cultivated an air of heroic misanthropy, derived from Byron. The
two forces flowed together in “Eugene Onegin,” which is the one work
of Pushkin that has united all his qualities. Here under the mantle
of Byronism which he had wrapped round himself, and which essentially
belied his own care-free temper, we get a world which is real but
detestable, and in which the bitterness stands close to the surface.
Yet this world, from which neither Pushkin nor any other later Russian
has found escape, was in a sense forced on him by outer circumstances,
particularly by the great early emotional crisis of his life, which
came from his secret sympathy with the Decembrist uprising in 1825
(when he was twenty-six) which he later had to disavow in order to
escape Siberia. This crisis was fatal to Pushkin’s harmony, in the same
way as Irving’s early emotional crisis, his engagement broken by death,
was fatal to Irving. The remainder of his work is a prolonged emotional
dissatisfaction, much on the lines of Irving’s half-humorous stories.
Pushkin became a realist despite himself, as Irving a romanticist
despite himself. Each is therefore a classic in the Russian or American
sense, but not in the European.
3
With James Fenimore Cooper we approach a very different problem. This
honest, stern and embittered man, at war with society and himself,
whose best writing was done at the latest period of his development,
is perhaps to-day the least known and least appreciated of American
writers. This is due to the fact that about much of his work he
deliberately threw the false glamour of an idyllic romanticism. Hating
the frontier as he did, hating equally the time-serving and vulgar
democracy of his own period, he sympathised at heart with nothing
but the already remote past of the Indian scout (of whom he has left
us an immortal portrait in Leatherstocking) and fundamentally the
Indian himself. An aristocrat to the bone, he threw himself repeatedly
back upon the eighteenth century. In his love of what was already a
remote and murky past, he recalls the Russian historian Karamzin, who
similarly after an early period of political polemic, went back to the
past and strove to glorify it. And the result was much the same in both
cases. Karamzin’s Russian history is, in the opinion of most critics
of standing, not really a history at all, but a marvellous portrait
gallery of living men and women held together by a flowing stream of
narrative tending to idealise and prettify the details of the picture
he was presenting. Cooper’s romances are similarly not romances at all,
but wonderful pictures of bygone events, storms at sea, revolutionary
battles, adventures in the wilderness, similarly vitiated by a tendency
to write idyllically about the past. And as Cooper influenced Melville
and hundreds of other American writers of adventure tales, so Karamzin
influenced Gogol and Dostoevsky. Cooper was indeed more important as an
influence than as an actual creator. Where he was great was in Uncas
and Chingachgook and Leatherstocking; his noble and persistent belief
in character saved him from incredible sentimentality of incident and
a viciously mannered style. The untold glory of the already vanishing
heroic age of American life when men took their lives in their hands
and lived alone with the wilderness, fired Cooper. He was scarcely
adequate to the tragic implications of his own theme.
Here we reach a point that is important for us to understand if we are
to grasp the real nature of the underlying contrast between American
and Russian culture, and the common causes of their failure. Under the
system of levelling democracy such as America adopted and practised,
men could not combine together to wrest a meaning and significance
from frontier conditions except by making sacrifice of some part of
their own personality. The complete personality, therefore, as such,
stood outside the bounds of American organised society, and became
inarticulate, unformed, illiterate, and to all intents and purposes,
a pariah and an outlaw. A Daniel Boone, a Leatherstocking, or in a
later age, a Kit Carson, or a Huckleberry Finn, are the authentic
“originals” of the American landscape. In their presence everything
else becomes feebly Colonial; an imitation of remote European manners
and traditions. Only in the South, where some elements of settled
aristocracy had rooted themselves, could culture and personality
exist side by side in the same individual, and this culture took
social and political, rather than literary forms. The North and the
ever-widening frontier of the West were incapable of producing a
single personality of the intellectual range and poised character
of Jefferson. At the other end of the scale, under the increasing
centralisation and autocracy of the Muscovite Czars, no one could have
independent personality except the Czar himself and a few important
nobles of his entourage. The system of abolishing local independence
worked, as a leveller of the mass, with equal efficiency as the system
of mob-democracy. Only a few of the older Slavonic and Baltic nobility
resisted, and it was within their ranks that literature was cultivated,
as it was within the ranks of the better-bred families of America that
the first attempts at an indigenous culture took place.
4
In both Russia and America, therefore, the rage for imitation of
European ways of life and thought early became of equal importance with
the suppressed desire to shape life according to local conditions. This
fact explains the popularity of such figures, for instance, as Bryant
and Zhukovsky. Bryant simply transported bodily the nature feeling of
Wordsworth to the American scene, as Zhukovsky tried to interfuse the
idyllic sentiment of Parny and Chenier into his aboriginal background.
Both spent a large part of their lives as translators; a task far
easier to the Russian than to the American, as the Russian could not
fail to enrich his material (chosen frequently from third-rate European
sources) by contact with far deeper and more lasting earthborn springs
of inspiration, whereas the American impoverished his by a scrupulous
and Puritanic zeal for correctitude. Both translated Homer, but while
Zhukovsky’s translation became and remained a Russian classic, Bryant’s
translation is a monument of Puritanic austerity and plainness and is
likely to abandon the mind of the cultivated English-speaking reader
in favour of the surging violence of Chapman, the artifice of Pope, or
the rich and tender idyllism of Butcher and Lang. But for all that,
Bryant’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are Greece as seen through American
eyes, and their homespun dignity are more valuable, because more
native, to the American critic than any European version. The impulse
both Bryant and Zhukovsky gave to translations has persisted throughout
the whole range of Russian and American literature; it is symptomatic
of the fact that culture in both countries is not a natural growth,
but something that has to be propped up and supported by continual
reference to what goes on without, in lands where authors are born to
more settled traditions.