greatness as a poet rests on this achievement, on nothing less and on
nothing more. When he is at his best, as in the first part of _Faust_
and in a dozen lyrics, he gets beyond and above style and writes--
‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’
or
‘Mein Ruh ist hin,’
or
‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen ass,’
or
‘Von wem Ich’s habe, dass sag Ich Euch nicht,’
or
‘Denkt Ihr an mich ein Augenblickchen nur,’
or
‘Es war ein König in Thule,’
or
‘Heiss mich nicht reden, heiss mich schweigen,’
and the world agrees that when he writes like this he is ‘grand comme
le monde.’ Nobody disputes the fact because he wrote masses and masses
of inferior work. The point is that only a very great poet could have
written
‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’
and the rest.
“I maintain that only a great poet could have written the ‘Dying
Gladiator’; that only a great poet could have written the song that
begins--
‘She walks in beauty like the night;’
and the song that ends
‘In silence and tears;’
the stanzas beginning
‘The moon is up, and yet it is not night’
(not a bad line?) The stanzas on Waterloo and Rome, or, to take a
slighter instance, I contend that only a great poet could have written
this little song--
I
‘So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as bright.
II
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
III
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.’
“But to do justice to Byron one must take a deep draught of his foaming
beverage, and to refresh your memory just listen to these stanzas.
Don’t stop to pause and criticise line by line, but drink the whole
thing in at a draught--
CLXXXIII
‘It was the cooling hour, just when the rounded
Red sun sinks down behind the azure hill,
Which then seems as if the whole earth it bounded,
Circling all nature, hush’d, and dim, and still,
With the far mountain-crescent half surrounded
On one side, and the deep sea calm and chill
Upon the other, and the rosy sky
With one star sparkling through it like an eye.
CLXXXIV
And thus they wander’d forth, and hand in hand,
Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
Glided along the smooth and harden’d sand,
And in the worn and wild receptacles
Work’d by the storms, yet work’d as it were plann’d
In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
They turned to rest; and, each clasp’d by an arm,
Yielded to the deep twilight’s purple charm.
CLXXXV
They look’d up to the sky, whose floating glow
Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright;
They gazed upon the glittering sea below,
Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight;
They heard the waves splash, and the wind so low,
And saw each other’s dark eyes darting light
Into each other--and, beholding this,
Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss.
CLXXXVI
A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth, and love,
And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus, kindled from above:
Such kisses as belong to early days
Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move,
And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart-quake--for a kiss’s strength,
I think, it must be reckoned by its length.
CLXXXVII
By length I mean duration; theirs endured
Heaven knows how long--no doubt they never reckon’d;
And if they had, they could not have secured
The sum of their sensations to a second:
They had not spoken; but they felt allured,
As if their souls and lips each other beckon’d,
Which, being joined, like swarming bees they clung--
Their hearts the flowers from whence the honey sprung.
CLXXXVIII
They were alone, but not alone as they
Who shut in chambers think it loneliness;
The silent ocean, and the starlight bay,
The twilight glow, which momently grew less,
The voiceless sands, and dropping caves, that lay
Around them, made them to each other press,
As if there were no life beneath the sky
Save theirs, and that their life could never die.
CLXXXIX
They fear’d no eyes nor ears on that lone beach,
They felt no terrors from the night; they were
All in all to each other: though their speech
Was broken words, they thought a language there;
And all the burning tongues the passions teach
Found in one sigh the best interpreter
Of Nature’s oracle--first love--that all
Which Eve has left her daughters since her fall.
CXC
Haidée spoke not of scruples, ask’d no vows
Nor offered any; she had never heard
Of plight and promises to be a spouse
Or perils by a loving maid incurr’d;
She was all which pure ignorance allows,
And flew to her young mate like a young bird;
And never having dreamt of falsehood, she
Had not one word to say of constancy.’
“Isn’t this poetry? Wouldn’t any of the minor poets of to-day be
surprised and pleased to have found that they had written these stanzas
and those which follow until the passage ends thus--
CXCVI
‘An infant when it gazes on the light,
A child the moment when it drains the breast,
A devotee when soars the Host in sight,
An Arab with a stranger for a guest,
A sailor when the prize has struck in fight,
A miser filling his most hoarded chest,
Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping
As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping.
CXCVII
For there it lies, so tranquil, so beloved:
All that it hath of life with us is living;
So gentle, stirless, helpless and unmoved,
And all unconscious of the joy ’tis giving;
All it hath felt, inflicted, pass’d, and proved,
Hush’d into depths beyond the watcher’s diving;
There lies the thing we love, with all its errors
And all its charms, like death, without its terrors.
CXCVIII
The lady watch’d her lover--and that hour
Of Love’s, and Night’s, and Ocean’s solitude,
O’erflow’d her soul with their united power:
Amidst the barren sand and rocks so rude,
She and her wave-worn love had made their bower
Where nought upon their passion could intrude;
And all the stars that crowded the blue space
Saw nothing happier than her glowing face.’
“The man who wrote this had the tremendous driving force of passion,
the sweeping vision, and the commanding utterance, the swiftness,
and the splendour which belongs only to the gods and the Titans, and
because Byron does not sit on the tranquil mountain in the serene
spaces with Virgil, Praxiteles, Racine, Leopardi, Milton, Mozart, and
Raphael, he is none the less more than mortal. He may have been cast
out of the heaven of pure art; but the story of his divine downfall has
been written in the sky like a constellation and hangs there for ever;
a permanent comet. One generation may forget him, being interested in
other and later appearances in the firmament of poetry, but there will
always be men to look and to wonder in any generation. Of such was your
great scholar Arthur Strong, who knew Russian as well as I do from
having learnt it out of a book, who was not only perhaps the man of the
widest and deepest reading of our generation in Europe, but whose power
of appreciation was as delicate as a microphone and as wide as the sea.
He, alas! is now ‘famous, calm, and dead’; and he admired Byron because
he considered him to be an inspired poet and a writer of good verse.
‘The French,’ he once said to me, ‘are like the Persians, they stand
no nonsense about poetry. To them it is either good or bad verse.’
Opinions differ, and opinions of the same man about the same thing
differ under the influence of time. For instance, Swinburne’s blame of
Byron has been recently quoted; but his praise of Byron in the first
volume of _Essays and Studies_ is, to my mind, the finest thing he
ever wrote, and the last word of what can be said in praise of Byron.
In that essay, in which he speaks of Byron having ‘the imperishable
excellence and sincerity and strength,’ he was of the opinion that
Byron wrote good verse. Personally I cannot think that the man who
wrote the following lines:--
XXX
‘There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing, had I such to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,
Which living waves where thou didst cease to live,
And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,
I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring,’
or in another manner (of the meeting of the Archangel and Lucifer)--
‘And yet between his Darkness and his Brightness,
There passed a mutual glance of great politeness,’
wrote bad verse.
“And to me he will always be what he was to Goethe, to Shelley, and to
Arthur Strong--
‘A beautiful and mighty thing of Light.’
“The phrase is Byron’s.”
MODERN LITERATURE IN RUSSIA
At the beginning of last century there was in Russia, as in most
other countries, a great wave of romanticism, which produced Pouskin,
Lermontov, and other poets. The wave subsided, and no planets of great
magnitude swam into the ken of the watchers of the skies of Russian
literature until the period of the Crimean War. After the war and the
liberation of the serfs there came another great movement, and a race
of literary giants--Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Dostoievski--was born. It is
a remarkable fact that the movements of literary renascence in Russia
have always immediately followed movements of political renascence and
change. This second movement subsided, and although the Russo-Turkish
War gave a kind of flip to the country a general calm soon once more
prevailed, which up till 1903 bore all the signs of stagnation. The
writer who gives the most faithful picture of the general atmosphere of
the period which preceded the Russo-Japanese War is Anton Tchekoff. In
a multitude of short stories, some broadly humorous, others poignantly
sad, and in half a dozen plays (in writing which he inaugurated a new
epoch in the history of the stage and was the pioneer of a movement
which at one moment made itself felt in London at the Court Theatre)
he reflects the frame of mind of educated Russia during this period.
It is a frame of mind of stagnation. Its prevailing characteristic is
the hopelessness arising from the conviction that it is no use trying
to do anything in Russia; that on those who would like to work for
progress and enlightenment, education and liberalism in the larger
non-political sense of the word, the doors are shut, and that therefore
there is nothing to do but to play cards, drink vodka, and while away
the tedious hours as best one can. It is not that Tchekoff despaired in
the least of the advent of the dawn, only he felt he would not live to
see it, and that it would break upon another generation.
They would march prospering not from his presence;
Songs shall inspirit them not from his lyre.
The dawn came quicker probably than he expected. Tchekoff’s last play
was performed in 1904, and he himself died soon after, while the
war was still going on. Then came the bursting of the dam, and with
the swift and tumultuous events of the political movement, with the
granting of the freedom of the Press and the inflooding of Russia
with a light which it had never before known, came a new literary
renascence. It is too soon as yet to discern and to gauge what is the
literary value of the thick and turbulent mass of production which has
been poured out in Russia during the last two years. But one thing is
certain, namely, that there is nothing stagnant in the new phenomena.
The writers of the younger generation are still often pessimistic in
the extreme; they dip their pencils in the “hues of earthquake and
eclipse,” but it is the gloom of the earthquake and not the monotonous
greyness of a sunless atmosphere. They shriek, they vociferate and they
anathematise, but they do not say: “There is nothing to be done. Let us
sit down and play Vindt.” It is true that this revolutionary outburst
was succeeded by weariness and apathy. It is true that reaction was
again in its turn as triumphant as it was in France during the reign
of Louis XVIII., that the Liberal movement suffered a great blow owing
to the fact that a considerable part of the population, namely, the
landed proprietors and all people of means, who were until 1905 nearly
all of them staunch supporters of the Opposition, frightened by the
spectres of expropriation, revolution, and anarchy and ruin, veered to
the Right. It is true that some people think that it will need another
war, a famine, an epidemic of cholera, and several other disasters
of the kind to set the movement going again. But in spite of this we
shall never get back to the old stagnation, because of the flood of
light which has been let into the country, and which cannot now ever be
driven out again.
The literature, for instance, cannot go back to the time when there
was no political life, because there is a political life now. The
Reactionaries may have the best of it; the Liberals may discredit
themselves and they may fail again and again; but all this constitutes
a thing called political life, and which is reflected directly in the
daily Press and indirectly in the literature of the day. Therefore, so
far, whatever may be the discouragement felt by political reformers,
there is as yet no trace of a note of apathy in the literature of the
day. The curious thing is that nearly all the literature which is now
appearing--with the exception of a small æsthetic school which has
plunged into mysticism, decadentism, and many other isms--has for its
subject-matter political events and political events only. Prisons,
police, Pogroms, meetings, elections, parties, assassinations, bombs,
revolutionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, fanatics--these are the
main elements of the new literature. Another interesting point is that
with all this stock-in-trade of sensationalism the literature is not
sensational. If one compares it with English or German books on the
same subject one thinks one is reading about a different country. This
is owing to the simple fact that the Russians understand the people
about whom they are writing. They know that humanity is not divided
into two clearly defined categories--Liberals who are all saints and
Conservatives who are all monsters. They know that because a man is
a policeman he does not necessarily cease to be a human being, or
that because a man is a revolutionary he does not necessarily become
a superman, endowed with the resistance of Prometheus, the energy of
Cromwell, the kindness of St. John. These writers distinguish. Andreev,
for instance, writes a touching story of the Governor of a town, who
in a moment of riot gives the order for firing on the crowd. He then
relates how this man knows he will be killed, how every one else
knows it, and how slowly, deliberately, and helplessly he slides into
his doom. Kouprin, one of the most talented writers of the younger
generation, tells a story which he says is a true one, of how after
one of the Jewish “Pogroms,” when a committee was sitting to organise
relief for those who had suffered, a deputation of thieves arrives
and addresses the President. The thieves are burning with indignation
because they have been accused of having taken part in the “Pogrom.”
They are wounded in their most sensitive spot: their _amour propre_.
They cannot get over the fact that people such as they--thieves
by profession, who take pride in their art, whether it consist in
pocketpicking, or housebreaking--should be confused with the inglorious
herd of hooligans; and what is to them the unkindest cut of all is that
people should have thought them capable of siding with the police,
since they say that the “Pogroms” are the work of the police, and that
the police is but the instrument in the hands of what Prince Ourousov
once called the “dark forces” which stand behind the Government, and
who make it so difficult for people to govern Russia.
Again, the same author tells a story of a revolutionary student who
betrays his companions because, when he is interviewed by the police
inspector he loses his nerve. He is not otherwise a coward; but he is
afraid of _people_. The police inspector, he says, was as civil as
a dentist to his comrades, but him he hectored and bullied, feeling
instinctively that he would give way, and he did. He shoots himself:
he is not afraid of doing that. In a letter he writes before killing
himself he explains that he is not in the least afraid of death or of
danger; but that in the presence of people he loses his head, and he
attributes the fact to his having been soaked in the atmosphere of
the stagnant generation of his parents, from whose influence he never
escaped. These writers afford us an infinite number of sidelights on
the subtleties, the contradictions, the curious contrasts which the
political events bring to light--in fact on human nature, which is the
same everywhere, but which under the stress and pressure of untoward
violence is sharply revealed to us as though by lightning. Then, of
course, the very existence of conflicting parties, ideals, opinions and
aims gives the writer endless “copy” and an unbounded field of dramatic
material.
The Dreyfus case divided France into two camps and split up families.
Much more powerful, then, must be the political question in Russia,
where it is not merely abstract but concrete; not merely platonic, but
full of living passion, where any day a Conservative statesman may
learn that his son or his daughter has blown up one of his colleagues,
or a revolutionary girl may ascertain that her betrothed has denounced
her comrades to the police. In this domain vistas are opened on to
endless “conflicts of wills,” the most rewarding stuff for drama.
All this does not make for stagnation, and it is impossible to sum up
the characteristics of modern Russian literature better than in the
following words, which Kouprin puts into the mouth of the student (in a
story to which I alluded above) who shot himself. He is talking of the
schoolboy of the present generation, and what he says of the schoolboy
applies equally well to the new generation, its literature, and all
that belongs to it.
“I am convinced that the schoolboy of the sixth form to-day in the
presence of all the Kings of Europe, in any throne room you please,
would fiercely and clearly--and even somewhat rudely--declare the
claims of _his party_. He is, it is true, almost absurd, this premature
schoolboy; but there is in him a sacred respect for his own joyful,
proud, and free ego, for that very thing which the spiritual poverty
and the cowardly morals of our parents extirpated in us, who belong to
the former generation.”
THE RUSSIAN STAGE
Hamlet in one of those pointed phrases which appear to Count Tolstoi
to be so foreign to his character, and to the rest of the world to be
peculiarly in harmony with it, said that players were “the abstracts
and brief chronicles of the time.” It is certain that at the present
day in Russia the doings of the Russian stage and of the players throw
many interesting sidelights on the present situation; in fact, Hamlet’s
remark is especially applicable to Russia at the present day. Whatever
one may think of Russian politics at the present moment, whether we
are witnessing the slow phases of a revolution, an evolution, or
merely a crisis, one thing is certain and that is that the country is
not in a normal condition, and that the element of paradox which has
always existed in Russian life has now reached an exaggerated point of
intensity.
The country is still an autocracy in which the Monarch is constantly
declaring that his autocratic sovereignty is to remain inviolate, and
at the same time that he is determined to fulfil his promise that the
people shall govern themselves. The most important political party
is still outlawed. You may be hanged for stealing three roubles (six
shillings); for shooting a student in a restaurant you receive a year’s
imprisonment, and for arranging a bomb explosion which fails to kill
the Prime Minister, but which does kill many other people, you are let
off with penal servitude, and under no circumstances whatever can you
be handcuffed. This is not a normal situation, and the people who are
factors in such a situation cannot fail to be affected by it. Therefore
it is interesting to study as manifested on the stage the “abstracts
and brief chronicles” of this extraordinary epoch. Such a study is
doubly interesting and valuable owing to the peculiar nature of the
Russian stage at the present moment.
To explain why this is so I must state briefly what are the chief
characteristics of the Russian stage. It differs entirely from the
European stage in that it escaped the influence of the modern French
stage and the French ideals of stagecraft, of the “well-made” play,
which produced the skill of Scribe, the ingenuity of Sardou, the logic
of Alexandre Dumas _fils_, which left so deep an imprint on the stage
of all other European countries. This tradition of stagecraft and
these ideals were absorbed by Henrik Ibsen, who, as soon as he had
made himself absolute master of all tricks which this craft comprised,
threw them overboard and wrote plays in which he showed how at a
given moment Fate may deal to mortals terrific blows arising from
their deeds in the past, and often what they considered to be their
good deeds--the aforesaid blows making themselves manifest in that by
the ordinary course and conversations of everyday life. Ibsen was,
therefore, the great reformer of the modern stage; and he not only
cast away the tricks of the French school, but he wrote plays about
human beings ruthlessly and vividly portrayed instead of conventional
puppets. In France there was likewise a revolt against the “well-made”
play, and dramatists of the naturalist school gave to the public what
they called “slices of life,” which in its turn produced a reaction
towards romanticism and artificial comedy. But in spite of the various
phases of Scribisme and naturalism, and in spite of the fact that the
Scribe-Sardou tradition has been thrown to the winds, certain ideals
belonging to this school remain in the modern French stage, namely,
the necessity of “situations,” or of fundamental theses to be worked
out logically, which cause many modern French plays to resemble
mathematical problems. The Russian stage differs entirely from both the
French and the Scandinavian. The Sardou-Scribe school never reigned in
Russia, so that there was no necessity to dethrone it, but apart from
this significant fact the Russian stage has just as little in common
with Ibsen, the French naturalist school, and the modern French play
_à thèse_ as it has with Sardou or Dumas _fils_. This is where the
difference lies. Ibsen shows us human beings at a moment when Fate in
the shape of the inevitable result of their actions falls upon them
like a thunderbolt; the French naturalist school gave us slices of raw
life, but slices of brutally raw life so brutal as to be exaggerated,
abnormal, and therefore unreal; the modern French play _à thèse_ goes
back for its machinery to the old ideal of the well-made play; that is
to say, the wine is new, but the skins are old.