and "in three centuries humility, resignation and obedience were
accepted as virtues; the shrines of the gods were abandoned; the
beautiful limbs of the lover and athlete were forbidden to the sculptor
and the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered him instead.
Literature died, for literature can but praise life. Music died, for
music can but praise life, and the lugubrious _Dies Irae_ was heard in
the fanes. What use had a world for art when the creed current among men
was that life is a mean and miserable thing? So amid lugubrious chant
and solemn procession the dusk thickened until the moment of deepest
night was reached in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the
fifteenth century the dawn began in Italy, and sculptors and painters
turned their eyes toward Greece." Dante was a Catholic, although not a
very orthodox one, and Catholicism can make a valid claim to the
cathedrals and the choral music of Vittoria and Palestrina. But the
painters of the Renaissance were as pagan as Cæsar Borgia and only chose
religious subjects as a pretext for drawing and to meet a certain
demand. In fact, the whole spirit of the Renaissance was pagan and
progressive, and a return to the Middle Ages was averted when "that
disagreeable monk, Savonarola," was burned at the stake. After this new
birth came the Reformation, resulting in the Council of Trent, which
forbade all speculation on the meaning and value of life and arranged
"the Catholic's journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any
tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons." As a result
there has been practically no Catholic literature since that time.
"Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can
praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and
it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic
and allowed the rose to bloom again." Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan,
Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all
agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and
Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any
criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy
more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller,
Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche--no Catholics
and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and
Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out,
did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main
figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan
D'Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, _Don Quixote_,
but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen,
Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for
the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote
_The Essay on Man_, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had
a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne,
Emerson, Poe, and Whitman--Protestant and agnostic.
The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again.
It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient
and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest
among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of
Genesis we read of God's anger at the man and woman who ate of the
forbidden fruit. "The two great enemies of religion are the desire to
live and the desire to know," and the whole tendency of art is to
increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the
Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore
writes with pride of "the noble and exalted world that must have existed
before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion
and bade them to think of angels instead." He insists with Gautier that
earth is as beautiful as heaven.
When he had decided that literature was incompatible with dogma, Mr.
Moore found himself in a decidedly unpleasant situation. He had changed
the course of his life to take part in the Irish Renaissance, and now he
realized that the Irish Renaissance was a mere bubble. The whole history
of the world showed that literature could not be produced in a Roman
Catholic country. The only thing for him to do was to leave Ireland, but
in the meanwhile he felt that he must declare himself a Protestant.
Between art and religion there could be but one choice for him; the
religion must be changed. It is true that he had never acquiesced in any
of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but he had been baptized in that
Church, and he had always been considered a Catholic. Protestantism
seemed much preferable, because Protestantism leaves the mind very
nearly free. In the _Confessions of a Young Man_, he had already
expressed his prejudice in its favor. "Look at the nations that have
clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The
Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs
limp in the incensed silence of the Vatican." And so Mr. Moore after
several futile interviews with the Anglican priest wrote to _The Irish
Times_ announcing his change from the Church of Rome, and began the
composition of _Hail and Farewell_ as the best means in his power to
liberate his country priestcraft.
P. M. HENRY.
Smile and Scream: Chekhov and Andreyev
_Stories of Russian Life_, by Anton Tchekoff; translated by Marian
Fell. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]
_Savva_ and _The Life of Man_, by Leonid Andreyev; translated from
the French (!) by Thomas Seltzer. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
A French critic characterized Russian literature as Heroic. Tragic would
perhaps be a happier definition; what has been Russian life, and hence
its literature, but a continuous tragedy? Gogol looked into that life
and burst into a homeric laughter which ultimately drove him insane; the
"repenting nobleman" Turgenyev was devoured by melancholy over his sad
heroes and heroines; the "cruel genius" of Dostoyevsky convulsively
writhed in contemplation of the "humiliated and offended"; Chekhov, who
had begun his career in the gayest humor, turned eventually gloomy and
pronounced his diagnosis: Such life is impossible; even Gorky, the
chanter of hymns to the proud Man, was crushed and silenced by grim
reality, and his scepter of the idol of young Russia passed into the
hands of the most pessimistic writer, Andreyev.
O forgive me, my unfortunate people:
Not one gay song have I sung for you yet!
_Frug._
* * * * *
Tutchev found a mysterious beauty in the brightness of autumn evenings:
Wane, enfeeblement, and on all--
That mild smile of decay
Which in sensible creatures we call
Exalted meekness of suffering.
Such was the smile of Anton Chekhov. Run through his works, look at the
sad faces of his heroes, listen to the yearning effusions of his women,
observe _his_ Nature, his skies and steppes, and your heart will shrink
before that smile of fading autumn. He knew and understood Russian life
better than any other writer, and keenly felt its tragicness and ...
hopelessness. Therefore he did not protest or advocate, did not denounce
or propagate, did not shout or curse, as most of his colleagues did: for
what is the use? He only smiled, a sad gripping smile that maddens the
sensitive reader--a smile of ennui and helplessness characteristic of
the Russian "soilless" intellectual. I believe it was this smile, which
masqued an abyss of sorrow and pain, that early extinguished Chekhov's
life; it is so much easier and more healthful to scream and howl than to
smile under torture.
The stories translated by Miss Fell are far not of the best (by the way:
why not use a correct transliteration? Why that half-German,
half-English "Tchekoff"?). I suspect that the translator endeavored to
choose the least typically-Russian sketches in the hope that they would
be more "understandable" to the foreign reader; such attempts generally
fail to convey the real atmosphere. "If you wish to know the Poet, you
must go into the Poet's land," said Goethe. On the whole, however, the
book is imbued with the Chekhovian _leit-motif_--the longing,
struggling, crippled Russian soul.
Leonid Andreyev is of a dual personality: the artist, and the mouthpiece
of society. In his early sketches, in his short stories, and in his
greatest achievement, _The Seven Who Were Hanged_, he is the wonderful
psychologist, the unveiler of the soul mysteries with an art that
approaches that of Maeterlinck. Russian reality, however, is a Moloch
clamoring victims; the powerful tragedy of life absorbs and subjugates
all individual forces, and it requires great artistic strength to
preserve aloofness from the burning problems of the day. Andreyev has
witnessed the most appalling epoch in his country's history: disastrous
war, revolution, reaction, famine, national demoralization. He has been
tempted to interpret the passing events, a perilous path for an artist
whose field of observation must lie either in the crystallized past or
in the dim future, never in chronicling the floating present. In his
stories and plays of that later period, Andreyev revealed such horrors,
such gruesome scenes, that we have felt as if we were in a Gallery of
Tortures. Horror shrieks, screams, beats upon our senses, maddens us.
But the colors are too loud, the medium of tickling our sensations too
vulgar. I recall a passage from Merezhkovsky, a description of one of
the museums in Florence. There is a head of Dante; the face is calm,
almost indifferent, yet one sees at once that it is a face of one who
saw hell. In the same room hangs a wax-image of Plague, with hideous
details--rotting cadavers with outpouring bowels in which swarm enormous
worms. The Sunday-visitors pass by Dante's head yawning, but wistfully
crowd at the wax Plague. I confess this scene, at times, makes me draw
an analogy with Chekhov and Andreyev.
As a playwright Andreyev has utterly failed; he lacks dramatic
constraint and proportion. He puts into the mouths of his actors
bombastic phrases, to the delight of the gallery; but there is
absolutely too much talking in his plays, with very little drama. The
two plays published in the book now before me, _Savva_ and _Life of
Man_, have caused more discussion than any of his other plays,--a fact
due not to their particular merit, but to their pyrotechnic effects and
"understandableness."
Savva, a young man "with a suggestion of the peasant in his looks," has
a modest intention to annihilate everything.
Man is to remain, of course. What is in his way is the stupidity
that, piling up for thousands of years, has grown into a
mountain. The modern sages want to build on this mountain, but
that, of course, will lead to nothing but making the mountain
still higher. It is the mountain itself that must be removed. It
must be levelled to its foundation, down to the bare earth.
... Annihilate everything! The old houses, the old cities, the
old literature, the old art.... All the old dress must go. Man
must be stripped bare and left on a naked earth! Then he will
build up a new life. The earth must be denuded; it must be
stripped of its hideous old rags. It deserves to be arrayed in a
king's mantle; but what have they done with it? They have dressed
it in coarse fustian, in convict clothes. They've built cities,
the idiots!
... Believe me, monk, I have been in many cities and in many
lands. Nowhere did I see a free man. I saw only slaves. I saw the
cages in which they live, the beds on which they are born and
die; I saw their hatreds and their loves, their sins and their
good works. And I saw also their amusements, their pitiful
attempts to bring dead joy back to life again. And everything
that I saw bore the stamp of stupidity and unreason. He that is
born wise turns stupid in their midst: he that is born cheerful
hangs himself from boredom and sticks out his tongue at them.
Amidst the flowers of the beautiful earth--you have no idea how
beautiful the earth is, monk--they have erected insane asylums.
And what are they doing with their children? I have never yet
seen parents who do not deserve capital punishment; first because
they begot children, and secondly, because, having begot them,
they did not immediately commit suicide.
Well, how is this _enfant terrible_--the trumpeter of a popularized
edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.--how
is this "bad man" going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very
simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour,
that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb
behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant
believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble:
When we are through with God, we'll go for fellows like him.
There are lots of them--Titian, Shakespeare, Byron. We'll make a
nice pile of the whole lot and pour oil over it. Then we'll burn
their cities.
Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to
a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work,
where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and
suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had
killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery
to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts
of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of
King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a
martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk:
_King Herod_: I am wise. My sorrow has made me so. It is a great
sorrow. There is none greater on earth. I killed my son with my
own hand. Not the hand you are looking at, but the one which
isn't here.
_Savva_: Where is it?
_King Herod_: I burnt it. I held it in the stove and let it burn
up to my elbow.
_Savva_: Did that relieve you?
_King Herod_: No. Fire cannot destroy my grief. It burns with a
heat that is greater than fire.... No, young man, fire is weak.
Spit on it and it is quenched.
Our hero, Savva, is naturally offended, for his motto is _Ignis sanat_,
and he is determined to cure the world with fire. The pilgrim calmly
rejoinds:
No, boy. Every fire goes out when its time comes. My grief is
great, so great that when I look around me I say to myself: good
heavens, what has become of everything else that's large and
great? Where has it all gone to? The forest is small, the house
is small, the mountain is small, the whole earth is small, a mere
poppy seed. You have to walk cautiously and look out, lest you
reach the end and drop off.
..........
_Speransky_: I feel blue.
_King Herod_: Keep still, keep still, I don't want to listen. You
are suffering? Keep still. I am a man too, brother, so I don't
understand. I'll insult you if you don't look out.
... Here I am with my sorrow. You see what it is--there is no
greater on earth. And yet if God spoke to me and said, "Yeremy, I
will give you the whole earth if you give me your grief," I
wouldn't give it away. I will not give it away, friend. It is
sweeter to me than honey; it is stronger than the strongest
drink. Through it I have learned the truth.
_Savva_: God?
_King Herod_: Christ--that's the one! He alone can understand the
sorrow that is in me. He sees and understands. "Yes, Yeremy, I
see how you suffer." That's all. "I see." And I answer Him: "Yes,
O Lord, behold my sorrow!" That's all. No more is necessary.
_Savva_: What you value in Christ is His suffering...?
_King Herod_: You mean His crucifixion? No, brother, that
suffering was a trifle. They crucified him--what did that matter?
The important point was that thereby He came to know the truth.
As long as He walked the earth, He was--well--a man, rather a
good man--talking here and there about this and that.... But when
these same fellows carried Him off to the cross and went at Him
with knouts, whips, and lashes, then His eyes were opened. "Aha!"
He said, "so that's what it is!" And He prayed: "I cannot endure
such suffering. I thought it would be a simple crucifixion; but,
O Father in Heaven, what is this?" And the Father said to Him:
"Never mind, never mind, Son! Know the truth, know what it is."
And from then on He fell to sorrowing, and has been sorrowing to
this day.
... And everywhere, wherever I go, I see before me His pure
visage. "Do you understand my suffering, O Lord?" "I understand,
Yeremy, I understand everything. Go your way in peace." I am to
Him like a transparent crystal with a tear inside. "You
understand, Lord?" "I understand, Yeremy." "Well, and I
understand you too." So we live together. He with me, I with him.
I am sorry for Him also. When I die, I will transmit my sorrow to
Him. "Take it Lord."
In depicting individual sorrow Andreyev approaches Dostoevsky; it is
when he raises general, universal questions, that he miserably fails in
answering them. The Russian public has "spoiled" him, has crowned him
with the title of a genius, when he is only a man of big talent.
Unfortunately Andreyev took the flattery of the beast-public seriously;
he said to himself: Who knows? Maybe I am, indeed, an Atlas. Let me try
and shake the world. And he did try! As a result we have, among his
other sore failures, the loudest commonplace--_Life of Man_.
I think it was Maurice Baring, a Russologue and an admirer of the
playwright, who defined _Life of Man_ as an algebraic play, with Man
standing for _x_ and Fate for _y_. Not the tragedy of a certain life
under certain conditions, but Life in general, under all circumstances,
was the object of the drama. It is the world-old problem, the futility
of man's struggles in the face of blind unreasoning fate that may at any
moment overthrow his toy-castles. Perhaps a Goethe might attempt to say
something new on that subject, or at least to put it in a new way. With
Andreyev the task proved to be not "up to his shoulder," as the Russians
say. The annoying pretentiousness of the play appears a hundred times
more convex when on the stage. I saw it once in the "symbolized" theatre
of Mme. Kommissarzhevskaya in St. Petersburg, and another time in the
performance of the Moscow Artistic Theatre. On the first occasion I was
bored to death, and pitied the gifted manager, Mr. Meyerhold, in his
futile attempt to veil the platitudes of the play in mysticism, to
create an atmosphere, a "_Stimmung_." The Moscow people succeeded in
emphasizing the ridiculous awkwardness of the drama, the shrill
incongruities of the situations and styles,--and I shall ever be
grateful to them for the minutes of hearty laughter that they caused me
then and which I cannot escape even now, as soon as I recall the harmony
between the symbolicized Someone in Gray (sh-sh ...--Fate!) and the
super-realistic shrieks of the mother giving birth to a child. The
actors did their best, but no miracle could have saved the doomed loud
nothingness.
As I have mentioned, Andreyev's "heel of Achilles" demonstrates its
vulnerability when he obeys the call of the public and speaks on
up-to-date topics. _Life of Man_ was written, evidently, in response to
the symbolistic moods that became noticeable among Russian society at
the beginning of the twentieth century. For more than ten years the
group of Symbolists, under the leadership of Valery Brusov, had been
ridiculed and unrecognized. Then came the reaction: All began to talk
symbols; the press, the stage, the art galleries, the public lectures,
became symbolistic over night. A torrent of parodies and imitations
gushed on the market, and the public did not differentiate between the
real and false coins. It became _bon-ton_ to quote Brusov, Balmont,
Viacheslav Ivanov, Sollogub; schoolboys declaimed about "the ostrich
feathers that wave in my brains," and janitors whined to "the moon, in a
white bonnet with embroidery."
_Life of Man_ reaped broad success, a fact that speaks volumes on the
taste of the Public. I am sure that in this country Andreyev's play
would be a more "paying proposition" for the producer than even
"Everywoman." The plaintive philosophy of Job clothed in modern
phraseology; Maeterlinckian Fates dancing in a saloon around the drunken
Man; symbolization of Destiny and squeals of the new-born Man;
quasi-primitiveness turned into wood-cut allegory and melodramatic
effects (of course, there occur several deaths: there is not a single
play by Andreyev not spiced with two or three natural or unnatural
deaths),--is it any wonder that _Life of Man_ vied in popularity with
its contemporary, _The Merry Widow_?
No, messrs. stage-managers and publishers, we reject your popular
Andreyev.
ALEXANDER S. KAUN.
Horace Traubel's Whitman
_With Walt Whitman in Camden_, by Horace Traubel. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.]
The wheat that eager work extricates from huge masses of chaff is worth
what it costs. _Leaves of Grass_ does not contain all the solid
nutrition that stands for Whitman's durable contribution to the literary
food supply of America: he added to it substantially by talking to his
friend, Horace Traubel, during the poet's residence at Camden, N. J.,
from 1888 to the end of his life in 1892, and that comrade, who jotted
down every word, has scattered the resultant wheat through its own
chaff. Three of the eight volumes through which the mixture is to run
have been published.
It is inevitable that inconsequential stuff--sheer nonsense in
instances--should find its way into this morbidly complete story of the
harvest years of Whitman's life; but it is surprising how much
personality and interpretative value lie hidden in some of his most
commonplace utterances. A tremendous personality descends to occasional
banality because of the inadequacy and commonness of words. It is too
much to expect Whitman even to revitalize the vocabulary of a democracy.
But great as he was as a cosmic voice, Whitman exhibited and confessed
kinship with common clay. In fact, _Leaves of Grass_ could never have
grown out of an artificial soil, inoculated with classic cultures; it
sprang as the first vegetation upon the surface of a wild, primal clay.
Whitman was first of all a big, magnificent animal-man; he was
secondarily a powerful poetic instrumentality, giving sound and
articulation to the wee sma' voices exhaled by the earth. That is why
the essence of his message was an appeal and a challenge to and an
expression of democracy. (Of course, I do not mean the institutionalized
democracy of politicians, for no Jeffersonian goes to Whitman for solace
when his faith is wobbling; I mean the bio-economic democracy that some
of us believe in as a part of natural law.)
As a man and as a poet Whitman was simply, daringly, and resolutely
himself. He had achieved a large, strong selfhood before Traubel began
to Boswellize him, and to that intimate friend he revealed in the
languages of pen, tongue, countenance, and silence all the bigness and
littleness that a long and intimate relationship could evoke. It would
therefore be unfair to ascribe to Whitman all the sapless hay with which
these three volumes are padded; it is largely a product of mutual
reactions. But in relation to Traubel more than to any other person,
Whitman was consistently, habitually, and subconsciously himself, and
the result is that this discursive, unedited "story" of the poet's life
and work will live as the most personal and valuable revealment of his
character. It is the last word about him as a man. Whitman the poet
effected his supreme expression in the poem beginning with the words, "I
celebrate myself." Other features which give permanent distinction to
these volumes are the letters to Whitman from noted men and women in
America and Great Britain, and numerous portraits of himself and some of
his friends.