"Had, then, an angel flown in secret

To meet him as his friend of yore,

To sing the byegone joys they cherished,

And soothe the sufferings he bore?

Then first the Demon knew he loved;

Knew how he yearned and longed for love.

In sudden fear, he thought to fly ...

But in that first, heart-rending anguish

His wing was stayed--he had no power!

And, marvel! from his veilèd eye

There dropped a tear.... This very hour

There lieth by Tamàra's tower

A stone burnt through by flame-like tear--

Inhuman tear: a sign for aye!..."

As he entered he was met by the guardian angel of the fair sinner, who

reproaches the Demon, and bids him begone.

"The Demon's face

Lit up with smile of proud derision,

His look flashed jealousy and scorn,

And in his soul again awakened

The former hatred's poisonous thorn."

The guardian angel departs and the Demon is left victor of the field to

plead his cause. In answer to Tamàra's question, "'But who art thou?

Who?... Answer me,'" he replies:

"'I'm he whose voice has made thee listen

Throughout the midnight's calm and rest;

Whose thoughts have reached thee like a whisper,

Whose vision through thy dreams would glisten,

Whose sadness thou hast dimly guessed....

I am the lord of understanding

And freedom: I am Nature's foe,

The world's despair, and Heaven's woe.

Yet at thy feet I worship thee!...

I love thee: I'm thy slave to-day....

What is eternity without thee?

My boundless realm, when I am lonely?'"

Tamàra then asks him why he loves her, to which he replies:

"'Why do I, fair? I do not know.

Since first the earthly world began,

In my mind's eye imprinted ever

Thine image seemed to fill the ether,

And through eternity it ran.

In Paradise the glorious years

Were lacking only thy creation.

Oh, if thou couldst but comprehend

The bitterness of my existence

Through dreary ages' dread consistence....

Oft through the rack and tempest raging,

I rushed at midnight levin-clad,

In fruitless hope of e'er assuaging

My aching heart's revolt and dread,

To kill the pain of mind's regret,

The ne'er forgotten to forget.'"

Tamàra is gradually won to listen to his passionate pleading.

"'Whoe'er thou art, my friend so mystic,

I list to thee against my will.

I know my peace is lost for ever;

But thou art suffering, and never

I could forget thee suffering still.

But if thy words are false and cunning,

But if thou plannest a deceit ...

Have mercy. What's to thee this conquest?

What counts my soul in thy conceit?

Oh, give thy oath, thy sacred vow:

Thou seest--I fail and suffer now--

Thou seest a woman's tender dreams!...

But fear grows less ... To me it seems

Thou understand'st and knowest all....

Swear on thy oath, give me a token

That sin and wrong thou wilt renounce.'"

The Demon vows fidelity:

"'I swear by dawn of the creation,

By the decay of earthly sooth,

By the disgrace of crime and evil,

And by the triumph of the truth.

I swear by flashing hopes of conquest,

I swear by bitter pains of fall,

I swear by having met with thee,

And by the threat of losing all; ...

I swear by Hell, I swear by Heaven,

I swear by sacredness, by thee,

Thy latest look my soul enslaving,

Thy first and guileless tear for me;

By breath from lips so pure and ireless,

Thy silky tresses' wave and shine,

I swear by suffering, elation,

And by my love for thee, divine....

But here's my offer; all my power

I bring to thee, my sanctuary!

I seek thy love, I need its blessing;

Thou wilt obtain eternity

For one short moment. Trust my greatness

In love, and wrath, and equity.

I, free and wilful Son of Ether,

Shall take thee high above the stars,

And thou shalt be the Queen of Nature,

My foremost love, eternal treasure,

Whom nothing equals or debars!...

Crowds of ethereal fairy-maidens

Will wait, thy every wish to meet.

The crown which Evening Star is wearing

I'll tear from her, and crown thy head;

I'll take the dew from evening flowers

To shine on it in diamonds' stead;

I'll take a sunset ray of scarlet,

And gird thee with its ribbon light;

I'll saturate the air around thee

With purest fragrance of the night.

A never-dying magic music

Will charm thine ears by fall and swell.

I'll build a palace out of turquoise

And pearls and gold for thee to dwell;

I'll search for thee the depth of ocean;

I'll get all riches from the stars;

I'll give thee every earthly treasure--

But love me ...'

Closely o'er her bending,

He gently touched Tamàra's trembling

Lips with his lips burning like fire,

Words overwhelming with temptation

Were to her pleading his reply....

The evil spirit was the victor ...

But poison of his touch inflicted

A fatal blow on child-like breast,

An agonising shriek, through rest

And silence of the hour, broke ..."

The guardian angel returns and banishes the Demon.

"Then at the spirit of Temptation

An austere glance the Angel bent:

The conquered Demon cursed his longings,

His maddening dreams where love had shone;

And once again he stood relentless,

In scornful arrogance, and dauntless,

Amidst the Universe--alone."

Comment on such a poem is needless. I have done my part if I have

induced you by my brief extracts to go back to the original and read the

whole of it for yourselves.

V

GOGOL (1809-1852)

Nicholas Gogol was born in 1809 near Poltàva and brought up in affluence

by a Cossack grandmother: at school he did but little work, but devoted

himself with enthusiasm to drawing and the theatre. In 1829 he obtained

a Government office in Petrograd. He then tried the stage,

schoolmastering, and obtained a Professorship of History; failing in all

these, he turned to literature. His first fruits brought him to the

notice of the famous literary men of his day, and he became a friend of

Pushkin, who proved invaluable as critic and adviser.

For seven years he lived in Petrograd, and during this period began his

sketches of Little Russian--that is, of South Russian--life in _Evenings

on a Farm on the Dikanka_ and _Mirgorod_. Little Russia differs from

Great Russia in having scattered whitewashed houses in place of the

regular streets of the villages of Great Russia: separate little farms

surrounded by charming little gardens. It is specially attractive in its

more genial climate, warm nights, its musical language, the beauty of

its people, their picturesque dress and its lyrical songs. There is,

too, more freedom in the relations between young men and young girls;

there is none of that seclusion of the women which we meet with in Great

Russia. The Little Russians have also preserved numerous traditions and

epic poems from the time when they were free Cossacks, fighting against

the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. In Gogol we see a

merging of the Great and the Little, for though Little by birth and

breeding, he yet wrote in the language of Pushkin and Lèrmontov. From

his very first days we feel the richness of his laughter and the

whimsical, Puck-like vein of wit which is characteristically Little

Russian. It was only later that we feel the unseen tears behind the

laughter.

In these we find that quality which we immediately associate with his

name, a realism based upon meticulous observation, but merged into it

and permeating his whole work is an eerie romanticism, a delight in the

supernatural and a deep religious vein which afterwards dominated all

the other qualities. His humour is rich and many-sided, ranging from the

broad and farcical to a delicate and half melancholy, and later to an

almost Swiftean irony.

Right from the beginning we plunge into an atmosphere that brings us at

a bound into the very heart of Russia as no other writer has been able

to do. In his first stories we hear of water-nymphs, the devil, witches,

magicians; in the second, _Mirgorod_, we find him feeling his way

towards realism. _The Quarrel of the Two Ivans_ is simply the story of

two friends who quarrel over nothing and are just on the point of

reconciliation, years after, when the mere mention of the word "goose,"

which was the prime cause of the quarrel, sets them off again, this time

irrevocably. It is in this volume that we come across _Taras Bulba_, now

published in the Everyman Edition, a short historical novel in which

Cossack life is inimitably set down.

Later in _Arabesques_ and the _Tales_ he leaves the supernatural

altogether, and we get such a story as _The Overcoat_, in which a minor

public servant who is always shivering dreams of the day when he can

achieve his ambition of owning a warm overcoat. After years of poverty

and striving he manages to save enough money to buy one, and on the

first day he wears it it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his

ghost haunts the streets. It sets one thinking at once of that host of

failures which exercise so queer a fascination over all later Russian

novelists, particularly Dostoievsky.

Interspersed between the stories came the plays. One has to remember in

this connection the exceptionally severe censorship of the stage. It is

a matter of no little surprise to us on reading _The Inspector-General_

to think that such a play should ever have been licensed in such a

country. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an

obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government Inspector

is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. An ordinary

traveller from Petrograd--an intrepid liar--is mistaken for the

Inspector and plays up to his part until the arrival of the real one,

when he manages to effect his escape.

As a satire on Russian bureaucracy the play has no rival: nearly every

character is dishonest, and it is a delight to see them all taken in by

the empty-headed hero with his fluent lying. Of all plays which can

count on drawing big houses at holiday-time in Russia this stands easily

first. It became a classic as soon as it was produced and it is as

irresistible in its appeal now as it was when it was written.

Gogol now left Russia and settled in Rome, never to return to his native

country.

It was here that he produced his masterpiece, _Dead Souls_, the great

comic work of all Russia. Again it was Pushkin who gave him the idea.

The hero of the book, Chichikov, conceives a brilliant idea. Every

landlord possessed so many serfs, called "souls." Every ten years a

revision took place and the landlord had to pay poll-tax on all the

"souls" who had died in that period. Between the periods no one

inspected the lists. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls

from the landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to get out of the

tax by this means; Chichikov would then register his purchases and then

mortgage the souls at the rate of three hundred roubles each at a bank

in Petrograd or Moscow, representing that they were in some corner of

the Crimea, and so make enough money to buy live "souls" of his own.

The book is simply the odyssey of Chichikov all over Russia in his

search for these souls: it gives infinite scope to the author, for he

can bring in every type of man and woman that he knows. The book was to

be divided into three parts, the first of which appeared in 1842: he

went on working at the other two parts until 1852, when he died. He

twice threw the second part of his work into the fire when it was

finished, so we are left with a complete first part and an incomplete

second. The third part was probably only sketched. In the second part he

meant to show us the moral regeneration of Chichikov: apparently he

could not bring himself to believe that he had done this adequately, and

he came to be more and more of an ascetic and a recluse as the years

passed.

So here once more we get that extraordinary "break" in mid-flight which

is so peculiar a characteristic of all Russian writers.

The book made an immediate and lasting impression upon the country. It

pleased some by its reality, its artistry and its social ideas; it

pleased the Slavophils by its truth to life and its smell of Russia.

When Gogol read the first chapter to his master, Pushkin, the latter

remarked: "God! what a sad country Russia is!"--a queer comment, you may

think, for the most humorous book that Russia has produced. But the

truth is that, comic as the best chapters are, Gogol refuses to flatter

either his country or the people who inhabit it, and in Chichikov, just

as in Oblòmov, most readers find themselves wondering whether after all

there is not a good deal of the character there portrayed in themselves,

some such scoundrelly ideas, at any rate in embryo. But Chichikov is so

shameless, so entertaining, so magnificent a liar, so plausible, so

ingenious, in a word, so Falstaffian that he enchants us all. He is

always human and the least of a hypocrite imaginable.

In fact Gogol goes further than most satirists in other countries and

having laid bare his baseness, turns round and tells us that we have no

cause to be angry with him: Chichikov is, after all, only the victim of

circumstances, of the ruling passion of gain: like all his countrymen,

he is indulgent and charitable: he cannot be brought to condemn. He sees

the mean and the common, but he does not conclude from that that life is

either of these. Rather does he infer the opposite. Chichikov is great

just as Napoleon was great, the victim of a ruling passion and great by

reason of it. Our minds immediately turn to Dostoievsky once more, to

_Crime and Punishment_, where the chief character tries to be the victim

of a ruling passion, not this time of rascality, but fails.

_Dead Souls_ is not unlike _Don Quixote_. It has the same depth: it

makes boys laugh, young men think and old men weep.

Its influence was as great on its merits taken as a work of art as on

its other sides of philosophy and ideas. Gogol for ever liberated

fiction from the grand style. By writing a novel without any love

interest, with such a rascal as Chichikov for hero, he created Russian

realism. There is no exaggeration, no caricature; there is the

instinctive economy, the sense of selection of the true artist.

Just as Pushkin showed his countrymen that there was such a thing as

Russian landscape, so Gogol showed them what an inexhaustible mine of

humour, absurdity, irony and quaintness lay in the ordinary life of

ordinary people.

In 1847 _Passages from a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published,

which changed the opinions of many of his followers from worship to

disgust, for he there preached a lesson of abject humility and

submission to the Government in matters both temporal and spiritual.

He had shown up the evils of Bureaucracy, his enemies said, therefore it

was inconsistent in him not to resist the powers, but he had shown up

the evils of misers, the obstinacy of old women, and many other things:

he had never pretended to be a Liberal.

His bent lay in the direction of devotion: he made a pilgrimage to the

Holy Land, spending all his money in charity and his time in religious

study. There are those who lament that by reason of this we have lost

much rich humour, but it may at least be open to question whether we

should have possessed so rich a legacy as he has left us had it not been

for that very intensity of feeling which caused him to renounce his art,

an art which he looked upon as a torch-bearer indicating a higher ideal

of living.

While others expended their energies in spreading political ideals in

their novels, Gogol was content to give the social element in Russian

its prominent and dominating position. He is the living proof, if proof

were needed, that realism does not connote a mere anatomy of society, a

dwelling upon revolting details, a love of defying convention by

fluttering over cesspools and bringing to light, the hidden lower things

of life. True Realism does not mean Zola, but Gogol--an all-round view

of humanity as it is not seen through the smoked glasses of the romancer

nor the microscope of the moral scientist.

VI

TURGENEV (1816-1883)

In Edward Garnett's admirable book on Turgenev Conrad lays his finger

with unerring accuracy on the crux of the whole problem with regard to

him when he says that we are apt to belittle a consummate artist who is

quiet when we compare him with a Titanic, restless genius like

Dostoievsky. It is like comparing Jane Austen with Victor Hugo.

Incidentally Mr Garnett's book loses much of its value owing to his

repeated endeavour to show Turgenev's superiority over Dostoievsky.

As a matter of fact, there is no comparison possible.

Turgenev came of noble birth and began by writing verse, but soon found

his proper _métier_ in prose.

For two years he was exiled to his country estate for his quite harmless

defence of Gogol. After this term was over he left Russia for Baden and

Paris, which accounts to some extent for his aloofness from the problems

which perturbed his countrymen, and makes him more a Cosmopolitan than

National, like Dostoievsky. His five great novels, _Rúdin_, _The Nest of

Gentlefolk_, _On the Eve_, _Fathers and Sons_ and _Smoke_, all appeared

in the eleven years between 1856 and 1867 and he was at once appraised

by all European critics, who discovered in him Russia for the first

time, and the Russian woman in particular. His popularity at home was

impaired on the publication of _Fathers and Sons_, because the

revolutionaries saw in Bazarov, the hero, only calumny and a libel,

whereas the reactionary party looked on the book as a glorification of

Nihilism. Thus he fell between two stools. In Europe, however, he gained

larger and larger audiences, until an admiration for his work became the

hall-mark of good taste.

But to-day Turgenev holds his own even in his own country, for his

exquisite style, the majesty of his poetry and the sureness of his

characterisation. Baring finds a parallel to Turgenev in this country in

Tennyson, in that they are both Mid-Victorian, both shut off from the

world by the trees of old parks; but Major Baring, as it seems to me, is

fair to neither genius.

For Turgenev has an amazing insight into men's motives and actions which

we do not commonly associate with those who are shut off from the world.

Rúdin is a picture of a type that peculiarly appealed to Turgenev, the

Hamlet type of man who can only unpack his heart with words, but breaks

down when he is asked to translate his theories into action: he is

passionately devoted to Liberty in his eloquent talk and makes Natasha,

the daughter of the house in which he is staying, fall madly in love

with him and persuade herself that she is ready to fly with him, but he,

whose love is more that of the intellect than the heart, fails her and

tells her to submit.

He is eventually killed in '48 on a barricade in Paris. In the epilogue

we get his character beautifully unfolded to us.

"'I know him well,' continued Lézhneff, 'I am aware of his faults. They

are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small

scale.'

"'His is a character of genius!' cried Bassístoff.

"'Genius very likely he has!' replied Lézhneff, 'but as for character

... That's just his misfortune: there's no force of character in him....

But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has

enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is

the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably

reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and

thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do

you remember, Sásha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed

him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in

his blood--that is not his fault--and not in his head. He is not an

actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other

people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no

doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw

stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has

no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not

been of use, that his words have not scattered good seeds in young

hearts, to whom Nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for

action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I

myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. Sásha knows

what Rúdin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that

Rúdin's words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking

then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already

lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man's eloquence,

and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man's ear, happily,

is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears

seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The

intonation he will supply for himself!'

"'Bravo, bravo!' cried Bassístoff, 'that is justly spoken! And as

regards Rúdin's influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how

to move you, he lifts you up; he does not let you stand still, he stirs

you to the depths and sets you on fire!'"

In _A Nobleman's Retreat_ we find a man, Lavrètsiy by name, separated

from his wife, who meets a good, honest girl, by name Liza: they fall in

love with one another: for a moment they are led to believe that his

wife is dead, but she reappears and Liza goes to a convent.

But it is in the next two novels, _On the Eve_ and _Fathers and Sons_,

that we see Turgenev at his best.

_On the Eve_ is a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the

Russia of the fifties.

The central figure of the novel is Elena, who comes near to being the

most completely successful heroine in all fiction. We know her through

and through, and she is, as are all Turgenev's heroines, well worth

knowing. "Her strength of will, her serious, courageous, proud soul, her

capacity for passion, all the play of her delicate idealistic nature

troubled by the contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness that the

dawn of love brings to her, all this is conveyed to us by the simplest

and the most consummate art." Her confession (in her diary) of her

discovery that she loved the Bulgarian Insarov is in itself an amazing

revelation of the working of a young girl's heart. Every side of her

nature is shown us. We see her from her father's point of view, which is

contemptuous; from her mother's, which is that of affectionate

bewilderment; from one of her lovers (Shubin's), which is petulantly

critical; from another of her lovers (Bevsenyev's), which is halfhearted

enthralment; from Insarov's, which recognises her greatness of soul and

sincerity of purpose.

Turgenev's magnificent clear-sightedness never manifests itself so

sustainedly as in this book. Not only does each of the characters

breathe and move and live from the first page, but politically too the

author precisely hits off with his pen the Russian temperament. Of all

the great Russian writers he is the least diffuse, the most of an

artist. He is, after all, as he himself confessed, not so much a Russian

as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe, and it is his mission to stand

aloof and describe with absolute impartiality the various types that

come before his eye without seeking to make his puppets conform to his

own ideas or using them as a peg on which to hang a thesis of his own.

The foundation of his art lies in his portraits of women. Pure,

virginal, heroic, self-sacrificing, boundless in their love and devotion

to a man or cause, they form a gallery worthy to be set by the side of

Shakespeare's and Meredith's heroines. They are very flesh and blood,

very woman, and yet altogether fascinating, adorable, steadfast,

superbly endowed with all the gifts that make for nobility of soul.

Over the creation of these Turgenev showed himself to be deeply

sensitive, responsive to all that is best in the feminine mind, of

shrewd insight, unfailingly generous, absolutely sane and level-headed.

So perfect is his sense of balance, so consummate his artistry, that his

work has been unduly depreciated by some critics: they do not easily

forgive perfection of form, absolute harmony of style, a sense of

proportion so exquisitely poised as his.

He reminds us again of Meredith in his highly intellectual conception as

in his portraits of women. He became almost uncannily prophetic in his

utterances about the educated classes and their ideals.

He is so interested in characterisation that he needs no incidents to

show the growth of his characters: indeed we are almost taken aback by

such a dramatic situation as that of the drunken German being thrown

into the lake by Insarov. We feel that the play of character upon

character is enough, without fortuitous circumstances of this sort ...

but there is never anything repulsively inartistic in his work.

He is melancholy, and there is a strain of sadness throughout all

Turgenev's work, but he is restrained: he never gives way to his

emotions. He loves mankind even though he is clear-sighted with regard

to his failings. As a philosopher he sees no reason to trust in man nor

to think much of him: particularly does he lament the absence of men in

Russia.

"'O great philosopher of the Russian world!' says Shubin to Uvar

Ivanovitch, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's

not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake

it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose: one doesn't know which is

uppermost in it, sloth or strength!...

"'We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere--either

small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or

darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or

else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful

detail and are for ever feeling the pulse of every sensation and

reporting to themselves: "That's what I feel, that's what I think." A

useful, rational occupation! When will our time be? When will men be

born among us?'"

This is not the man to flatter where praise is not deserved. He rather

realises than idealises, and that is why it is so exhilarating and

refreshing to come into contact with his women, for we can be sure that

he paints as he sees and not as he would wish to see. He believes in his

women and makes us believe in them. Stranger still is the discovery that

he always draws from life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I

never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a

living person, on whom the various elements were harmonised together, to

work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread

firmly." To such purpose did he do this in _Fathers and Sons_ that he

roused hostility of so savage a nature that he never afterwards became

popular in Russia during his lifetime. On the other hand, "I received

congratulations," he said, "almost caresses, from people of the opposite

camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did

not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I

had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively

with sympathy."

The type which he here speaks of is, of course, the Nihilist, Bazarov.

His readers were swayed by party passion and consequently were unable to

accept the portrait as a work of art. The fast-increasing antipathy

between the old and new made the reactionaries, who hailed in this novel

the picture of the insidious revolutionary ideas current in young

Russia, ironically congratulate the former champion of Liberalism on his

penetration and honesty in unmasking the Nihilist: the younger

generation saw only a caricature of itself. "The whole ground of the

misunderstanding," wrote Turgenev, "lay in the fact that the type of

Bazarov had not time to pass through the usual phases. At the very

moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as

well as a new type I introduced.... The reader is easily thrown into

perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to

his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist

to entertain."

And what is Bazarov? Let us listen again to Turgenev: "I dreamed of a

sombre, savage and great figure, only half emerged from barbarism,

strong, méchant, and honest, and nevertheless doomed to perish because

it is always in advance of the future."

Mr Garnett calls him the bare mind of Science first applied to politics.

His watchword is not "Negation," as all his critics averred, but

Reality.

His creator, whose first and last words to young writers was, "You need

truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations," was driven to

confess that he shared all Bazarov's convictions except those on Art. He

stands at the dividing-line between the religion of the Past which is

Faith and that of the future which is Science. His savage egoism is

necessary if he is to break away from all the old laws and customs that

men held sacred. His aversion from Art and Poetry is simply due to his

refusal to be hoodwinked by glamour. The Englishman sees in him merely

the quintessence of bad form, bad taste, bad manners and colossal

conceit, but in reality he stands for Humanity awakened from age-old

superstitions, Aggression, destroyed in his destroying: he must needs

stand alone, and delights in doing so. Despising honour, success, public

opinion, he allows nothing, not even love, to come between him and his

fixity of purpose.

He towers above all the other people in the novel. If there still remain

any who have so far held out against the fascination and consummate

mastery of Turgenev, I would ask them to turn again to the

twenty-seventh chapter of _Fathers and Sons_ and read aloud the account

of Bazarov's last hours. Anything more poignant, more simple and yet

more effective than the last scene of the parents at the grave does not

exist: there Turgenev in one stroke epitomises the infinite aspiration,

the eternal insignificance of the life of man.

So quietly does the artist work that hasty readers fail to realise his

greatness after the storm and stress of Dostoievsky or the titanic

canvases of Tolstoy: he lacked exuberance: his men are, Hamlet-like,

unable to make mouths at the invisible event, ineffectual, their native

hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought--it is

left to his women to be independent, to know their own minds, to be

courageous, pure, crystal-clear, simple, strong, no longer mere sexual

incidents in a man's life, but helping companions. In his love of

language and his power of making us breathe the air of his landscapes he

affords an interesting parallel to Tennyson: we find an echo of him in

Elena's diary: "To be good is not enough: to do good--yes, that is the

great thing in life."

But where he is most himself and most a genius is in his wonderful

capacity for making his characters all reveal themselves in the ordinary

details of daily life.

VII

GONCHAROV (1812-1891)

Goncharov is important from the English point of view through one book

alone. But this novel, _Oblòmov_, far transcends in value many far more

famous books that we should do better to leave unread until we have

appreciated this most Russian of the Russian works of art.

Oblòmov, the hero of the novel, is a nobleman whose main characteristic

is lack of initiative, due primarily to the indolence caused by riches.

"'From my earliest childhood,'" Oblòmov asks, "'have I myself ever put

on my socks?'"

We see him first in his lodgings in Petrograd in bed: he is too lazy to

get up. Not that he lacked interest in life.

"The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him," Goncharov

writes; "the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he

cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt

unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere

far away--probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had

tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon

his cheeks. It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred

towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread

all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind

its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head

like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make

all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would

be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves

into decisions.... Moved by a moral force, he would rapidly change over

and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half

lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ...

the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself

into an act of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results

might one not expect from so great an effort! But--the morning would

pass away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad

daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline

towards rest--the storms in his soul would subside--his head would shake

off the worrying thoughts--his blood would circulate more slowly in his

veins--and Oblomoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back;

looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his

eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring

house--and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that

sunset!"

His landlord wishes him to change his lodgings while his rooms are put

into repair. He is terrified at the prospect of going through the

trouble of moving.

Later he meets a young girl called Olga, in some ways curiously

reminiscent of Turgenev's heroines. She devotes herself to the cause of

curing Oblòmov, with whom she falls in love, of his laziness. She tries

by every means in her power to rouse him to exert himself in art and

literature. At first she seems to succeed: they are about to marry: but

his slackness comes over him again; he cannot even take the first

necessary steps.

He sinks back into his life of dressing gown and slippers in spite of

Olga's splendid efforts to make a man of him. In the end she is

compelled to give up the struggle to reform him, and in a parting scene

which is as good as anything I know of its kind she describes the sort

of life they would lead if she acquiesced in his desires.

"He fell to musing over the words: 'Now or never!' As he listened

inwardly to this despairing appeal of reason and will-power, he

consciously weighed the little will-power that was left to him, whither

he would carry it, into what he would put that paltry remnant. After

having pondered over it painfully, he seized the pen, dragged a book out

of the corner, and in one hour wanted to read, write, and think all that

he had neglected to read, write, and think in ten years. What was he to

do now? To go ahead, or to remain? This Oblòmov question was of more

import to him than Hamlet's. To go ahead--that would mean at once

doffing his comfortable dressing gown, not only from the shoulders, but

from the soul and mind; together with the cobweb on the walls to sweep

away the cobweb from the eyes, and regain eyesight! What first step

should be made for this? Where begin? 'I do not know--I cannot--no, I am

begging the question, I do know, and---- And here is Stoltz by my side;

he will tell me. What will he tell me? "In a week," he will say, "you

must sketch a detailed instruction for your plenipotentiary and send him

into the village. Get your Oblòmovka mortgaged, buy some more land, send

a plan of new buildings, give up your house, procure a passport, and go

abroad for six months, to get rid of your surplus fat, to throw off the

weight, to refresh the soul with the atmosphere of which you have

dreamed long ago with your friend, to live without a dressing gown,

without Zakhar and Tarantev, to put on your own socks and take off your

own boots, sleep only at night, travel where all travel, on railroads,

steamboats, and then---- Then to settle in Oblòmovka, to find out what

sowing and threshing is, why peasants are poor or well-to-do, walk over

the fields, go to elections, to the factory, to the mill, the docks. At

the same time you are to read newspapers, books, and become excited why

the English have sent a warship to the East----" That's what he will

say! That's what is meant by going ahead, and thus it is to be all my

life! Farewell, poetical ideal of life! That is some kind of a

blacksmith shop, not life! There is in it an eternal fire, hammering,

heat, din---- But when is one to live? Would it not be better to stay?

To stay means to put on a shirt over all, to hear the patter of Zakhar's

feet as he jumps down from his couch, to dine with Tarantev, to think

less about anything, never to finish the _Voyage to Africa_, to grow

peacefully old in these chambers, at the house of Tarantev's lady

friend.'

"'Now or never!' 'To be or not to be!' Oblòmov was about to rise from

his chair, but his foot did not at once find its way into the slipper,

and he sat down again."

The publication of this novel in 1859 produced an instantaneous effect:

everyone in Russia who read it recognised something of himself in

Oblòmov, and felt the disease of Oblòmovism in his veins.

It is to miss out quite one of the major characteristics of the nation

to discount this inertia which pervades every side of life. It is

universal in that it expresses ultra-conservative fights to preserve

old customs: Oblòmov is remarkable for his inability to put up any sort

of resistance to anything; he is frightened of everything, even of love:

love is disquieting, restless.

There have been many Oblòmovs in real life among even great Russian

writers, though it seems paradoxical to think that any man who achieves

fame could ever be preternaturally lazy. Krylov is a case in point.

This poet spent most of his days lying on a sofa: one day somebody

pointed out to him that the nail on which a picture was hanging just

over the sofa was loose, and that the picture would probably fall on his

head. "No," said Krylov, "the picture will fall just beyond the sofa. I

know the angle."

It must not be forgotten that Oblòmov was in all respects save one

entirely excellent: he had a heart of gold, a chaste mind and clear

soul: it was just that his will was sapped: Olga, even after her

marriage with her really splendid husband, continued to love Oblòmov

till the end. It was simply that he had forfeited her respect.

VIII

DOSTOIEVSKY (1821-1881)

Quite one of the most remarkable things about Dostoievsky is his

complete antithesis to Tolstoy in everything. Tolstoy is healthy,

Dostoievsky epileptic. Tolstoy's life was strangely uneventful;

Dostoievsky was condemned to death after a youth spent in poverty and

misery: he endured four years' hard labour, six years in exile; he was

for ever on the verge of financial ruin; his wife, his brother and his

best friend all died within a very short time of one another; he was

attacked and harassed on all sides; he wrote under the very worst

possible conditions, starving, ill and pressed for time. Tolstoy was a

heretic and a materialist; Dostoievsky was a devout believer in

Christianity; and a mystic. Tolstoy was narrow, while Dostoievsky was

one of the most broadminded men who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the

supernatural. Dostoievsky lived as Blake did among the unknown, and

seemed to regard this world only as fantastic and unreal. Tolstoy was

eaten up with pride; Dostoievsky preached and practised a humility

almost Christ-like. Tolstoy hated and did not understand Art;

Dostoievsky was superbly Catholic and cosmopolitan in his tastes.

Tolstoy was characterised by a magnificent intolerance, Dostoievsky by a

sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamt of giving all to the poor, and did

nothing, while Dostoievsky shared every moment of his life with the

lowest criminals: and finally Tolstoy was purposely autobiographical

from start to finish, whereas from Dostoievsky we learn nothing whatever

from his books. He was as objective as Shakespeare. He does not care to

talk about himself. This does not mean that he does not reveal himself

in his books. He does, and Christ-like indeed is the character that

emanates as the result ... but he does not see himself in all his main

characters as Tolstoy does. His sufferings did not make him cynical or

cruel; once when a gushing young lady accosted him with "Gazing at you I

can trace your suffering," he replied: "What suffering?" He drew but

little on his personal experiences. He was passionately Slavophil, and

therefore opposed in that to Turgenev, whose genius none the less he

perceived and revered.

He was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's daughter, born in a

charity hospital at Moscow, brought up in the direst penury. He was,

like Goldsmith, quite thriftless, and unable to realise the value of

money. Of a confiding nature and withal kindly, he was at the mercy of

all those who found it worth while to take advantage of him. Tolstoy, as

you will remember, was thrifty and domestic, while Dostoievsky was

profuse and a houseless vagabond. Yet another point of divergence.

Tolstoy thinks that he hates money, but money loves him. Dostoievsky

thinks that he loves money, and money flees from him. As Merejkòvski so

neatly puts it, all worldly advantages in Tolstoy are centripetal, in

Dostoievsky centrifugal. Tolstoy was careful in spite of the apparent

passionateness of his impulses never to overstep the mark; Dostoievsky

was for ever giving rein to irregularities and vices: Middleton Murry

suggests that he gave way to these on purpose to show his oneness with

man in a world to which he could never accustom himself. His first

novel, _Poor Folk_, was a prodigious success, which made the failure of

the second, _The Double_, all the more terrible to him. From this time

his literary career became a life-long and desperate struggle to

re-establish himself in the good graces of his fellow-countrymen. Having

allied himself about this time with the Petrachevsky circle of

socialists and Slavophils, he was one evening led to declaim Pushkin's

_Ode on the Abolition of Serfdom_, and in the discussion that followed

is said to have declared that if reform could only come through

insurrection, "Then insurrection let it be." This was enough to lead to

his arrest, and on 22nd December 1849 he was taken with twenty-one

others to the scaffold to be executed. All the prisoners were stripped

to their shirts in twenty-one degrees of frost and the death sentence

was read out. They were then bound in threes to stakes and prepared

themselves for death. Suddenly they were unbound and informed that the

Tsar had commuted the penalty of death to that of hard labour. But the

strain had been too much. From this moment Dostoievsky looks back on a

world that he had so nearly left that he could never quite believe that

he belonged to it. His four years in Siberia is turned to magnificent

use, as we see in _The House of The Dead_, where we see criminals behave

exactly as English Public School boys: we never regard them as

miscreants, always as unfortunate victims of adverse circumstances.

After these terrible times were over he served for three years as a

private soldier and was promoted to be an officer. He turned his back on

Socialism because of its materialism and atheistic tendency. He had only

joined this section of the community because his nature ever made him

seek out what was most difficult, disastrous, hard and terrible. During

his imprisonment his epilepsy became more pronounced and his fits

recurred with alarming frequency. But there was something lofty and

jubilant, a sort of religious revelation which he experienced when the

sacred sickness was on him that coloured all the rest of his life.

Then suddenly it was as if something had been rent asunder before him,

an unwonted inward light dawned upon his soul, he says in one of his

descriptions. Again we are led to a comparison with Tolstoy, for whom

with his superb animal vitality the light of death is thrown on life

from without, whereas for Dostoievsky the revealing light comes from

within. Life and death are one to him; to Tolstoy they are in eternal

antagonism.

The former with the eyes of the spirit world looks on life from a

footing which to those who live seems death, while the latter looks at

death from within the house of life with the eyes of this world.

From his earliest youth Dostoievsky was an omnivorous reader, revelling

in and appreciating not only Homer, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Schiller and

Hoffmann, but also all the great French classics of the seventeenth

century: throughout his life he kept alive his passion for universal

culture. He is at once that most curious anomaly, the most Russian of

the Russians, and yet the greatest cosmopolitan, and herein once more

shows his complete difference from Tolstoy, who, trying to become

cosmopolitan, ended by living more completely limited by place and time

and nationality than almost any other writer we know. The enthusiasm for

the distant simply did not exist for him: every fibre and root in him

is fixed in the present. He visited Italy and brought therefrom no

impressions. He is unable to appreciate either Æschylus, Sophocles,

Euripides, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Wagner or Beethoven. He even

comes to regard all his own work as bad art, with the exception of two

tales which are easily his weakest. He was never a man of letters as

Dostoievsky was. All his life he was ashamed of literature, while

Dostoievsky loved it. He was proud of his calling and counted it high

and sacred, though he valued his creations in terms of cash.

"Many a time," he writes, "the beginning of a chapter of a novel was

already at the printer's and being set up while the end was still in my

brain and had to be ready without fail next day. Work out of sheer want

has crushed and eaten me up."

He complains that Turgenev, who has two thousand serfs, gets a hundred

and fifty pounds, while he, needy as he was, got only thirty-eight

pounds. "Poverty forces me to hurry, and so, of course, spoils my work."

Endlessg rows of figures and accounts, interspersed with desperate

entreaties for help, fill all his letters.

He edited a paper, the _Vremya_, which met with some success and

promised a regular income. Without warning the periodical was prohibited

by the censor for publishing a quite harmless article on Poland.

Undaunted, he started another venture, the _Epocha_, which incurred the

wrath not only of the Government but also of the Liberal party. It was

at this time that his brother Michael, his dearest friend Grigoviev, and

his first wife, Maria, all died.

"And here I am left all alone," he writes, "and I feel simply broken. I

have, literally, nothing left to live for." The _Epocha_ failed, its

editor became temporarily insolvent, having debts amounting to one

thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven hundred pounds in debts

of honour. He starts feverishly on a novel to begin to pay the load off.

In the end, to avoid the debtors' prison, he is forced to fly the

country. He spent four years of incredible extremes of want abroad,

pawning even his "last linen" to keep going.

"They expect literature of me now," he moans. "Why, how can I write at

all? I walk about and tear my hair and cannot sleep of nights. They

point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them see the state in which I have

to work."

And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting

cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him,

starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime

on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of

all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circumstances which

would have crushed him.

"I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to

myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the

pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know

that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'"

And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers,

harassed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and

dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wrote _Crime and

Punishment_, _The Idiot_ and _The Possessed_, and even planned _The

Brothers Karamazov_.

He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as

heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and

criminal depths of the human heart, especially the passion of love in

all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest,

most spiritual passion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha

Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, "the she-spider who

devours her own mate," in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.

At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as

autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:

"At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable

debauchery. My squalid passions were keen, glowing with morbid

irritability. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts,

and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night,

secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at

the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of

secretiveness: I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met,

recognised."

Sexual passion appears with him at times a cruel, coarse, even animal

force, but never unnatural or perverted.

To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal

fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of

Dostoievsky in the words, "Live decently I cannot."

He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much

absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who

also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give

up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen shillings a

month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.

"'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have

overshot the mark.'"

The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of

Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with

lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.

When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the

child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a

separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.

"But where is Sonia? I want Sonia."

On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to

understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the

message that he leaves for us to pick up?

"'Love all God's creation--every grain of sand,'" says Zossima, "'every

leaf, every ray of God, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love

everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at God's secret in

things.'"

Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he

concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his

dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's

characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we

should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas

as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we

realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need

to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form

of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With

Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we

hear.

Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a

single day he can make us feel that we have lived through æons.

Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his

characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we

cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky

we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.

Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that "she does not condescend to

be clever." Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human

mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental

rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never

doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and

foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion,

abstract thought may be passionate: all passions and misdeeds in his

work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those

who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They

suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will

because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the

main, God. They are all "God-tortured." This insatiable religious thirst

is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or

more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of

the soul.

Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths

hitherto undreamt of and unplumbed.

He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women,

sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy

man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is

scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and

complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are

healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he

depicts for us.

"What matter if it be a morbid state?" he writes. "What difference can

it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the

moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state,

proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an

unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of

satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis

of life?"

This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the

final emancipator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to

content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look

forward to recognition as a prophet.

Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a

picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we

have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia,

whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays

his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become

strangely fantastic and bizarre.

"I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art," he confessed, "when, so to

speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and

unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes,

often the very essence of the real."

This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov

seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.

The demon Smerdyakov in _The Brothers Karamazov_ pines for solidity,

corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted

above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.

"'I am dreadfully fond of realism--realism, so to speak, carried to the

fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence

of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you

everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us

all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become

superstitious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going

to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen

and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and

therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in

all that she believes.'"

As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennui--magnificently bored.

Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected

village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners.

Dostoievsky is always trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon

really tries to explain his point of view.

"'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with

them all "Hosanna," there already escaped, there already broke from my

breast ...

"'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But

common-sense--my most unfortunate quality--kept me within due limits,

and I let the moment pass. For what, I asked myself at the time, what

would have resulted after my "Hosanna"? That instant all would have come

to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And

so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to

suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else

takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the

bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they

will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out

the actual facts I should break out into a "Hosanna" and instantly the

indispensable minus quantity would vanish. Reason would begin to reign

all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of

everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret

is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is

quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown

which will be the purer of the two.'"

Samuel Butler in a note called _An Apology for the Devil_ says: "It must

be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has

written all the books." After reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ we may

take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in

Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the

writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.

That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the

mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that

he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his

beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion.

And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds

that he cannot accept the world as God has made it. That any innocent

child should have to suffer makes any question of future recompense

intolerable. It is not that he does not accept God, he most respectfully

hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can

obliterate needless suffering.

Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: "'Life will bring

you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you

will bless life and cause others to bless it.'" That is the secret of

Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and

filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness

and light, good cheer and reasonableness.

In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime

and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved

humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. "Be no

man's judge: humble love is a terrible power which effects more than

violence. Only active love can bring out faith. Love men and be not

afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children

and as the birds."

The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and

perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an

amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us

longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through

the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes

we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been

greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am

kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of

mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.

"His friends were exaltations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

IX

TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

Tolstoy was born in the estate of Yàsnaya Polyàna: after the death of

his father in Moscow, where they went when he was nine, the novelist

returned to his home and graduated at the University of Petrograd in

1848, and shortly afterwards entered the army, and was stationed in the

Caucasus, where he began his literary career. He took part in the

Crimean War and afterwards settled in Petrograd, where he grew more and

more dissatisfied with existing conditions. In 1862 he married and

returned once more to Yàsnaya Polyàna. Here he devoted himself to the

education of the peasants and edited an educational paper: soon

afterwards he assumed a negative attitude to all progress and wrote many

novels. Later he urged men to occupy themselves in manual labour, and in

the year of his death left his home to put his theories more completely

into practice, but died at a wayside railway station. Everything that

Tolstoy wrote is autobiographical, so it is unnecessary to dwell further

on the bare facts of his life. Like all Russians, he acts upon impulse;

unlike Oblòmov, he is first of all the man of action: he asks himself

with unwearying persistence, "What is the purpose of my life?" and his

answer is: "The purpose of my life is to understand, and as far as

possible to do, the will of that Power which has sent me here, and which

actuates my reason and conscience." He seeks goodness rather by the head

than the heart; he begins with the understanding. As a novelist he keeps

closer to actual life than the others, because he has lived his

incidents before he writes about them. He is first and foremost a seeker

after God: he abjures literature and art through pride, and thinks that

truth is to be found only in working like a peasant: he was unable

himself to do this because his wife refused to allow him to. "For

ourselves we may do what we like, but for the sake of our children we

may not," was her contention.

No man ever more truly exemplified the meaning of Bacon's aphorism that

"he that is married hath given hostages to fortune."

He had the pride of Lucifer or Lèrmontov's Demon, and yet he spent his

life searching for the ideal humility of Dostoievsky's Myshkin, the pure

fool, the divine idiot.

He starts by advocating non-resistance to evil, and ends by passionately

resisting it.

From the beginning we find in him a supreme love of himself, a man

interested only in Russia, an amazing lack of sympathy with culture, an

astonishing want of taste (a lover of Dumas in his youth, he later on

pins his faith to George Eliot and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_). He was quite

ignorant of life owing to his wealth.

But by far the most outstanding characteristic of this genius is his

perfect paganism: he is always seeking for the divine in the animal.

Like so many great Russians, he changed his whole life at one period of

his existence.

In 1879 he explains this in a most illuminating passage:

"Five years ago something very curious began to take place in me: I

began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of

life, as if I did not know how I was to live or what I was to do. These

suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am

I here?' and then, 'What next?' I had lived and lived, and gone on and

on till I had drawn near a precipice: I saw clearly that before me there

lay nothing but destruction. With all my might I endeavoured to escape

from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my

boot-laces, that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my

room when undressing alone at night; and ceased to take a gun with me

out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing

myself of life."

He was saved from this mood by becoming friendly with the labouring

classes.

"I lived in this way, that is to say, in communion with the people, for

two years; and a change took place in me. What befell me was that the

life of our class--the wealthy and cultured--not only became repulsive

to me, but lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments,

science and art itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realised that

it was all self-indulgence, that it was useless to look for any meaning

in it. I hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become

clear to me."

Here as always he unfolds to us all that he knows about himself.

At one moment self-conscious, good and weak, he controls himself,

repents, and cultivates loathing of himself and his vices; at another,

unconscious, wicked and violent, he fancies himself a great man, who has

discovered for the welfare of all mankind new truths, and with a proud

consciousness of his own merit looks down on other mortals. In other

words, he is imbued in one mood with self-love, in another with

self-hate. It is always self.

Then come those twenty happy years immediately after his marriage, years

of complete isolation and happiness, in which he learnt to live

according to "the one truth, that you must live in such a way as may be

best for you and your family."

In the words of Ecclesiastes: "He undertook great things: he built

himself houses, and planted vineyards, he made gardens and groves, and

placed in them all manner of fruit trees, he made himself cisterns for

the watering of the groves, he got himself men-servants and

maid-servants ... and he became great and rich, and wisdom dwelt with

him."

And yet there lies the dread of death lurking always in the dim

background. Brave enough when confronted with actual danger, he was yet

terrified at the thought of passing into nothingness. The truth as he

came now to see it consisted in casting out the desire of lands and

money; so he determined to leave his home, his wife, his children, his

lands, to give away his six hundred thousand kopecks and become a

beggar.

"I shall look," he says, "for my friends among the peasants. No woman

can stand to me in the place of a friend. Why do we deceive our wives by

pretending to consider them our best friends? For it certainly is not

true. Woman is, in all respects, morally man's inferior."

"Nowadays," writes his biographer, "Leo behaves to his wife with a touch

of exactingness, reproachfulness, and even displeasure, accusing her of

preventing him from giving away his property, and going on bringing up

the children in the old way. His wife, for her part, thinks herself in

the right, and complains of such conduct on her husband's side. In her

there has involuntarily sprung up a hatred and loathing of his teaching

and its consequences. Between them there has even grown up a tone of

mutual contradiction, the voicing of their complaints against one

another. Giving away one's property to strangers and leaving one's

children on the world, when no one else is disposed to do the same, she

not only looks on as out of the question, but thinks it her duty as a

mother to prevent."

"'Should I not have gone with him,' she cries, 'if I had not had young

children? But he has forgotten everything in his doctrines.'"

Then comes the final decision.

"Leo's wife, in order to preserve the property for her children, was

prepared to ask the authorities to appoint a committee to manage the

property. Not wishing to oppose his wife by force, he began to assume

towards his property an attitude of ignoring its existence; renounced

his income, proceeded to shut his eyes to what became of it, and ceased

to make use of it, except in so far as to go on living under the roof of

the house at Yàsnaya Polyàna."

His wife continues to look after his wants and turns a blind eye to his

doctrines; she is always ready to help him. Even if he seems ungrateful

and says that his wife is no friend of his, she finds comfort in the

realisation that he cannot get along without her for a day, and that she

has made him what he is. Life becomes one golden holiday: there is an

air of infectious jollity pervading the household. He finds sheer animal

delight in his physical vigour, and yet ... and yet.... Is he not

thinking of himself (as usual) when he writes:

"One refined life, led in moderation and within the bounds of decency,

of what is commonly called a virtuous household, one family life,

absorbing as many working days as would suffice to maintain thousands of

the poor that live in misery hard by, does more to corrupt people than

thousands of wild orgies by coarse tradesmen, officers or artisans given

to drunkenness or debauchery, who smash mirrors and crockery for sheer

fun."

It was at this time that he found out that his books were becoming a

source of commercial prosperity to him. At first he refused to listen

when there was talk of money in connection with his books, but the

Countess, to secure the future of her children, stood firm.

Tolstoy was, as is well known, remarkable for the few friendships which

he formed. The notable exception is, of course, Turgenev, who wrote of

him: "His chief fault consists in the absence of spiritual freedom. He

is an egotist to the marrow of his bones." Despite his constant

asseveration that he always confesses everything, this is the one trait

he dare not divulge, even to himself.

Dostoievsky calls him "an ordinary Moscow fop of the upper class," "an

empty and chaotic soul," _fainéantise_ ... but he was more, much more

than this. As Merejkòvski says, he came very near to solving the supreme

mystery, to lifting the veil in the Holy of Holies.... In the end

despairingly he has to cry: "I am a fallen fledgling lying on my back

and crying in the high grass." He finds nothing, no faith, no God, for

all his seeking. His path lay in pursuing his ideal through things

terrestrial, in carrying on those moments when he rolled in

self-admiration in his tub as a naked child, when he felt the fresh

touch of the cherry-tree boughs, like a child's kiss, against his face.

In all literature there is no writer equal to Tolstoy in depicting the

human body. He is accurate, simple and as short as possible, selecting

only the few small unnoticed facial or personal features, and producing

them gradually he distributes them over the whole course of the story.

The wife of Prince Andreï in _Peace and War_ is for ever recurring to

our memory owing to the fact that we are constantly reminded of her

short downy upper lip. Prince Andreï's sister, too, is always fixed in

our minds owing to her trick of flushing in patches and walking heavily.

There are countless instances of this. There is the long thin neck of

Verestchagin, the swollen neck of Prince Andreï, the rotundity of Platon

Karataev, the little white hand of Napoleon. All these details are

impressed upon us with unwearying insistence until we come to realise

that this is Tolstoy's peculiar method of unfolding before us the

psychology of his characters. He has the gift of insight into the body

of his _dramatis personæ_. Think for a moment of Anna Karènina. Trait is

added to trait, feature to feature ... she has red lips, flashing grey

eyes, and most noticeable of all, her hands are made to express her more

even than her face. In them lies the whole charm of her person, the

union of strength with delicacy.

We learn that she always held herself exceptionally erect, that she has

a quick, decisive gait, when she dances she has a distinguishing grace,

sureness and lightness of movement. Tolstoy emphasises again and again

the roundness of her arms, the unruliness of her curls; the traits are

so harmonised that they naturally and involuntarily unite, in the fancy

of the reader, into one living, personal whole. We feel how easy and

pleasant it is to the author to describe living bodies and their

movements, not only of people, but also of animals. Even the Tartar

footmen who wait on Levine are said to be broad-hipped, an unnecessary

touch which shows us how much this sort of bodily accentuation can be

carried to excess.

For there is no doubt that Tolstoy relies on gestures where another

writer would have had recourse to words. He uses this convertible

connection between the external and the internal with inimitable art and

exquisite effect. It is the silent smile of Natasha which decides the

fate of Pierre far more effectively than any words.

So peculiar is this gift that it has been said that the nervous

susceptibility of people becomes different after reading Tolstoy's

works. He notices what has escaped everyone else, and uses his discovery

with a subtlety of effect that is startling. Thus it is to him that we

are indebted for the simple but none the less surprising fact that a

man's smile is reflected not only in his face, but also in the sound of

his voice.

Thus Platon Karataev says something to Pierre "in a voice changed by a

smile." Tolstoy was the first to notice that horse-hoofs have the queer

effect of giving, as it were, a "transparent sound." As we should expect

from so "animal-loving" a man, Tolstoy sounds every note in sensation.

He is equally able to fathom the sensation of her bared body to a young

girl, before going to her first ball, and the feelings of an old woman

worn out with child-bearing, and those of a nursing mother who has not

yet severed the mysterious connection of her body with that of her

child. Even the sensations of animals are familiar to him. Not the least

of his gifts to us is that he gave us new bodily sensations. He is the

greatest portrayer of the physico-spiritual region in the natural man:

that side of the spirit which most nearly approximates to the flesh. He

is a man of the senses, half-pagan, a fraction Christian: in the region

of pure thought, where Dostoievsky walked at ease, superbly master, he

is totally at a loss. But within the limits of the animal in man he is

the supreme artist of the world.

In _War and Peace_ Tolstoy meant to give us what is commonly known as an

historical novel: on laying it down we feel, not that we have lived in

an age long past side by side with Napoleon, or fought at Borodino, but

that these characters have been transplanted to our own age, and that he

is depicting men and women whom we already know very well. The poverty

of his historical colouring is amazing: where he depicts reality, the

"natural" man, his language is distinguished by unequalled simplicity,

strength and accuracy, but directly he gets on to the subject of

abstract psychology he is lost; his very language seems to become

helpless. When he leaves the passions of the heart for the passions of

the mind he becomes obscure, ungrammatical and false. Compare Irteniev,

the hero of _Childhood and Youth_, with Nekhlindov in _Resurrection_.

The former is distinct, unforgettable, alive ... the latter a lifeless

abstraction, a dreary megaphone. He cannot create human souls with

anything like the success he achieves with human bodies.

We see this best of all in the case of Natasha, in _War and Peace_. She

seems at the end of the book to have lost her soul in her body, and

become a mere prolific she-animal, living solely for her children and

husband. She has become divinely fleshly. "'We may run risks ourselves,

but not for our children,'" she remarks to Pierre when he wishes to give

away his property, echoing what Tolstoy's own wife said to him on a

similar occasion.

Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon--all pass

forgotten as if written on sand, but Natasha remains, Natasha, the

eternal mother, triumphantly waving "swaddling clothes, with a yellow

stain instead of a green," the divine animal. The swallowing up of the

human individual in the universal is Tolstoy's unvarying theme. Natures

swallows up Uncle Yeroshka ("I die and--the grass grows"), child-bearing

absorbs Natasha, sinful, destroying love swallows up Anna Karènina. She

is all compact of love. Her words are poor: Tolstoy is always poor in

dialogue. His excellence lies, as may have been guessed, in

descriptions. One might almost say that his characters only speak

because the mechanical conformation of their mouths admits of it.

What do we know, for instance, of Anna? What does she think about

Children, People, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death and God? We don't know.

But, on the other hand, we do know exactly how her slender fingers taper

at the end, what a round, polished neck she has, how her curls flutter

on her neck and temples; every expression of her face, every movement of

her body we do know.

He probes the human till he reaches the animal, and so, as in the case

of Vronsky's mare, Frou-frou, he probes the animal till he reaches the

human. He brings the likeness of God to the image of the beast.

There are in Tolstoy's books no heroes, no characters, no personalities

... and hence there is no tragedy, no catastrophe, no redeeming horror,

no redeeming laughter. The principals are all clever, honourable, good,

simple, naïve or kindly, yet we never feel at home with them. There is

always present that feeling with us that he lacks spiritual liberty, as

Turgenev said. It is due entirely to his too great sense of the body,

too little sense of the spirit.

X

TCHEHOV (1860-1904)

Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupassant is to French, but he

has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with

the middle classes, minor officials and the professional classes.

Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way

that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of

detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among

photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but

they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their

subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he

wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His

work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary

activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like "ennui,"

"greyness," and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed

playing vint.

Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to

evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had

sunk back into torpor: the disease of Oblòmovism had a firm grip of

them.

He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a

good education, finishing at the University of Moscow, where he studied

medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand

at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse

characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing,

which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first

in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he

undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year

in artistry.

His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life,

especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the

all-pervading meanness of everyday life.

I will treat first of his dramas.

The Russians, it must be premised, go to the theatre to see what they

would see off the stage: they are incurably realistic. They do not take

a delight, as we do, in huge catastrophes: they like to see the trivial

incidents of ordinary life reproduced with life-like accuracy on the

stage.

He wrote in all eleven plays, five of which are serious: the remaining

farces need not detain us. He discovered that life can be made

interesting and dramatic with indulging in heroics. He is always human,

and makes us feel moods and sensations over again which we have often

felt before. He seems, in other words, to make his plays out of nothing,

without having recourse to action or any extraordinary phenomena.

We are not introduced to men and women stripped of the masks which they

wear in ordinary life: his characters behave exactly as they would off

the stage, and betray themselves as people do by a phrase, a gesture,

the humming of a tune and the smell of a flower.

In The _Seagull_ we are introduced to the family of Sorin, whose sister

is a famous actress called Arkadina. Preparations have been made for

some private theatricals written by Arkadina's son, Constantin. The

chief part is to be played by Ina, the young daughter of a neighbour who

is in love with Constantin, who is full of ideals about reforming the

stage. A well-known writer, Trigorin, a man of about forty, is staying

with Sorin at the time.

The play is acted: Arkadina labels it decadent; Constantin gets annoyed.

Ina after the performance is introduced to Trigorin. The daughter of an

agent who has witnessed the performance (her name is Masha) confesses to

a doctor visitor that she is in love with Constantin, and the curtain

falls on Act I.

The second Act takes place in the same house. Constantin brings in a

dead seagull, and lays it at Ina's feet as a symbol which she fails to

understand.

Trigorin in the course of a conversation with her tells her what it

feels like to be a famous author.

"'What is there so wonderful about it? Like a monomaniac, who is always

thinking day and night of the moon, I am pursued by the one thought

which I cannot get rid of, I must write, I must write, I must. I have

scarcely finished a story when I must write a second, then a third, then

a fourth. I write uninterruptedly, I cannot do otherwise. What is there

so wonderful and splendid in this, I ask you? It is a cruel life. I get

excited with you and all the time I am remembering that an unfinished

story is waiting for me. I see a cloud which is like a piano, and I at

once think that I must remember to say somewhere in the story that there

is a cloud like a piano.

"'When I write it is pleasant, and it is nice to correct proofs: but as

soon as the thing is published I cannot bear it, and I already see that

it is not at all what I meant, that it is a mistake, that I should not

have written it at all, and I am vexed and horribly depressed. The

public reads it, and says: "Yes, pretty, full of talent, very nice, but

how different from Tolstoy!" or "Yes, a fine thing, but how far behind

_Fathers and Sons_: Turgenev is better." And so, until I die, it will

always be "pretty and full of talent," never anything more: and when I

die my friends as they pass my grave will say: "Here lies Trigorin; he

was a good writer, but he did not write so well as Turgenev."'"

This reads like that very rare thing in Tchehov, a confession of the

author himself.

However that may be, Ina replies that to her it is none the less a most

wonderful gift that he possesses. For her part, for the joy of being an

artist she would bear the hate of friends, want and disappointment.

Trigorin then notices the seagull and is driven to turn it into copy at

once.

"'An idea has occurred to me,'" he says, "'for a short story. On the

banks of a lake a young girl lives from her infancy. She loves the lake

like a seagull, she is happy and free: unexpectedly a man comes and sees

her and out of mere idleness kills her, just like this sea-gull.'"

That is the end of the second Act.

In the third Act Ina has fallen in love with Trigorin. Constantin out of

jealousy has tried unsuccessfully to kill himself and challenged

Trigorin to a duel, of which he takes no notice. After a quarrel with

his mother, which is made up, Constantin is inspired to take up the

threads of life again. We now discover that Trigorin has been and is

Arkadina's lover. Ina tells the famous author that she is going to

follow him to Moscow and they part on a note of passion. Two years

elapse.

In the fourth Act we find that Constantin has become famous: Ina has

gone on the stage and failed. She has had a child (which died) by

Trigorin: he has returned to Arkadina and deserted Ina, who has been

thrown over by her parents too. She enters and tells her story, and

Constantin declares that he still loves her in spite of all, but she is

still in love with Trigorin. Constantin, hearing this, can bear up no

longer, but shoots himself.

Such is the rather grim plot: the characterisation is well-nigh

faultless, especially of Arkadina, the loving mother, who is quite

unable to appreciate her son's talents, and of Trigorin, the weak, vain

egoist, who is without a vestige of ill-nature or malice.

_The Cherry Garden_ was his last play and sounds a note of hopefulness

which re-echoes through all his stories. Though the present may be black

and bitter, Tchehov always looks to a future where ideals shall once

more reign.

In the first Act we see the return of a lady who is heavily burdened

with debts to her estate in South Russia. It is the month of May and the

cherry orchard is in full blossom. We get the exact atmosphere of the

arrival of people from a journey and the return of a family to a home

from which it has long been absent.

The lady, Ranievskaia, is a child in financial matters and,

Micawber-like, imagines that someone or something will turn up to

extricate her out of her difficulties. A merchant neighbour of singular

astuteness propounds a solution. If they cut down the cherry-trees and

let the land for villa holdings they will ensure an income of two

thousand five hundred pounds a year at least. They regard this idea as

quite out of the question. They refuse to listen to such a ridiculous

suggestion. They revert to their Micawber-like attitude and wait for an

aunt to die and leave them a legacy and something of a like nature.

In the third Act we arrive at the day of the auction when their house

and property are to be sold over their heads. Nevertheless they are

holding a dance in spite of it. The merchant enters and announces that

he has bought the cherry orchard.

In the last Act we see them leaving their house for ever; the trees are

already being cut down and the house is going to make room for neat

suburban villas. The pathos and naturalness of this Act are

extraordinary. Every character in the play lives. It is historical and

at the same time symbolical, because it shows us why the landed gentry

in Russia has ceased to have any importance and how these unpractical,

amiable people must go under when faced by energetic, rich, self-made

men. The play seems to be about nothing and yet every casual remark has

always a definite purpose.

_Three Sisters_ represents the intense monotony of provincial life,

relieved momentarily by a passing flash, and then rendered doubly grey

by the disappearance of the flash. A regiment of artillery comes to the

garrison of a small town. One of the three sisters, Masha, has married a

schoolmaster: the two others, Irina and Olga, are living with their

brother, who is a professor. Irina is in the telegraph office, Olga

teaches. They live for one thing only, to get away and settle in Moscow.

They only remain on Masha's account. Masha's husband is an exceedingly

tedious schoolmaster, who is always reciting tags of Latin. Once his

wife thought him the cleverest man in the world, now she thinks of him

as the kindest but most tedious.

When the play begins we hear of a new commander appointed to the

battery. His name is Vershinin and he is married to a half-mad woman.

Other officers are Baron Tuzenbach and Major Soleny. The former is in

love with Irina, who is willing to marry him but does not love him.

Masha falls passionately in love with Vershinin. The Major is jealous of

Tuzenbach. Suddenly the battery is transferred to some remote corner of

the country. Soleny challenges the Baron and kills him. The three

sisters are left alone, Vershinin bidding a passionate farewell to

Masha, who does not even trouble to hide her grief from her husband. He

in a most pathetic way tries to console her: Ina does not care even when

she is told of the death of the Baron ... and so the sisters are left to

go on working in their misery, deprived even of the flash which promised

to lend some colour to their existence. It is, of course, impossible to

deny that these plays are laden with gloom, but it is the darkness of

the last hour before the dawn. Tchehov never despairs: he has an

invincible trust in the coming day. He shows us how difficult life is,

that there is nothing to be done but to continue working as cheerfully

as we may, but in doing so he fulfilled the first condition of all great

writing: he never failed to interest, and consequently his plays are, in

spite of their sombreness, a never-failing fount of inspiration and

æsthetic delight.

As a short story-writer he has certainly no equal in Russia and few in

any other country.

Owing to the indefatigability of Mrs Constance Garnett we now possess

eight volumes, all containing priceless cameos of Russian life, ranging

through the humorous, the bizarre, the mystic, the unconventional and

lawless to the pathetic, poignant and dramatic.

He is unflinching in his realism, but passionately devoted to his search

for truth and full of a poet's sensitiveness to beauty. He is softer,

warmer, altogether kindlier than Maupassant. Even the odious characters

are seen through the eyes of a kindly creator who never descends to

hardness or bitterness. Indeed this faculty of refraining from judging

others is almost the most peculiar feature of Russian writers taken as a

whole. They are many degrees nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than any other

Christian country, if this virtue is really so valuable as the New

Testament insists. There is nothing cynical in Tchehov's melancholy. He

accepts the world with all its glaring, tangled skein of inconsequences

and wickedness and foolishness and humorously transcribes what he sees

in a mood of cool, scientific passivity blending with the sensibility of

a sweet, wholesome, responsive nature. Unlike Dostoievsky, he seldom

identifies himself with his unfortunate characters.

The first story in the series edited by Mrs Garnett is _The Darling_,

which treats of a woman who shares her first husband's anxiety about his

theatre; throws herself into the interests of the timber trade in which

her second husband works; under the influence of her third begins to

regard the campaign against the foot and mouth disease as the most

important matter in the world and is finally left engrossed in

grammatical questions and the interests of the little schoolboy in the

big cap.

She devotes herself with her whole being in each case to the man and the

cause he represents. And Tolstoy in his criticism thinks that Tchehov

set out to scoff at her inconstancy. Yet do we laugh at Dryden's

frequent change of front? Is it not a sign of life and growth to throw

oneself heart and soul into whatever pursuit may be immediately to one's

hand? Certainly she loves absurd people, but love is sacred whatever the

object of the affection. "He, like Balaam," says Tolstoy, "intended to

curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless.

And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such

an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman

can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those

with whom destiny throws her."

But I do not feel convinced in my mind that Tchehov meant Olenka to

excite our disgust or careless laughter. Where she loves there she loves

whole-heartedly: her life is a blank, ready to take any impress, nor

does she seek to erase any one of them until it is irrevocably removed

from her. There are innumerable little touches deftly sketched in which

make us feel not the ridiculousness or emptiness of the Darling, but

rather love her for her sensibility and power of loving.

The main attraction of Tchehov for normal English readers is the shrewd

psychology and the quick lightning flashes of nimble wit with which the

text is strewn. As with his plays, so in his tales there is practically

no plot. Passions spin the plot and mere catastrophic incident is not

required.

In _Ariadne_, for instance, we are more intrigued by the conversations

about women in general (a favourite topic of conversation among the

Russians) than by the events that take place. Listen, for instance, to

this point of view:

"We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us

and to everything in the world. But the trouble is that when we have

been married for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and

disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again--disappointment,

again--reputation, and in the long run we become convinced that women

are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far from

being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men."

There are moments, too, when we could find it in our hearts to wish that

Tchehov had given rein to his obvious gifts for scenic description: so

many writers indulge in an orgy of nature panegyrics that we rarely want

more from any man, and Tchehov very wisely subordinates everything to

his main theme, but all the same we could well do with more of this sort

of thing:

"Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water

chatters noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat

flower-beds, bee-hives, a kitchen garden, and below it a river with

leafy willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a

lustreless look as though they had turned grey: and on the other side a

meadow, and beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine

forest. In that forest delicious reddish agaries grow in endless

profusion, and elks still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed

up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early mornings,

you know, when the sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings

when the nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and beyond

the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village,

while they play the piano indoors and the stream babbles ... when there

is such music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to

sing aloud."

But it is for little character sketches like this of Lubkov, who "would

sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: 'It

would be nice to have tea here,'" that endears Tchehov to us so

conclusively.

It is certainly sound psychology and good for a young lover to learn by

heart (it would save endless heartaches and a thousand other natural

shocks the flesh is heir to if they did) this aphorism: "A woman will

forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your

reasonableness."

It is with more than a thrill of delight that we read of so exquisitely

apt a simile as that for the girl who had refused a wealthy but utterly

insignificant prince and then immediately fretted at her decision. "Just

as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of krass with cockroaches in

it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of

the prince."

The story from which these extracts are taken is an amazingly true

psychological study of a girl whose coldness only made her more sensual:

she lived solely for the purpose of attracting men, was deceitful when

deceit was unnecessary, able to appear cultured in society and yet be in

reality superstitious, bigoted, illiterate and devoid of all taste.

"'She is half a human beast already,'" says the misogynist, who had

given up everything to please Ariadne, speaking of educated women

generally. "'Thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human

genius has been lost again: the woman gradually disappears and in her

place is the primitive female ... of course a woman's a woman and a

man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before

the Flood, and can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex

spiritual organisation, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel

towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is

different from mine? To get on terms with a woman is easy enough,'" he

concludes. "'You have only to undress her: but afterwards what a bore it

is, what a silly business.'"

And now by way of a change let me just lightly give the plots of the

following few stories. In _Polinka_ we are simply invited to listen to

the conversation over the counter of a little milliner and a draper's

assistant who loves her and objects to her being led astray by a young

medical student. The poignancy of the tale lies in the fact that the

conversation, which is quite tragic, has to take place in public and

therefore covered by discussions about buttons and corsets.

_Anynta_ describes the misery of a kept mistress of a medical student

who is tired of her.

_The Two Volodyas_ shows us a girl who has married one elderly Volodya

pining for the affection of another Volodya, who treats her as a child

who has to be humoured. He told her that she was like a little dog

waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his

knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:

"Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay ... tara-ra-boom-dee-ay."

_The Trousseau_ gives us a pathetic picture of a wife and daughter in

some dull, out-the-way place preparing year in, year out, material for

her "bottom drawer," the girl after all dying before she met anyone who

wanted to marry her.

_The Help-Mate_ describes the doings of a suspicious husband who finds

that his wife is corresponding secretly: he offers to set his wife free

in order that she may marry her lover. We hear of a mother-in-law who

aids her daughter in her immorality delightfully touched in in a phrase

that cuts like a lash: "A stout lady with small predatory features like

a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in

everything: if her daughter were strangling someone the mother would not

have protested but would only have screened her with her skirts."

The wife refuses to accept a divorce because it will lower her status

and perhaps her lover will throw her over. He is younger than she is.

In _An Artist's Story_ we get some invaluable hints on the problem of

the education of the masses.

"'The whole horror of their position,'" says the artist, "'lies in their

never having time to think of their souls, of their image and

resemblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like

avalanches of snow, block for them every way to spiritual activity--that

is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes and what is the only thing

which makes life worth living--the people must be freed from hard

physical labour: we must lighten their yoke, let them have time to

breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the

wash-tub, and in the fields, but may also have time to think of God--may

have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of

man is spiritual activity, the perpetual search for truth and the

meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let

them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these

dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he

can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these

trifles. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us,

townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to

divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of

their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for

two or three hours a day. What is needed is not elementary education,

but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. If one must

cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the

principal cause--physical labour--and then there will be no disease. We

have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and

write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians,

philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our

spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.'"

The story itself, however, concerns the love of an artist for a girl who

disobeys the dictates of her heart and gives up her happiness at her

sister's behest without question. The passage where the artist hears

that his chance of real abiding love has been snatched from him is

peculiarly Tchehov-like at his most poignant. He goes, full of hope and

ecstasy, to meet his beloved and hears her sister, who dislikes him,

giving a dictation lesson.

"'God ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice,

probably dictating.... "'God sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow

... a piece of cheese ... Who's there?' she called suddenly, hearing my

steps.

"'It's I.'

"'Ah! Excuse me. I cannot come out to you this minute: I'm giving Dasha

her lesson.'

"'Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?'

"'No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the

province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,' she

added after a pause. 'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of

cheese.... Have you written it?'

"I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village,

and the sound reached me of 'A piece of cheese ... God sent the crow a

piece of cheese.'"

In _Three Years_, a somewhat longer tale, we read of the gradually

waning affection between husband and wife and their reconciliation.

Very deftly does the author show us the difference between the passion

which Laptev felt for Yulia at the beginning and his feeling at the end

when she tells him how dear he is to her: though he kept smiling at her

and her beautiful neck with a sort of joyous shyness as a sign of the

new birth of his love, yet we read that when she put her arm round his

neck he cautiously removed her hand. The mingled emotions are

exquisitely rendered.

His longest story is _The Duel_ and in it we hear of a neurasthenic,

Laevsky, who finds that "'living with a woman who has read Spencer and

followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living

with any Anfissa or Kulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of

powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same

self-deception.'" He tries every means in his power to raise money by

loan to leave the Caucasus and his mistress: there is a clear-headed,

cold-blooded zoologist called Von Koren who despises Laevsky for his

degeneracy. He thus analyses Laevsky's character:

"'His existence is confined like an egg within its shell. Whether he

walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to

wine, cards, slippers and women. He has had great success with women and

therein lies his noxiousness. He is a failure, a superfluous man, a

victim of the age.'" Meanwhile Laevsky's mistress had been philandering

with other men. He discovers her infidelity just when he is on the point

of fighting a duel with Von Koren. He was wounded but slightly and

became reconciled to his wife, while Von Koren was the one to go away,

leaving lover and mistress almost happy in each other's society.

_Mire_ is a horrible story about two men neither of whom was able to

resist the fascinations of a Jewess prostitute.

_Neighbours_ is an account of a visit paid by a brother to his sister

who had run away with a married man: his first intention is to wreak his

vengeance on her lover for the dishonour he had brought upon his house,

but he remains as their friend.

_At Home_ gives us a picture of the dull monotony of life in the

country: a girl returns to her aunt's house and out of sheer boredom is

induced to marry the local doctor.

_Expensive Lessons_ shows the unrequited passion of a research student

for a poor French governess whom he had hired to teach him French.

_The Princess_ tells of a rich girl who likes to see others happy and

revels in the thought that she is the means of making many content who

otherwise would not be. She is taken severely to task by a doctor who

tries to show her her true character as seen by her inferiors. '"You

look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic standpoint as food for

the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea: you have nothing except

aversion: your philanthropic work has been a farce from the beginning.

There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living

puppets.'" He says too much, is frightened and apologises, and the

Princess goes from him once more reinstated to her former position of

Lady Bountiful in her own mind. "'How happy I am!'" she murmured,

shutting her eyes. "'How happy I am!'"

_The Chemist's Wife_ is a charming trifle dealing with a country town in

which an officer and a doctor knock up a chemist late at night on the

pretext of wanting some peppermints, in reality to talk to the pretty

young wife of the chemist. She is flattered: adventure has at last come

her way: she stays some time downstairs talking to them while her

husband sleeps. Reluctantly her visitors leave her, and when she is once

more in bed return, this time waking her husband, who attends to them

himself.

"Two minutes later the chemist's wife saw Obvyosov go out of the shop,

and after he had gone some steps she saw him throw the packet of

peppermints on the dusty road. The doctor came from behind a corner to

meet him ... they met, and gesticulating, vanished in the morning mist."

"'How unhappy I am!'" said the chemist's wife, looking angrily at her

husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. "'Oh, how

unhappy I am!'" she repeated. "'And nobody knows, nobody knows.'

"'I forgot fourpence on the counter,'" muttered the chemist, pulling the

quilt over him. "Put it away in the till, please....'" And at once he

fell asleep again.

In _The Lady with the Dog_ we get one of those notes of optimism which

are so characteristic of Tchehov just where the normal writer would be

pessimistic.

"The monotonous hollow sound of the sea, rising up from below, spoke of

the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us: in this constancy, in this

complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies

hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing

movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection."

The story is about a married man who conceives a violent passion for a

married woman whom he meets while on holiday.

"Anna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like

husband and wife, like tender friends: it seemed to them that fate

itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why

he had a wife and she a husband: and it was as though they were a pair

of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They

forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they

forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had

changed them both."

By far the greater number of Tchehov's tales deal with the illicit loves

of married women: young girls are compelled to marry husbands who are

distasteful to them, and in after years they revenge themselves by

giving themselves to sprucer, cleaner, stronger men who flit into and

out of their lives only too quickly.

In _A Doctor's Visit_ Tchehov harks back again to a subject which is

always dear to him, the uselessness of modern labour. In this case two

thousand workpeople work without rest in unhealthy surroundings making

bad cotton goods ... for what purpose? The factory owner's family are

unhappy: "the only one who enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, the

governess, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez. All these

five blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the

Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and

drink Madeira."

The doctor who is called in to attend the daughter of the house ventures

on a criticism of present-day life.

"'Our generation sleep badly, are restless, talk a great deal, and are

always trying to settle whether we are right or not. For our children or

grandchildren that question will have been settled. Things will be

clearer for them than for us. Life will be good in fifty years' time.'"

_Ionitch_ shows us Tchehov in another characteristic vein. Here he

indulges in one of his favourite tricks, that of divulging the

foolishness of his _dramatis personæ_ through their idiotic

conversation. Ivan Petrovitch is an irritating buffoon whose idea of wit

is to repeat _ad nauseam_ phrases like "How do you do, if you please?"

and "Not badsome."

Tchehov's sense of irony is well shown in the following passage which

occurs in this story:--

"Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces and

Vera Iosiforna read her novel. It began like this: 'The frost was

intense ...' The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the

clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions.... It was comfortable

in the soft deep arm-chair: the lights had such a friendly twinkle in

the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the moment on a summer evening

when sounds of voices and laughter floated in from the street and whiffs

of lilac from the yard, it was difficult to grasp that the frost was

intense, and that the setting sun was lighting with its chilly rays a

solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain. Vera read how a beautiful young

countess founded a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and

fell in love with a wandering artist: she read of what never happens in

real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen ... it was comfortable, and

such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind one had no

desire to get up.

"'Not badsome' ... Ivan said softly."

"Hugeous," "Thank you most dumbly," were among the sallies of wit which

Ivan hurled at his audience from time to time.

The object of the story is as usual to emphasise the uselessness of the

narrow lives of the inhabitants of a provincial town where men and women

did absolutely nothing, took no interest in anything and looked askance

at anyone who tried to speak intelligently on any topic of importance.

There was nothing to do except eat and play vint. Tchehov shows us these

people growing older but otherwise changing not at all, dragging down to

their level even those who in their youth endeavoured to break loose

from the bondage of aimlessness and inertia.

There is, however, a side of Tchehov which one would not expect in so

relentless a realist. In _The Black Monk_ we cross the border of the

unseen and are in the society of mystics. No writer has so severely

handled those who rely on old wives' fables and ignorant superstitions,

but in this story he probes far down into the spiritual world and comes

into line with Dostoievsky in a field which we are astonished to see him

approach.

The phantom that appears periodically to Kovrin and so enhances his

happiness may be an hallucination: it is completely in the vein of

Smerdyakov and Ivan _The Brothers Karamazov_, though the conclusions are

very different.

"'And what is the object of eternal life?'" asks Kovrin of the black

monk, and the spirit answers: "'As of all life--enjoyment. True

enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and

inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said:

"In my Father's house there are many mansions."'"

One of Tchehov's most remarkable traits is his capacity for getting

right inside the very body of his characters. In _An Anonymous Story_,

with a sureness of touch that we can only wonder at, he paints for us

the hardships of a flunkey's life. Just as Turgenev seems to have been

able to see into the most secret recesses of a young girl's heart, so

Tchehov can put on the guise of an old man or a young boy lover, a

jealous wife or an unfaithful husband, a garrulous father or a feckless

waster at will, and actually become them for ten, twenty, fifty pages at

a time without once giving us a chance to doubt the truth of his

creation.

There are moments when we imagine that he leans rather to that side of

life which we associate with authorship, hatred of domesticity. So many

of his characters fall foul of conjugal relationships, but it is one of

his worst characters who says that love is only a simple physical need,

like the need for food or clothes, and instances the French workman who

spends ten sous on dinner, five sous on wine, five or ten sous on women,

and devotes his brain and nerves entirely to his work, and it is surely

the voice of Tchehov himself who replies: "'Your everlasting attacks on

female logic, lying, weakness and so on--doesn't it look like a desire

at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may be on the

same level as your attitude to her?'"

There are many places in this long "anonymous story" where Tchehov

himself seems to be speaking to us across the footlights. It is his

voice again that I hear in Zinaida's "'The meaning of life is to be

found only in one thing--fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of

the serpent and to crush it. That's the meaning of life. In that alone

or in nothing.'"

In the pseudo-valet's "'One can serve an idea in more than one calling.

If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one, one may find another.'"

And once more in "'Man finds his true destiny in nothing if not in

self-sacrificing love for his neighbour.'" And lastly in the same man's

"'All I ask for is an objective attitude to life: the more objective,

the less danger of falling into error. One must look into the root of

things and try to see in every phenomenon a cause of all the other

causes. We have grown feeble, slack--degraded, in fact. Our generation

is entirely composed of neurasthenics and whimperers: we do nothing but

talk of fatigue and exhaustion. Life is only given us once and one wants

to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play

a striking, independent, noble part: one wants to make history so that

those generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we

were nonentities or worse.... Why should my ego be lost?'"

But if I had to select one characteristic story of Tchehov's to

illustrate his method more perfectly than any other I should choose _The

Husband_. It is simply on account of a tax-collector and his wife going

to a dance held in honour of the coming of a regiment to the town. The

wife under the influence of the music, the drink and the unaccustomed

society begins to revel in the function: her husband immediately orders

her to return home, merely to satisfy a whim.

The final paragraphs of the story, in which we see the wretched couple

walking home in the dark, the mud slushing under their feet, choking

with hatred of each other, are inimitable.

The fourth volume of tales is called _The Party_, and contains a

wonderful story called _Terror_, in which we again get Tchehov's

favourite plot of a man making love to his friend's wife.

The terror lies in the fact that the man loves his wife while she is

indifferent to him and gives herself to her husband's friend, who leaves

her as soon as he has won her.

In _A Woman's Kingdom_ he reverts to machinery and capital, and in

passing introduces a very sound criticism of Maupassant's work.

_The Kiss_, which is just the story of an officer being kissed in the

dark in mistake for somebody else, is a supreme example of Tchehov's

genius in making a completely successful story out of the merest trifle.

_The Teacher of Literature_ is a man who chafes, as so many of Tchehov's

heroes do, at the littleness of life. "I am surrounded," he writes in

his diary, "by vulgarity, and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant

people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women....

There is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and distressing than

vulgarity. I must escape--I must escape."

In volume five _The Wife_ is a poignantly pathetic story of a man who

loves his wife desperately but meets with no response to his affection;

it differs from other tales of the same sort in that the wife in this

case states most plainly and forcibly exactly why they fail to get on.

"'You bring suffocation, oppression,'" she says, "'something insulting

and humiliating to the utmost degree. Law and morality are such that a

self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend her life in idleness,

in depression, and in continual apprehension, and to receive board and

lodging from a man she does not love.'"

_Difficult People_ shows us, as Tchehov is fond of doing, a family in

the process of bickering and squabbling from day to day.

_The Grasshopper_ is the picture of a married girl who jumps from one

lover to another, only realising the purity and greatness of her husband

when he dies heroically.

_A Dreary Story_ is the notebook of an old man who is about to die,

having achieved fame but not found happiness. In this story there is a

magnificent description of the fascination of lecturing.

"'No kind of sport,'" he concludes, "'no kind of game or diversion, has

ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been

able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that

inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life,

and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just

such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.'"

We feel again that some autobiographical thread of the author's is

creeping in when he makes his old man say: '"I am interested in nothing

but science. I still believe that science is the most important, the

most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man: that it

always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love, and that

only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature.'"

The remaining stories in the volume, which are peculiar in that they are

linked by having characters in common, dwell on the evils of Tchehov's

days, the listlessness of the educated public, the refusal to break out

of the case or the groove, the general hypnotism and blindness to

suffering of the so-called happy.

"'There ought to be,'" says the hero in _Gooseberries_, "'behind the

door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer

continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people.'"

We learn in _About Love_ that Tchehov's apprenticeship to medicine

"taught me one invaluable lesson as an artist, to individualise each

case."

In the sixth and last volume we have _The Witch_, which gives its name

to the volume, which is parallel with _The Chemist's Wife_ in that it

again shows a wife dissatisfied with her husband endeavouring to secure

a moment's romance with a postman who has lost his way.

_Peasant Wives_ dwells on the unfaithfulness of women, and in _Agafya_

he reverts to the style and plot of _The Witch_.

_Gusev_ is a horrible story of a man dying at sea: when dead his body is

sewn up and thrown into the water, where he is eaten by a shark.

_In the Ravine_ is a picture of a girl not very different in her

calculated brutality and heartlessness from Regan and Goneril: it is one

of the most powerful stories that Tchehov ever wrote.

As a short story-writer Tchehov stands in a unique position. He relies

very little on plot, he is interested only in characters: every one of

his creations stands out definitely and clearly, and though he points

no moral it is easy to come to quite certain conclusions with regard to

his own view on life.

He obviously regards women as frail, easily dissatisfied, just as he

looks upon the men of his age as invertebrate, lacking in energy,

ideals, or any sense of the nobility of work.

His scenic descriptions are clear-cut and beautiful, not less effective

because they are so sparingly used.

He is obviously puzzled by the why and wherefore of existence, and

refuses to shut his eyes when he finds himself confronted by

uncomfortable truths.

But his main feature is his incurable optimism. He has no very great

opinion of the men of his own day, but it is easy to see that he has

unbounded faith in the future, and to stigmatise such a writer as

"gloomy" only betrays the impotence and wrong-headedness of the critic.

Transcriber's note:

_Underscores_ have been used to indicate _italic_ fonts.

Inconsistent hyphenation has been left as it was written.

Dialect has been left as written, e.g. täake. However obvious typos (outside of speech) have

been corrected.