There comes a moment in the history of every people when, by some
almost imperceptible inner growth of cultural self-consciousness, a
great, new, and original art is born among them. This moment coincides
with the first slackening of the impulse that has made the particular
people whose history we are surveying, free and victorious in their
long struggle for unity and liberty. The period that follows in every
case depends upon an emergence from early political upheaval and chaos,
and in its frankness and joyousness, resembles the coming of spring. A
slackening of unified political effort takes place, and a corresponding
increase of individual talent in other fields. Italy reached this
moment with her pictorial arts and literature early in the fourteenth
century; France under Ronsard and the Pleaid; England under the Tudors.
In Russia and America the old cultural background, such as it was,
blocked the path of a new birth down to the period at which we have now
arrived in the course of our study. Russia’s Renaissance and America’s
Renaissance coincided; both began about 1830. The first great figures
that these two Renaissances produced in the field of literature were
Gogol and Hawthorne.
Let us look for one moment at the social conditions under which these
two men came to maturity. In Russia the whole period is covered by the
reign of Nicholas I. Alexander I, who had succeeded in 1794 and whose
reign had led to a complete triumph over Napoleon after Moscow, died
in 1825. His reign had strengthened the hold of the autocracy upon the
great mass of the population, and had enormously increased as well
the prestige of Russia in Europe, but had successively alienated the
more enlightened nobility, who were all for the contemporary remedy
of Western liberalism--a constitution. His death was the signal for
the abortive uprising of the Decembrists, who were one and all nobles
and could command little support in the army. The aim of Nicholas
was to preserve everything exactly as it had been left by Alexander.
Personally friendly as he was to liberal thought at the beginning,
patron of both Pushkin and Gogol, possessed of great native courage
and invincible determination, the movement of events in Europe from
1830 to 1848 forced him little by little into the camp of the extreme
reactionaries, and the close of his reign found even the Slavophils in
opposition to the Czar. By his personal interference in the affairs of
Poland and Turkey he drew down upon him the enmity of Austria, England,
and France, at that time the three greatest European powers. In regard
to literature and the spread of ideas, his reign was marked by a
steady growth in the power of the censorship, tending to abolish every
manifestation of original thought.
All during this time, the pressure of Russia on its westward frontier,
the frontier of Europe, was enormous, as during the same period
America exerted immense pressure on its own westward frontier--the
frontier that led through the Spanish colonial possessions, to the
Pacific. The increase in repressive autocracy in Russia, under
Nicholas I, was counterbalanced in America by a great increase in
expansive democracy. The period opens with the disappearance of the
last of the old Federalist “dynasty” among the Presidents, which had
ruled (with the slight interregnum of Jefferson’s presidency) from
Washington’s presidency down to 1829. At that date John Quincy Adams
went out of office. He was succeeded by Andrew Jackson who was not
only a democrat, but a backwoodsman, a Southerner, and an apostle of
the common people. The only opposition Jackson need fear was from the
aristocratic and older South, in the person of John C. Calhoun, and to
a slight extent from the Northern Whigs. The latter party were soon
conciliated, and for the rest of that period under review, down to the
Civil War, we have a series of presidents whose democracy, slightly
tainted with Whiggism, leads to a remarkable series of compromises
between the agricultural and slave-holding South and the industrial
and trading North, and the ever-expanding Western territory which in
theory (but not in fact) lay equally open for both sections--Northern
and Southern--to settle upon and inhabit. What makes this period
remarkable in American history is first, the constant succession of
characterless and feebly respectable presidents--Van Buren, Fillmore,
Pierce, Buchanan--so characterless and feeble that a single Calhoun who
spent his lifetime in opposition to the whole system resembles a giant
by comparison; second, the increasing pressure on the southwest, on
Mexico, which resembles Nicholas First’s increasing pressure on Turkey;
and third, the growth of literature in the midst of a system which was
politically corrupt and persisted wholly on the principle of “to the
victors belong the spoils,” yet did such lip-service to respectability
that Hawthorne himself dared scarcely mention directly the word
“adultery” in his masterpiece. We would do well to recall the Russian
censorship in this connection, as also the fact that under Nicholas I,
government bribery and corruption (as revealed by the Crimean War)
reached a level only paralleled later under Nicholas II.
Under such conditions, the genius of Gogol and Hawthorne came to
flower. So close were they, not only in the themes upon which they
worked, but in their personal psychology, their inmost successes and
failures, that it matters little which we take first. But inasmuch as
to the English-speaking Occidental, the Russian’s art illuminates by
contrast that of the American’s, whereas the reverse is less likely to
be true, we will take first the career and activity of the unhappy man
who more than any other, made Russian literature what it specifically
is.
2
Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol was born on March 19, 1809, in a market town
of Sorochintsky in the province of Poltava. He came from a family of
Ukrainian Cossack gentry. The district in which he had been born he
himself immortalized in his story of “Taras Bulba.” It was the district
beginning about two hundred miles south of Moscow, embracing Kiev and
the dangerous shallows and rapids that encumber the course of the
lower Dnieper, which was the important “river road” leading to what
throughout the Middle Ages was Russia’s main sea frontier: the frontier
of the Black Sea. In the words of an able American commentator on
Russian affairs this district, known as the Ukraine, was “the Border
Marches. Naturally it has varied, in different epochs, just as our
western frontier (pretty nearly its exact equivalent) varied at
different periods throughout the history of the United States, and was
pushed further and further from the eastern centre of civilisation. In
the case of Russia, Moscow represented that centre.”[6]
In this district, then, Gogol was born. His people were the Ukrainian
Cossacks. This word meant to the Russian mind not an independent
race, but an independent class: the freebooter, the military nomad
of the boundless plain, the man whose home was the saddle, and whose
roof was in the sky, the exact counterpart of the Western American
“bad man.” But unlike the “bad man” of the West, these Cossacks had
been deliberately sent to populate the Ukraine by the policy of the
government. In the reign of Ivan the Terrible, it became necessary to
have a military force on this southwest frontier, in order to hold back
the Crimean Tartars, who were continually threatening Moscow through
advance from the Kherson peninsula. Czar Ivan thereupon collected
all the young men of adventurous disposition and warlike tendencies
that could be found for this purpose. Most of them were, in fact,
criminals--a body of men, warring alike upon Pole and Turk, who lived
in semi-monastic state in a movable capital on the banks of the
Dnieper, and who had become so great a menace to the Czar himself that
after Pugachev’s rebellion in the reign of Catherine the Great, they
were suppressed. It was from this group Gogol sprang.
He was, in fact, the last flower of the old Cossack independence of
spirit. After a sensitive, sickly, and morbid boyhood, he drifted to
St. Petersburg at the age of twenty, equipped with nothing but a bad
idyllic poem and a boundless ambition and vanity. Here he was taken up
by literary society and his first book of Ukrainian tales, “Evenings
on a Farm near Dikanka,” made such a sensation that he rapidly became
a social lion. He produced more tales and attempted to become a
teacher of history with small success. But he became increasingly the
idol of the more idealistic Russian intellectuals whose spiritual
home was Moscow, and whose aims were Slavophilism. Towards this group
he gravitated increasingly. His comedy, “The Government Inspector,”
was an immediate and unqualified success of mingled admiration and
disparagement, and he was now able to go abroad, choosing Rome as a
place of residence. From there, he came back to Russia, with the first
part of his masterpiece “Dead Souls” (published 1842). But life abroad
and still more the homage paid to him, had convinced him that he must
have some greater mission than merely to be a writer. He must become
a prophet, and regenerate Russia spiritually. His first attempt in
this direction took the form of the religious prose polemic, “Select
Passages from a Correspondence with Friends.” In this book, he throws
overboard the St. Petersburg Liberals and the Moscow Slavophils alike,
and reveals himself shamelessly as a preacher of nothing but dumb
obedience to the Czar, ready to transform his mission of regeneration
into the rôle of an upholder of complete reaction in religious and
political matters. Only an intense egotist could have written such
a book, with its attacks on all who had helped him in the past, and
henceforth Gogol had no friends. He could not find peace either
within or without Russia, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, restless
self-abnegations, tormented repentances, were alike in vain. In 1852,
he died having by his own act destroyed the greater portion of the
manuscript of the second part of his “Dead Souls.”
The inner history of Gogol is that of a man who seeks freedom
everywhere but can find it nowhere in the self-satisfied, petty
bourgeois civilization of his epoch, with its scum of semi-concealed
political corruption floating on the top of artificial manners, its
apeing of foreign fashion, its sentimentality and sordidness. All this
comes out very strongly in the novel which is Gogol’s unquestioned
masterpiece, his “Dead Souls.” The hero of this book, Chichikov,
is a sort of picture of Gogol himself, in his aimlessness, his
self-satisfied inferiority, his timidity with women. He has conceived
a brilliant plan, of obtaining an heiress in marriage by representing
himself as a large landowner with a great number of serfs. To carry
this plan into effect, he buys up from the landowners of a certain
district, the serfs that have recently died or run away, and whose
names, not having been struck off the census rolls, still leave
their owners liable to payment of poll tax for them. Equipped with
this list of “dead souls” he intends to pose as a wealthy man, but
his scheme fails through his own impudence. Gogol certainly meant to
make Chichikov attractive, and even to show his “regeneration” in
the second part, which was never finished; but Chichikov remains at
best a mean-spirited busybody, at worst a base adventurer with an
undeveloped moral sense. What the book is chiefly remarkable for is
its extraordinary portrait gallery of characters each set in their
appropriate surroundings of Russian landscape. As Chichikov drives
hither and thither on his enterprise of cheating, we are treated to
a panorama of Russian landscape and of Russian life, and each is as
dreary as the other. This novel has been compared to “Pickwick Papers,”
but the laughter of “Dead Souls” is bitter and harsh and menacing. One
cannot avoid a feeling as one reads on and on that the dead peasants
whom Chichikov absorbs were at least once men, fully alive, unspoilt
and integral (however degraded their conditions of existence); but
that the living landowners who possess them--with the exception of
the half-crazy old maid Korobotchka who gives the plot away, and the
embittered miser Plyuskin,--are neither wholly alive nor honest. They
are walking ghosts, horrible simulacra; rotting away within, the
degenerate self-satisfied scions of all manner of public and private
corruption.
“Dead Souls” remains valuable therefore chiefly as satire--a bitter
satire by a “soul” itself in peril of death; one who had come to
central Russia from the freer, wilder atmosphere of the frontier,
and who had there earnestly sought for truth and beauty only to find
stifling mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption. From this strain
of satire, Gogol himself vainly sought escape; escape into the
wild heroism of the old Cossack life vividly described in “Taras
Bulba,” escape into peasant folklore, escape into morbid religious
introspection. Gogol is usually credited with being the first
thorough-going Russian realist, but in fact realism was to him always
the enemy. On its face appeared the grin of the evil one, or the smirk
of the hypocrite. Only once is Gogol the objective realist in his play
the “Government Inspector.” Here he merely set down the facts, and gave
his skill in dialogue a free run. The result was equal to the most
bitter and cruel of all his satires; all the bitterer because here
there is no fantasy to fly to, no charm of sentiment to colour it. For
the whole of his life, Gogol struggled like a man in a net. He must
speak the truth, but the truth only hurt him. He must create beauty. He
had the courage to call “Dead Souls” a poem, and his whole career was
like a boldly planned and beautifully conceived raid of a daring chief
into the heart of a hostile country. But when he had arrived at the
summit of his career, beauty still mocked him from far away. Gogol left
Russian literature neither romantic nor realistic; he mingled humor
with bitter earnest, and magnificence with sordidness. In the end he
could not write any more. The warring forces within his soul tore him
to pieces.
3
The career of Hawthorne, if we set aside slight differences in early
environment and upbringing, was startlingly parallel. In his inner
life, Hawthorne was the exact counterpart to Gogol. He was born in
1804 of what might be called America’s radical aristocracy, the long
line of Puritan legalists, divines, and shipmasters that had been the
bulwark of the attacks against England’s unifying and centralizing
tendencies, from 1629 to the Revolution. An ancestor had taken part in
the hanging of witches and whipping of Quakers; just as an ancestor
of Gogol probably took part in the scenes of raid and rapine that are
so vividly told in “Taras Bulba.” A delicate childhood, a melancholy,
secretive and hypochondriac disposition, a precocious desire to
write, complete the picture. But unlike Gogol, Hawthorne did not have
to travel from his home to attain fame as a writer. He was born and
already established at the centre where all movement of ideas took
place: within sight of Boston. In his day, the force that had made the
Revolution a success, and had given New England the intellectual and
moral primacy of the New World, was already weakening. Further and
further off the frontier was moving, across the Mississippi. As each
new barrier interposed by nature was passed, the power of New England
waned. Already its trade and shipping were passing into the hands of
New York. Its population, moving out to the richer agricultural lands
of the Middle West, were maintaining all the faults of the Puritan
system, the greed, avarice, stiffness, and ugliness, without the
redeeming Puritan mental discipline. Hawthorne was therefore almost
the last flower of idealistic New England; the last flower of the old
stock that was to produce the first fine fruit of American literature.
And like Gogol, Hawthorne was primarily a humorist; but whereas Gogol’s
humour is lit up by savage hatred (which blazes to a great flame in
“Dead Souls,” despite Gogol), Hawthorne’s humor is made poignant by
the nostalgic hopelessness of regret. Behind Gogol’s mask is a sneer;
behind Hawthorne’s face one sees the terrible infinite vanity of all
earthly things.
It is instructive in this respect, to compare Hawthorne’s finest novel,
“The House of Seven Gables,” with Gogol’s masterpiece, “Dead Souls.”
Where Gogol adopts a setting that seems to take in its sweep the
whole of the Russian landscape, Hawthorne confines his action to the
precincts of a single house. Yet in this small compass of space, with
the use of barely more than half-a-dozen characters, he conveys the
sense of a past stretching back to infinity; a past so remote, awful
and unchangeable that the present day of his novel is but a feeble
echo of its long-appointed doom. Over this thought of the past, as an
event that cannot be recalled or redeemed, Hawthorne returns again and
again, as Gogol returns again and again to his motive that the souls
of his characters are really dead and can only be brought to life in
the future. The ruin of a people is here summed up in the downfall of
a single family within the four walls of a house, as in Gogol the same
ruin pursues Chichikov everywhere. Both novels are novels about what
are literally “dead souls”--Hepzibah and Clifford and old Uncle Venner
and the daguerreotypist Holgrave are as impotent to break the doom that
weighs upon them as any of Gogol’s landowners. But the doom here is
concentrated on a single point, whereas in Gogol it is widespread and
diffused.
In his admirable study of Hawthorne, Henry James suggests that the
“House of the Seven Gables” is more like a prelude or unfinished
sketch for a novel than a complete story. We know that Gogol was
unable to finish his novel, though he schemed that Chichikov should be
regenerated. Hawthorne did finish his, but the last chapters are an
anticlimax after what is the real end; the death of Judge Pyncheon, and
the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford. The real end is the railway: “At
one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next a village
had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished ...
the spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations;
the broad-based hills glided away.” This flight into the external
world away from the accursed house which held them, is a liberation;
it is a removal without an aim, a complete escape from “what we call
real estate--the solid ground to build a house on--which is the broad
foundation on which nearly all of the guilt of the world rests.” This,
and not the weak anticlimax by which the story actually ends, is the
real conclusion, so far as there can be any conclusion, in Hawthorne’s
mind. To get away from property--to get away from land, to own
nothing--that is Hawthorne’s solution, his magic charm for breaking the
spell of the past.
In Gogol’s novel, the same flight motive, which Hawthorne introduces
with skilful effect as a liberation from the House of Seven Gables,
rotting into ruin, is introduced and maintained throughout the story.
Chichikov moves hither and thither, forever aimless, forever wandering,
seeking to obtain something lasting; a mythical estate, imaginary
domain lures him on. He cannot be regenerated until he settles down and
heroically transcends his sordid past. Hawthorne’s characters cannot be
regenerated until they fly away from the past and become nonentities.
4
Here we see in its purest form the workings of that power-land
antithesis that we have already described as lying at the root of
the contrasted Russian and American psychology. The land on which
Hawthorne’s own characters pursue their existence warps their
characters; the power that the Russian helplessly desires to achieve,
warps the minds not only of Chichikov, but of all the other landowners
about him. Hawthorne himself could no more escape his heritage than
Gogol. He attempted to escape, in brilliant excursions into folklore,
such as “The Scarlet Letter,” in faintly objective comedy such as
“The Blithedale Romance,” finally even in life abroad. But in the end
he too had to confess himself beaten. The life of which he was so
fine a recorder became more and more a regretful memory of tradition;
and meantime the flood of democracy surged irresistibly past him to
other aims. Hawthorne could only be outwardly, but not inwardly, a
democrat. His political support of Franklin Pierce, and consequent
upholding of the rights granted to the Southern States at the time of
the making of the Constitution--including the right to hold slaves, and
to extend their territory--made him anathema to his own neighbours,
the abolitionists, to whom the Mexican War had become a shameful
memory, and who were about to give their support to the mad fanatic,
John Brown. Hawthorne went abroad after this, where he remained, very
indecisive in his attitude and writings till the eve of the Civil
War. That event disillusioned him completely. He declared publicly
that he considered that John Brown had been justly hanged; and that
the American’s allegiance, in the nature of things, was always to
one’s own native state, rather than to the country as a whole. These
remarks, duly deprecated by the editor of the paper in which they
appeared, only served to show that Hawthorne was now as much of a
disillusioned aristocrat as Gogol had been before him. He died, in
a fit of black melancholia, after making several abortive attempts
at writing a romance which would deal with the subject of a supposed
elixir of life,--attempts which came to nothing. Like Gogol, he was
one who had sought for happiness within his own country, and later
without, and had found it nowhere; but could not abandon the idea that
somewhere there existed a magic talisman that would set things right
and make life worth living. Because of the bitter fanaticism of this
hope--a hope which Europe from time to time also entertains but always
abandons--Gogol and Hawthorne were the first supremely great figures in
their national literatures.