They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white
walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the
styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened
and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were
ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so
well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.
Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret
of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never
seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more
to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in
bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must
be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons.
The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s pageant. Mr.
Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply
about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first
novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr.
Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these things. His
description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes
you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and
simple sentence like----
As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of
wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,
compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.
But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more in them
than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books, personal,
confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays have egotism
without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have personality without
egotism. He is economical of discussion of his own tastes. When he does
discuss them you know that here is no make-believe of confession. Take,
for instance, the comment on place-names with which he prefaces his
account of his disappointment with Tripoli:
You probably know there are place-names, which, when whispered
privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit
east of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print
without a thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are
a motley lot, and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own
lunacy in another phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco,
Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie
River, Tripoli of Barbary--they are some of mine. Rome should be
there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and
that is all I can say about it.
That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards
arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of
call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about
to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about--he
will scarcely even interest himself in--any world but that which he
has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience.
Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books,
animals, soldiers, workers--of all these things he will tell you with a
tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But
the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will
carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his
imagination.
I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is
so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star
of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires
even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New
York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he
has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries
and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the
memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing
seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the
passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly
recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the
assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on:
There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless
body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging
post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and
superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched
helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the
break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might
have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great
comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was
escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard.
She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit
in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit,
the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.
We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just
evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key
incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:
House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a
smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have
been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their
walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
dissolute.
And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger
lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a
tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered
planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered
procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly
a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own
finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of
literature.
As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover
plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes
to read _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler
and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing
in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models.
But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one
to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too,
has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the
world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it
not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in
his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the
world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining
in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible
at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s
_Table-talk_--that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.
XI
THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV
A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows
but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying
men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation
that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a
genius for consolation--a genius for stretching out a hand to his
floundering fellow-mortals--it was Tchehov. He was as active in service
as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was
as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was
open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor
man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally
generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented
as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary
men of genius. His attitude to Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but
it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I
am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die
there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved
any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs
I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier
moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his
younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget
gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before
everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend,
Suvorin, editor of the _Novoe Vremya_, he wrote:
The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good,
and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important
characteristic--they are going towards something and summoning
you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with
your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost
of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination
for nothing. Some have more immediate objects--the abolition of
serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or
simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects--God,
life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The
best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through
every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you
feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that
captivates you.
If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of
hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.
Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith.
Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he
excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had
a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during
the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and
Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse,
not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have
been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of
accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case
the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled
with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his
trial--that is unworthy of literature.”
We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of
Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building
in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a
lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off
to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of
the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his
investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for
the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for
the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest
and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building
a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague
of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others
with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the
cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries
were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the
zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov
at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English
translation of his letters:
He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as
though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and
made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with
his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings.
This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly
very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the
opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In
one letter he writes:
I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual
personalities scattered here and there all over Russia--educated
people or peasants--they have strength though they are few.
In another letter he says:
Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great
future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of
years, in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come
to know the truth of the real God--that is not, I conjecture, by
seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice
two are four.
If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is an
enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-marks
and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent,
inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from
violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the
programme I would follow if I were a great artist.
In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort of
realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent
parable:
Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham only noticed that
his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact
that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world.
Writers must not imitate Ham....
On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the practice of
honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is the object
of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:
A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not
an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense
of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough, he
mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he must conquer his
squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is
just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper
correspondent, out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to
please his readers, would describe only honest mayors, high-minded
ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?
In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth
about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,”
he declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their
conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no
doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the great
artist will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov
himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and
withheld it from others.
On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that
frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual men,
not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend from
his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest often
comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a widower, and
has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a priest who is
a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an unthinkable
paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in nature: he
accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was indifferent to the
vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one occasion to a great
journalist: “Why do they write nothing about prostitution in your
paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our Sobelev street is a
regular slave-market.”
Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He had
the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also the
doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in opposite
directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war, instead
of weakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great artist is
a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to have lived
aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that repeated summons
to reconciliation in his plays is the _credo_ of a man who has plumbed
the great secret of the liberalism of his time and, equally, of ours.
Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an
essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in
art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most
of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is
exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little
but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author
of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. He tells us the truth
even when it is most cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes
like a doctor going his rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the
sick world. That is why his stories delight us as the synthetic golden
syrup of more optimistic authors never does.
XII
NIETZSCHE: A NOTE
“_And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros._” Nietzsche writes in one
of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence”
in an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had
made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt image
of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude made him
perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness. There are few
more amazing passages in the annals of literature than those containing
the last letters between the mad Nietzsche and the mad Strindberg.
Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve,
1888:
I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order
... to be shot.
Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.
On one condition only. Let us divorce.
Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the
highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving
mad,” and concluded it:
Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true
to your
STRINDBERG
(The best, the highest God).
Nietzsche’s reply was:
MR. STRINDBERG:
Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!
“THE CRUCIFIED.”
Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from
Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has
been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable
protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage
Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however,
goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture
of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave
virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother,
and a generous enemy”--“not the slightest trace of any lack of
judgment”--“perfectly healthy and lucid”--such are the phrases in
which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that
“even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect
sense.” Here is the letter:
TO THE FRIEND GEORG.
Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others
to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.
“THE CRUCIFIED.”
It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close
of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for
him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough
in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one
of the inspired guides to life.
Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense
of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of
his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so
passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole
of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even
with total strangers!” About the same time--it was in 1880--he wrote:
One ceases from loving oneself properly when one _ceases_ from
exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the
latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly
deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)
Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric
life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I
shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and
obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that
it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow
my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the
values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in
an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect
as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At
that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to
feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every
movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every
scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism,
but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful
even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away
from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred
times too _low_.” He declares that he naturally belonged to “the
modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order
to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in
which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of
a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings
magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him
than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His
most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her
from Turin:
Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the
world express their loyalty to me--the most charming women, a
_Madame la Princesse Tenichefl_ not by any means excepted. I have
genuine geniuses among my admirers--to-day there is no name that
is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You
see that is the feat--sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am
nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even
down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has
picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.
Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall
woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After
he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese
disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such adolescent
advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting
and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he
was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans
who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he
felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting
subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and
loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:
... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about
fifteen books (--among them that _non plus ultra_ “Zarathustra”),
no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately
good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out
of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,”
“psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough
about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the
prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity--but how is it
that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels
insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop
of human sympathy, not a breath of love.