again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different
string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a
sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of
æsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision,
but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life
which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to
represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and
completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of
whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and
argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest
story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout,
and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is
reinforced by the incident. Tiny events--the peasant who eats minnows
alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand
roubles--take on a character of portent, except that the word is too
harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a
sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been
slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not
while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much
significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote
village shop:--
'"How much are these cakes?'
'"Two for a farthing.'
'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before
by the Jewess and asked him:--
'"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'
'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all
sides, and raised one eyebrow.
'"Like that?' he asked.
'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:--
'"Two for three farthings...."'
It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a
stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles,
infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately
sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every
pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the
real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a
secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have
explored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance of
them.
[AUGUST, 1919.
* * * * *
The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he
is the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughout
Tchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are
great among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essential
part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity
and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this.
Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus,
one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own.
'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a
big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never
loved any man as much as him.... Secondly, while Tolstoy is in
literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even
recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is
not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is
the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon
literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense
authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature,
vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling,
exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the
shade....'--(January, 1900.)
Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men
before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be
crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully
conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.
'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries--that is, men between
thirty and forty-five--have given the world one single drop of
alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a
great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull
time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity,
our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the
artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack
"something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our
muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that
the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who
intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic:
they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... And we?
We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... Flog
us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims,
and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics,
we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid
of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and
blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
nothing cannot be an artist....
'... You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not
to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not
to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the
ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'
That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
effort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the
_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been
thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own
despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was
plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable
of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West,
had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.
To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow
we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will
always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a
profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern
literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who
is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of
no particular account.
Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a
much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this
volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it
does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief
constituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because--we
insist again--the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only
great modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If he
is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may
aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can
refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we
regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of
the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in
him--and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub
his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess
beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for
universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a
millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted
to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his,
we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a
hero--more than that, _the_ hero of our time.
[Footnote 8: _Letters of Anton Tchehov_. Translated by Constance
Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]
It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not
consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated
by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most
frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the
infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in
himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw
in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for
refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked
everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and
saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his
letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great
exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner--a
thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his
country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political
indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active
good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism
and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin
in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he
spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures
against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and,
although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he
refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of
action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising
practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his
childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family.
Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a
saint. His self-devotion was boundless.
Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent;
but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies
will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an
axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and
men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon
the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is
within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of
his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his
brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect
human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;
they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they
are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves ...
they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual
instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is
tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote
it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day
and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for
it.'
In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set
himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference
upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral
indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the
fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end.
But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no
particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and
character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no
panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there
could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be
negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because
civilisation is largely a sham.
'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above
all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in
carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make
haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'
Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily
endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service
to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with
pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly
precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.
'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses
and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the
younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for
gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or
for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a
superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health,
intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute
freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make
take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great
artist.'
What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is
witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is,
achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and
self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story
about the son of a serf--Tchehov was the son of a serf--who 'squeezed
the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not
know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his
life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul
in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.
He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he
did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between
science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses;
it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a
little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of
the artist was to be a decent man.
'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary.... We
cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we
have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and
so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely
hooked.... And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a
colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from
gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being
hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as
simply a man.... Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody
alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up
solidarity.'
It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of
Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike
us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that
of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the
mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it
further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present
importance to ourselves.
[MARCH, 1920.
_American Poetry_
We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages
to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a
salutary shock from the critic of the _Detroit News_, who informs us
that Mr Aiken, 'despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the
newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates
... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee
Masters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin
Arlington Robinson.' The shock is two-fold. In a single sentence we are
in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a
little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr
Oppenheim or Mr Robinson. This very ignorance makes us cautious where we
have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr
Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
nothing which convinces us that they may not be.
Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
concentrated unity of æsthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they
seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at
once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;
they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all
interesting.
They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's
'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of
Forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not
very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry
save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly in
point, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American
poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly
pressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which
they throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at moments
they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a
story in poetry and keep it poetry is a herculean task. It would indeed
be doubly rash to dogmatise, for our three poets desire to tell very
different stories, and we are by no means sure that the emotional
subtleties which Mr Aiken in particular aims at capturing are capable of
being exactly expressed in prose.
Since Mr Aiken is the _corpus vile_ before us we will henceforward
confine ourselves to him, though we premise that in spite of his very
sufficient originality he is characteristic of what is most worth
attention in modern American poetry. Proceeding then, we find another
point of contact between him and Mr Kipling, more important perhaps than
the former, and certainly more dangerous. Both find it apparently
impossible to stem the uprush of rhetoric. Perhaps they do not try to;
but we will be charitable--after all, there is enough good in either of
them to justify charity--and assume that the willingness of the spirit
gives way to the weakness of the flesh. Of course we all know about Mr
Kipling's rhetoric; it is a kind of emanation of the spatial immensities
with which he deals--Empires, the Seven Seas, from Dublin to Diarbekir.
Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an
introspective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business.
His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling's
outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for the
illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. There
is much writing of this kind:--
'Dusk, withdrawing to a single lamplight
At the end of an infinite street--
He saw his ghost walk down that street for ever,
And heard the eternal rhythm of his feet.
And if he should reach at last that final gutter,
To-day, or to-morrow,
Or, maybe, after the death of himself and time;
And stand at the ultimate curbstone by the stars,
Above dead matches, and smears of paper, and slime;
Would the secret of his desire
Blossom out of the dark with a burst of fire?
Or would he hear the eternal arc-lamps sputter,
Only that; and see old shadows crawl;
And find the stars were street lamps after all?
Music, quivering to a point of silence,
Drew his heart down over the edge of the world....'
It is dangerous for a poet to conjure up infinities unless he has made
adequate preparation for keeping them in control when they appear. We
are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked.
Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably
managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr
Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean
and unsatisfactory.
'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
Spun from the darkness;
Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.
Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.
I tire of the green of the world.
I am myself a mouth for blood....'
Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been
to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to
another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new
and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a
kind of absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he
should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music
he has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for
a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from
the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more
from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration
of a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of
the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself
points to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,'
'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses
shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. When
there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity,
but precisely of 1890:--
'And he saw red roses drop apart,
Each to disclose a charnel heart....
We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we
do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into
those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency
in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption
longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not
sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in
rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his
own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a
violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the
theme demanded and his art could not ensure.
'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ...
Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ...
I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ...
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...'
We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to
say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might
have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;
bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen
great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate
fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor
expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--
'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'