after an endless journey in a train which went three miles an hour and
stopped for an indeterminate period, never less than an hour and a
half, at every station, I found a large crowd at the station gathered
round a pillar of smoke and flame. One’s first impression was, of
course, that a village fire was going on. Fires in Russian villages
are common occurrences in the summer, and this is not surprising since
the majority of the houses are thatched with straw. The houses are in
close proximity one to another, and the ground is littered with straw.
Moreover, to set fire to one’s neighbour’s house is a common form of
paying off a score. But it was not a fire that was in progress. It was
the casting of a bell which was to take place. The ceremony was fixed
for four o’clock in the afternoon with due solemnity and with religious
rites, and I was invited to be present.
“Heute muss die Glocke werden”
wrote Schiller in his famous poem, and here the words were appropriate.
To-day the bell was to be. It was a blazing hot day. The air was dry,
the ground was dry, everything was dry, and the great column of smoke
mixed with flame issuing from the furnace added to the heat. The
furnace had been made exactly opposite to the church. The church was
a stone building with a Doric portico consisting of four red columns,
a white pediment, a circular pale green roof, and a Byzantine minaret.
The village consisted of wooden log-built cottages thatched with straw
dotted over a rolling plain. The plain was variegated with woods--oak
trees and birch being their principal trees--and stretched out
infinitely into the blue distance. Before the bell was to be cast a Te
Deum was to be sung.
It was Wednesday, the day of the bazaar. The bazaar in the village is
the mart, where the buying and selling of meat, provisions, fruit,
melons, fish, hardware, ironmongery, china, and books are conducted.
This takes place once a week on Wednesdays, and peasants flock in from
the neighbouring villages to buy their provisions. But this afternoon
the bazaar was deserted. The whole population of the village was
gathered together on the dry brown grassy square in front of the church
to take part in the ceremony. At four o’clock two priests and a deacon,
followed by a choir consisting of two men in their Sunday clothes, and
by bearers of gilt banners, walked in procession out of the church.
They were dressed in stiff robes of green and gold, and as they walked
they intoned a plain song. An old card table with its stained green
cloth was placed and opened on the ground opposite and not far from the
church, and on this two lighted tapers were set together with a bowl of
holy water. The peasants gathered round in a semicircle with bare heads
and joined in the service, making countless genuflexions and signs of
the cross, and joining in the song with their deep bass voices. When
I said the peasants I should have said half of them. The other half
were gathered in a dense crowd round the furnace, which was built of
bricks and open on both sides to the east and to the west, and fed with
wooden fuel. The men in charge of the proceeding stood on both sides of
it and stirred the molten metal it contained with two enormous poles.
On the southern side of the furnace was a channel through which the
molten metal when released was to flow into the cast of the bell. The
crowd which was assembled here was already struggling to have and to
hold a good place for the spectacle of the release of the metal when
the solemn moment should arrive. Three policemen were endeavouring to
cope with the crowd; that is to say, one police officer, one police
sergeant, and one common policeman. They were trying with all their
might to keep back the crowd, so that when the metal was released a
disaster should not happen; but their efforts were in vain, because the
crowd was large, and when they pressed back a small portion of it they
made a dent in it which caused the remaining part of it to bulge out;
and it was the kind of crowd--so intensely typical of Russia--on which
no words, whether of command, entreaty, or threat, made the smallest
impression. The only way to keep it back was by pressing on it with
the body and outstretched arms, and that only kept back a tiny portion
of it. In the meantime the Te Deum went on and on; and many things and
persons were prayed for besides the bell which was about to be born. At
one moment I obtained a place from which I had a commanding view of the
furnace, but I was soon oozed out of it by the ever-increasing crowd of
men, women, and children.
The aspect of the whole thing was something between a sacred picture
and a scene in a Wagner opera. The tall peasants with red shirts, long
hair and beards, stirring the furnace with long poles, looked the
persons in the epic of the Niebelungen as we see it performed on the
stage to the strains of a complicated orchestration. There was Wotan
in a blue shirt, with a spear; and Alberic, with a grimy face and a
hammer, was meddling with the furnace, and Siegfried, in leather boots
and sheepskin, was smoking a cigarette and waving an enormous hammer,
while Mimi, whining and disagreeable as usual, was having his head
smacked. On the other hand, the peasants who were listening and taking
part in the Te Deum were like the figures of a sacred picture--women
with red and white Eastern head-dresses, bearded men, listening as
though a miracle were about to be performed, and barefooted children
with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes running about everywhere.
Towards six o’clock the Te Deum at last came to an end, and the whole
crowd moved and swayed around the furnace. A Russian crowd is like
a large tough sponge. Nothing seems to make any effect on it. It
absorbs the newcomers who dive into it, and you can pull it this way
and press it that way, but there it remains, indissoluble, passive,
and obstinate. Perhaps the same is true of the Russian nation; I think
it is certainly true of the Russian character, in which as fundamental
qualities there are so much apparent weakness and softness, so much
obvious elasticity and malleability, and so much hidden passive
resistance.
I asked a peasant who was sitting by a railing under the church when
the ceremony would begin. “Ask them,” he answered, “they will tell you,
but they won’t tell us.” With the help of the policeman I managed to
squeeze a way through the mass of struggling humanity to a place in the
first row. I was told that the critical moment was approaching, and was
asked to throw a piece of silver into the furnace, so that the bell
might have a tuneful sound. I threw a silver rouble into the furnace,
and then the men who were in charge of the casting said that the
critical moment had come. On each side of the small channel they fixed
metal screens and placed a large screen facing it. Then the man in
charge said in a loud matter-of-fact tone: “Now, let us pray to God.”
The peasants all uncovered themselves and made a sign of the cross,
and a moment was spent in silent prayer. This prayer was especially
for the success of the operation which was to take place immediately,
namely, the release of the molten metal, since two hours had already
been spent in praying for the bell. At this moment the excitement of
the crowd reached such a pitch that they pushed themselves right up
to the channel, and the efforts of the policemen, who were pouring
down with perspiration and stretching out in vain, like the ghosts
in Virgil, their futile arms, were pathetic. One man, however, not a
policeman, waved a big stick and threatened to beat everybody back if
they did not make way. Then at last the culminating moment arrived, the
metal was released, and it poured down the narrow channel which had
been prepared for it, and over which two logs placed crosswise formed
an arch, surmounted by a yachting cap for ornament. It caused a huge
yellow sheet of flame to flare up for a moment in front of the iron
screen facing the channel. The women in the crowd shrieked. Those who
were in front made a desperate effort to get back, and those who were
at the back made a desperate effort to get forward, and I was carried
right through and beyond the crowd in the struggle.
And the bell was born. I hope the silver rouble which I threw into it,
and which now forms a part of it, will sweeten its utterance, and that
it may never have to sound the alarm which signifies battle, murder,
and sudden death.
CONVERSATIONS WITH DIMITRI NIKOLAIEVITCH
I
ENGLISH LIBERALS IN RUSSIA
“While you were away,” said Dimitri Nikolaievitch A----, “I had several
long conversations with a young Englishman who had come over here to
have a glimpse of the Revolution and to express his sympathy with the
oppressed. He was an ardent Liberal, and he had a fine _doctrinaire_
spirit, so that although he was considerably disappointed with what
he saw, or, rather, with what he did not see, his theories on Russian
politics were unshaken by the facts he observed. And he remained
entrenched within them as in the walls of a strong fortress. He
interested me greatly, first, because he proved to me that a pet theory
of mine was wrong, that no Englishman is a Liberal, and, secondly, he
showed me how difficult it must be for people living in England, and
unacquainted with Russian life, to form a correct estimate of what is
going on here.
“He talked with burning indignation of the Bureaucrats and with hope
of the dawn of liberty in Russia, and the awakening giant and the
ferociousness of Ministers, and when I said that the only difference
between the Kadet reformers and the Bureaucrats was that the
Bureaucrats formed part of the Civil Service and the Kadet reformers
did not, although some of them have done so in the past, he did not
understand what I meant. And yet the matter is one which any Englishman
who can understand Bernard Shaw’s play, _John Bull’s Other Island_,
ought to be able to grasp. In _John Bull’s Other Island_, Bernard Shaw
has shown exactly how an English Liberal fails to understand the Irish
question. Now, an English Liberal misunderstands the Russian question
in exactly the same way as he misunderstands the Irish question. He
comes to Russia bursting with indignation, and burning with enthusiasm
for the cause of liberty, and he meets with polite sympathy from the
Russians who, while they respect the trend and the violence of his
opinions, inwardly smile at his misapprehension, his complete inability
to comprehend the nature of the case. The Liberal then goes back to
England and writes a book in which in lurid colours he paints the
distress of the distressful country, and in which he confuses utterly
the evils arising from a complicated, antiquated, and incompetent
system of administration with those due to original sin.
“I mean that in his book he is capable of saying, ‘Russia is such a
terrible country that if a convict fells a warder he is flogged.’ He
talks of the bloodthirsty Bureaucrats and the iron-fisted Governors,
and then of the Russian Liberals as if they belonged to an entirely
different race of people, as if, for instance, they possessed the
qualities, and those only, which are special to the admirable British
middle-class. Now, just think of this question of Bureaucracy for a
moment. To talk of the bloodthirsty race of Bureaucrats is absurd.
Nine-tenths of educated Russians are Bureaucrats, and the majority of
these Bureaucrats are probably Liberals and would vote for the Kadets
unless it were too inconvenient. Some of the higher officials among
these same Bureaucrats have often admittedly been excellent men; in any
case there is no difference of kind between the Russian who is a high
official or a small public servant and the Russian who is a doctor, a
lawyer, a political agitator, a novelist, an actor, or an anarchist.
“Where, then, is the mischief? The mischief is in the system, and
the misunderstanding arises from a misuse of words, which in its
turn is caused by a disinclination to think clearly. When people say
Bureaucracy they mean Autocracy. Russia is governed by the autocratic
system, and an Autocracy, unless, as happens every now and then in the
course of centuries, the autocrat is a man of genius like Peter the
Great, Cromwell, or Napoleon, means this, that the country governed by
an autocrat is governed in reality by a mass of officials, who claim
that they are directly responsible to the monarch, and who are at the
same time considered to be responsible to the monarch’s Ministers.
They end by being responsible to nobody, since the people who are
set beneath them can complain of them to those who are in authority
over them, and therefore not one of them, from the lowest telegraph
clerk to the Prime Minister, is sure of his position, because the
Prime Minister can be sent away at a moment’s notice, according to the
Sovereign’s whim. The result of this is that the individual counts for
nothing, and the better the Bureaucrat the more hopeless his position,
since there is no guarantee for the laws being enforced, and when a
people sees that sometimes the laws are enforced, and at others they
are not, according to circumstances, and according to the nature and
rank of the persons they affect, they become less inclined to obey
the laws. Therefore, what Russia is suffering from is not want of
liberty, but want of law. In Russia we have the licence of the Press,
and the power of suppressing newspapers. What we want is order. Now,
lots of Russians argue that the autocratic system and its attendant
lawlessness are simply the inevitable result of the Russian character,
out of which it has grown. I should be more inclined to believe this if
exactly the same system had not existed in France and been subsequently
destroyed, and if the autocratic system in Russia were a very ancient
instead of a comparatively modern institution borrowed from Germany by
an eccentric man of genius who forced it on a backward and ignorant
people. I mean Peter the Great.
“Again, many Russians argue thus: ‘In England, in spite of all their
Habeas Corpus, Bills of Right, etc., officials do lawless things in
Egypt, and innocent people are put in prison for mutilating horses.’
This argument seems to me fallacious. The point being not that the
Habeas Corpus is an infallible guarantee against lawlessness in
England, but that were there no Habeas Corpus in England things would
be much worse than they are at present. There was once a French priest
who, when he heard the Republic abused for all its vices and faults,
answered: ‘Tout de même si les institutions libérales disparaissaient,
nous les regrettrions.’ And I consider that if by any chance Liberal
Institutions were established in Russia we should not groan beneath
them. So you see I am not a Liberal but a radical. I am in favour of
radical change. In spite of that, the sympathy of Liberals in other
countries, even that of the Bishop of Hereford, fails either to move,
to console, or to encourage me.
“At the beginning of the French Revolution the English Liberals felt
much sympathy with the French Reformers, and a sword of honour was
sent by the French tribunes to the ‘citoyens’ who were then Ministers
in England; but when the French Revolution moved onwards towards its
logical close, the disgust of the English Liberals knew no bounds, and
Burke made his disapprobation immortal in burning prose. Therefore,
when the revolutionaries here begin to get the upper hand I shall
advise them to pause before sending a sword of honour to ‘Citoyen’
Hereford, ‘Citoyen’ Jaurès, and ‘Citoyen’ Keir Hardy, lest when all
Russia is in flames and the rentes have sunk to nothing and the red
flag flies from the Winter Palace, the Bishop from the pulpit, M.
Jaurès in the Chamber of Deputies, and Mr. Keir Hardy in the House of
Commons, rise to point out--safeguarding themselves with conjunctions
as is the habit of political speakers--that although nobody sympathises
more than they do with Liberal ideas, nevertheless, to repudiate
foreign loans, and to cut off Professor Milioukov’s head, and to throw
all the Kadets and the moderate Liberals and even the more moderate
Socialists into the Neva, is going too far, and for such actions they
cannot overstate their deprecation.”
II
BYRON
Last night I went to see my old friend Dimitri Nikolaievitch A----.
I found him, as usual, in the little den which he shares with a
bullfinch, a lizard, and a fox terrier on the sixth floor of a huge
sordid barrack. As usual, he was smoking, and there was a lack of
buttons on his coat.
“So you’ve come to talk politics,” he said, “and I am not going to
talk politics with you. I am going to talk literature with you--a far
more interesting subject. No Russian knows anything about politics
or really cares about politics; we are an artistic (I mean artistic,
not æsthetic) nation; we have been forced to take notice of politics
because our Government went just beyond the limit of incapacity and
general idiocy that a nation can stand; but that does not make
our political ideas any the more interesting. Whereas our ideas on
literature are really interesting, because all the defects of our
nature, owing to which we are such bad politicians, help to make us
good judges of literature. We have neither the sublime and contented
ignorance of the British, nor the Chinese Wall-like narrow-mindedness
of the French, nor the complicated misapprehension of the Teutons;
we are absolutely open-minded and catholic; we can understand and
assimilate everything and anything; there is no hard bar in our
nature; it is all plastic, pliant, and receptive. There is nothing we
cannot appreciate; a Frenchman--even an extremely clever Frenchman
like M. Bourget--cannot possibly appreciate either the humour or the
style or the point of a Scotch writer of genius such as Stevenson or
the works of Jacobs or a book like the _Diary of a Nobody_. We can;
that’s the difference. That is why our politicians are so bad and our
non-politicians so intelligent.” “That is all very well,” I answered,
“but I have to write political letters to my newspaper and I want your
views--people in England prefer politics to literature.” “I quite
understand that,” answered Dimitri Nikolaievitch, “but for all that I
refuse to talk politics to-day. I am going to talk to you about Byron,
a subject which few Englishmen are interested in, I believe, and if
what I say won’t do for a political letter send it to the literary page
of your newspaper. In the _Morning Post_, which I take in in the hope
of seeing my name mentioned now and then, I noticed that one of the
most delightful of English writers, Mr. Andrew Lang, lately raised the
question as to who was right about Byron, his detractors or the people
who praised him. Now, it is an odd thing, which I have noticed, that
people accept their likes and dislikes about most things with decent
resignation. If they don’t like chicken or roast beef or Mozart’s
music, or Rembrandt’s pictures, or Homer’s verse, they say so and pass
on. Not so with Shakespeare and Byron. These two authors have the
effect which a red rag has on a bull on the people who dislike them. If
a man dislikes Shakespeare he feels it incumbent on himself to proclaim
the fact on the housetops, as though it were a great discovery,
oblivious of the fact that people and literature are like a Seidlitz
powder, the man must have the complementary blue powder which when
mixed with the white powder of the book produces a fizzing combustion
in a glass of water. Count Tolstoi being without the blue powder that
makes Shakespeare fizz for him has to write a book in which he explains
that Shakespeare knows nothing of human nature and could not draw a
living character. This does not damage Shakespeare’s reputation as a
playwright, but it destroys Count Tolstoi’s reputation as a critic.
Byron produces the same effect; people who dislike Byron get very angry
if one says that he is a great poet, and quote you a long list of the
errors in syntax which are to be found in his works. Now, the reason
I want to talk about Byron is that being a foreigner and living far
off from the literary fashions of London, far from the catchwords and
quarrels of cliques and coteries, I am a much more impartial judge of
Byron than any Englishman can be. The obvious retort to this is that
foreigners admire Byron because they cannot appreciate the nicety,
the lights and shades, the values of the English language. In my case
you will admit the argument does not hold good; to a Russian who knows
English from his childhood and has a knowledge and appreciation of the
world’s literature, the manipulation of the English language and the
apprehension of its values is child’s play compared to the manipulation
of the Russian language. The argument of a foreigner’s inability to
appreciate the values of the language may be true of a Frenchman or of
a German; it is not true of an Italian critic such as Nencioni, who
translated Browning, nor is it true of a Russian critic such as myself,
who has run to seed and made a hash of life from having appreciated
literature and the arts wisely and too well, and has, thank heavens,
written nothing at all. To go back to Byron, the mistake people make
with regard to him seems to me that they judge him by a wrong standard.
They apply to him the standards which appertain to other things. To
judge Byron by the standard of Tennyson is like criticising Michael
Angelo by the standard of Benvenuto Cellini. They apply a magnifying
glass to the picture, at which they should look from a distance
of several yards. They criticise a frieze as if it were a carved
cherry-stone. To this I reply that other men such as Goethe judge him
by the standard of Shakespeare, and criticise him with the finest
discrimination and find him good.
“Read all that Goethe says about Byron in ‘Eckerman,’ not merely the
oft-quoted phrases of his being the greatest genius of the nineteenth
century, but all his _obiter dicta_ with regard to Byron, and you will
be struck by their profound wisdom and incredible acuteness.
“But a better reply is to quote what is perhaps the most hackneyed of
hackneyed Byronic quotations, two stanzas of which I learned in the
nursery, but which, I dare say, you have never read--
CXL
‘I see before me the Gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand--his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop’d head sinks gradually low--
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now
The arena swims around him; he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won.
CXLI
He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
_There_ were his young barbarians all at play,
_There_ was their Dacian mother--he, their sire,
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday--
All this rush’d with his blood--Shall he expire,
And unavenged?--Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!’
“By so doing I may be applying the wrong test myself, since it is a
commonplace of criticism that Byron must be judged by the whole and not
by fragments; but I maintain that just as if some one were to examine a
limb hacked off a statue by Michael Angelo or a horse’s head from the
Parthenon frieze he would say the hand who wrought such a fragment was
a mighty hand; so it is with this short quotation; it is impossible to
read it without being convinced that the man who wrote it was more than
a ‘clever man.’ He was a poet. He was a great poet. Because to have
said--
‘his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away,’
in this connection signifies that he had the gift by the use of the
simplest possible and most ordinary words of piercing the heart and
brain with the divine stab which only great poetry can inflict.
“Other poets can do other things. But because Virgil and Keats touch
you with a wand that produces a ravishing enchantment, because Shelley
and Coleridge lift you into unimagined heavens of light and music,
because Shakespeare takes your breath away by the potent magic of his
phrases, that does not prove that Byron has not in his fashion achieved
what is generally accepted as being one of the highest achievements of
poetry: that is to say, the achievement of making style disappear and
of knocking you on the head with poetry made out of the language of
every day.