however, much insistence, the mural aspects of the equality of
the sexes. Is a woman, who has had no relationships with a man
before marriage, entitled to expect the same in her husband? Is a
man, who has had relationships with other women before marriage,
entitled to complain if his wife has also had such relationships?
These are the sort of questions which the Scandinavian and Danish
dramatists--Björnson, Eduard Brandes, Charlotte Edgren, Benzon--seem
never tired of discussing. Eduard Brandes makes his admirable little
drama “Et Besög,” published about the same time as “Vildanden,” hang
on this problem, and although he brings no new idea into the play, he
settles the question in the same spirit as his great fellow-dramatist.
“En Hanske,” also published about the same time, gives us Björnson’s
contribution to the question. In this play a young woman is in love
with a young man who, as she learns accidentally at the moment of
formally engaging herself to him, has had previous relationships with
other women. At the same time she discovers that her own father, an
amiable old _élégant_, has been frequently unfaithful to his wife,
and that her mother still carries about a suppressed bitterness. The
girl realizes that life is not like what she has been brought up to
believe; she rejects her lover, and after some unexpected and quite
unnecessary brutalities from him, flings her glove in his face. All
Björnson’s genial vivacity and emotional expansiveness come out in
the earlier scenes of this play, and there is some pleasant comedy,
especially when the easy-going father tries to lecture his daughter,
to the accompaniment of her acute comments and the wife’s sarcastic
exclamations, on a wife’s privileges. “Here,” he says, “is woman’s
noblest calling.” “As what?” asks the daughter. “As what?--Have you
not listened? As--as the ennobling influence in marriage, as that
which makes man purer, as, as----” “Soap?” “Soap? what on earth makes
you think of soap?” “You make out that marriage is a great laundry
for men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her wash-tub, with her
piece of soap. Is that how you mean it?” On this ground, however, it
is difficult to avoid comparisons with Ibsen, and we miss here both
the artistic and moral grip of the greater dramatist. Ibsen’s solution
of the matter in “The Wild Duck” seems to be that there can be no true
marriage without mutual knowledge and mutual confession.
In “Rosmersholm,” social questions have passed into the background:
they are present, indeed, throughout; and to some extent they cause
the tragedy of the drama, as the numberless threads that bind a man to
his past, and that cut and oppress him when he strives to take a step
forward. But on this grey background the passionate figure of Rebecca
West forms a vivid and highly-wrought portrait. Ibsen has rarely shown
such intimate interest in the development of passion. The whole life
and soul of this ardent, silent woman, whom we see in the first scene
quietly working at her crochet, while the housekeeper prepares the
supper, are gradually revealed to us in brief flashes of light between
the subsidiary episodes, until at last she ascends and disappears down
the inevitable path to the mill stream. The touches which complete this
picture are too many and too subtle to allow of analysis; in the last
scene Ibsen’s concentrated prose reaches as high a pitch of emotional
intensity as he has ever cared to attain.
“The Lady from the Sea” seems to carry us into an atmosphere rather
different from that of the early social dramas. An element of melodrama
mingles here with the social interest, and makes this play one of
the least characteristic, but certainly one of the most dramatically
effective of the group. Ellida, a morbid, romantic young woman, whose
mother died insane, has met before her marriage the second mate of an
American ship, a “stranger;” he attracts her with all the charm of
the wild life of the sea and the fascination of the unknown. Having
perpetrated a more or less justifiable homicide, the second mate is
compelled to flee, not before he has gone through a form of betrothal
with Ellida. Subsequently she marries a well-meaning, commonplace
widower, but she wanders helplessly and uselessly through life, like
a mermaid among the children of men, still held, in spite of herself,
by the old fascination of the sea. At length the mysterious “stranger”
turns up again, resolved, if she wishes, to carry her off in spite of
everything. She feels that she must be free--free to go or free to
stay. The husband, naturally, refuses to hear of this, proposes to
send the man about his business. At length he consents to allow her
to choose as she will. Then at once she feels able to decide against
the “stranger,” who leaps over the wall and disappears. The charm is
broken for ever, and she has the chance to make something of her life.
The moral is evident: without freedom of choice there can be no real
emancipation or development.
The men of our own great dramatic period wrote plays which are the
expression of mere gladness of heart and childlike pleasure in the
splendid and various spectacle of the world. Hamlet and Falstaff, the
tragic De Flores and the comic Simon Eyre, they are all merely parts of
the play. It is all play. The breath of Ariosto’s long song of delight
and Boccaccio’s virile joy in life was still on these men, and for
the organization of society, or even for the development and fate of
the individual save as a spectacle, they took little thought. In the
modern world this is no longer possible; rather, it is only possible
for an occasional individual who is compelled to turn his back on the
world. Ibsen, like Aristophanes, like Molière, and like Dumas to-day,
has given all his mature art and his knowledge of life and men to the
service of ideas. “Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid
getting straight”--one of the audacious sayings of James Hinton--might
be placed as a motto on the title-page of all Ibsen’s later plays. His
work throughout is the expression of a great soul crushed by the weight
of an antagonistic social environment into utterance that has caused
him to be regarded as the most revolutionary of modern writers.
An artist and thinker, whose gigantic strength has been nourished
chiefly in solitude, whose works have been, as he himself says in
one of his poems, “deeds of night,” written from afar, can never be
genuinely popular. Everything that he writes is received in his own
country with attention and controversy; but he is mistaken for a cynic
and pessimist; he is not loved in Norway as Björnson is loved, although
Björnson, in the fruitful dramatic activity of his second period,
has but followed in Ibsen’s steps;--just as Goethe was never so well
understood and appreciated as Schiller. Björnson, with his genial
exuberance, his popular sympathies and hopes, never too far in advance
of his fellows, invigorates and refreshes like one of the forces of
nature. He represents the summer side of his country, in its bright
warmth and fragrance. Ibsen, standing alone in the darkness in front,
absorbed in the problems of human life, indifferent to the aspects of
external nature, has closer affinities to the stern winter-night of
Norway. But there is a mighty energy in this man’s work. The ideas and
instincts, developed in silence, which inspire his art, are of the kind
that penetrate men’s minds slowly. Yet they penetrate surely, and are
proclaimed at length in the market-place.
TOLSTOI.
I.
Russia is the natural mediator between Europe and Asia. It happens
with the regularity of an ethnic law that every race partakes of the
characteristics of neighbouring races. The extinct Tasmanian, by his
curious aberrations from the Australian type and approximation to that
of Polynesia, furnished an unexpected anthropological problem that is
still unsolved. Everywhere the same mysterious blending or transition
may be witnessed. Apart from complexion, it has been said, many a
Russian peasant might pass in Lahore or Benares as a native of the
Ganges valley. Whatever the ethnologist may say, one way or another,
as to the racial elements of the country, anyone who approaches the
study of Russian men and Russian things perpetually meets with traits
that are not familiar to him as European, but which he may have already
learnt to know as Asiatic. Nor is it only in the little traits of
character and daily life that these Eastern influences appear; the
language itself has close Oriental affinities, and the old Sclavonic
is nearly related to Sanscrit. In trying to make Russia plain to
ourselves, it is constantly necessary to sound this keynote.
A nation’s instincts are revealed in its art. The complex history
of the origin and development of Russian art is full of interest.
“Russia,” as Viollet le Duc wrote in his charming book, “L’Art russe,”
“has been a laboratory in which the arts coming from all parts of
Asia have united to assume an intermediate form between the eastern
and western worlds.” The art of Russia has three great sources, the
Scythian, the Byzantine, and the Mongolian, but when these are analyzed
it is found that each of them consists largely, when not entirely,
of Oriental elements. Not less than nine-tenths of these component
elements, Persian, Greek, Hindu, Finnic, and other, may, in Viollet
le Duc’s opinion, be set down as Eastern. Sometimes the art of Russia
seems to have been almost effaced by Byzantine or Hindu influences,
yet it ultimately assimilated all these Eastern influences until it
reached its highest point of development at the end of the sixteenth
century. In the gilded bulbous domes we see Hindu influence. Persian
influence was peculiarly strong; the beautiful Holy Gate of the Church
of St. John at Rostoff, the work of sixteenth century Russian artists,
is of thoroughly Persian character. All that Russia took from Central
Asia and Persia strengthened her art, though it retained its own
characteristics, shown partly by the love of splendour peculiar to
a youthful and semi-barbaric race, as in the fantastic magnificence
of that “gigantic madrepore,” the Church of Vassili Blagennoi in the
Kremlin at Moscow; partly by a freedom of conception and variety of
execution in which the native spirit found expression. Gothic art,
with its whole gamut of notes, from divine aspiration to grotesque
humour, remained absolutely alien. When Peter the Great introduced
Latin and Teutonic influences, and German, Italian, English, above
all, French elements poured into the country, an “official Russia”
grew up, speaking a foreign language and having no contact with the
nation. Russia remained the same, but the dissolution of Russian art
was ensured.
The genuine Russian spirit seems not to have emerged distinctively into
the region of great art until it was brought into the peculiarly modern
and western shape of the novel by Gogol, the Ukranian Cossack. “Dead
Souls” is the first great Russian example of the modern story-teller’s
art, and still the most popular. Oriental influences have ceased; in
Gogol we find western, especially English, influences, but, unlike the
literary tendencies of the last century, they are duly subordinated
to elements that are essentially Russian. The direct simplicity of
the Russian, his love of minute realistic detail, which seems to be
expressed even in the ancient form of the Russian cross, his quietism,
his profound human sympathy, have all found adequate voice in the
modern Russian novel. The Russian painters of to-day, and the artists
in bronze, with their simple realism and constant research for the
expression of life in action, have but followed in the steps of the
Russian novel, which has, as its supreme representatives, Tourgueneff,
Dostoieffski, and Tolstoi. Tourgueneff, so delicate and sensitive in
his realism, with its atmosphere of ineffable melancholy, a Corot
among novelists, as De Vogüé calls him, is great not only by the
breadth and insight of his art, but by the unique position he holds
in the development of Russian literature. The “Stories by a Hunter,”
published a few years before the emancipation of the serfs, to which
they are supposed to have contributed, turned the Russian novel in the
direction of peasant life. The study of the peasant which occupies
so much attention in Russia to-day is much more than a mere fashion,
for the peasant in Russia represents by far the chief element in
the population; certainly the interest in him has already left an
ineffaceable mark on those great Russian novelists whose influence is
world-wide. Tolstoi, Gregorovitch, Tchedrine, and others, have drawn
the _moojik_ with the breadth and faithfulness of Millet, in every
attitude of godlike strength, of pathetic resignation, of abject vice.
In Dostoieffski, as in the poet Nekrassoff, this democratic element is
more fundamental than in either Tourgueneff or Tolstoi. Dostoieffski’s
profound science of the human heart could never get near enough to its
primitive and instinctive elements. There are two or three scenes in
“Recollections of the Dead House,” of Dantesque awfulness, which seem
to bring nearer to us than anything else the very flesh and spirit of
humanity. Such is that scene of the convicts in the bath-room, close
and crowded, until, on the reddened backs, beneath the stress of the
heat and the steam, stand out clearly the old scars of whips and rods.
In all Dostoieffski’s books we are constantly irritated and fascinated
by this same strange penetrating odour of humanity.
Russian art has always been very closely allied with religion, and
the Russian is very religious. Ever since, a thousand years ago,
the Muscovites swam by thousands into their rivers, headed by the
chiefs, to receive Christian baptism, they seem to have taken great
interest in religion. But their religion has a distinctive character.
It has no clear demarcation from ordinary life, a characteristic
that is reflected in the similarity of religious and secular art in
Russia. More than this, unlike both the favourite religions of the
Indian and of the Teutonic races, it is not largely mystical; it is
simply a mystical communism. Sympathy and the need of comradeship,
which seem to be deeply rooted in the national character, are the
characteristics of Russian religion. “Pity for a fallen creature is
a very national trait,” wrote Gogol, and among the great Russian
novelists, Dostoieffski, who is the most intensely Russian, is
throughout penetrated by the passion of pity. This spirit shows itself
in the remarkable sympathy with which, in Russian popular stories, the
devil is treated. “He is represented,” Stepniak remarks, “as the enemy
of man, doing his best to drag him down into hell. But as this is his
trade he cannot help it, and the people bear him no malice. He is a
good devil after all.” Of the three persons of the Christian Trinity,
the second, most associated with images of love, appeals most to the
Russian popular imagination. God the Father, as an austere personage,
lacking in sympathy, is, on the other hand, regarded with indifferent,
not to say hostile, feelings. This was well exemplified by the innocent
remark of a venerable _moojik_ in a remote part of the country: “What!
Is the old fellow alive still?”
The Russian has yet changed but little. The Scythians, as we see them
in the realistic repoussé work of the Nikopol vase of twenty-three
centuries ago, are the Russian _moojiks_ of to-day; the features and
the dress have scarcely changed. They are, as Herodotus described them,
a race very tenacious of their customs. The sorcerer still holds his
own among them, while the orthodox pope, it is well known, is regarded
with no reverence, but rather as a tradesman. Propitiatory sacrifices,
it is said, are still paid by fishermen to the river-gods, and families
in the same way try to keep on good terms with the household deities.
The ancient communistic land customs still flourish, together with the
ineradicable belief that the land must be the property of everyone. In
some parts of the country it is not uncommon for a poor man to help
himself to the corn of a rich man, the loan being repaid with interest
in subsequent years. The deeply-rooted indifference of the people to
external laws appears in the difficulty with which they have been
induced to accept an officially recognized marriage ceremony, and in
the indulgence which is still felt towards liberty, which is not always
licence, in such matters. In some parts of Russia, even to-day, it is
said, a kind of _Pervigilium Veneris_ is held periodically; the young
people ascend a mountain to sing and to dance, after which it is _de
rigueur_ to separate and to spend the night in couples. The primitive
matter-of-fact simplicity of the people, as well as their indifference
to law and authority, is shown in an incident that is said to have
occurred only a few years ago. The peasants in a certain village
decided that it was not desirable for their widowed pope to live
alone, but the priest of the Greek Church is not allowed to re-marry;
therefore the peasants, having obtained the consent of a soldier’s
widow to be the pope’s mistress, insisted on introducing her into his
house.[11] Such incidents often took place in the western Europe of
five centuries ago.
[11] I take this, and much of what follows, from N. Tsakni’s
interesting book, “La Russie Sectaire.” It is scarcely necessary to
refer the English reader to the valuable series of works in which
Stepniak has set forth the condition of modern Russia.
We have to bear in mind these characteristics when we try to understand
the great religious movements that are going on in Russia. In all these
sects we see the tenacity with which the Russian people have clung to
their inborn practical instincts of communism, fraternity, and sexual
freedom. This religious movement is but another aspect of the spirit
that shows itself in Nihilism, and it is a wider, deeper, and more
interesting aspect. Both represent a profound antagonism to the State
and to the official western methods of social organization promulgated
by the State. Religious nonconformity dates far back into the Middle
Ages, but to Peter the Great is owing the first great development of
Russian sects. That Tzar, with his hatred of all things Russian, was
naturally regarded by pious and patriotic Russians as Antichrist, and
they perished, in thousands at a time, by their own hands, rather than
submit to the western notions which, knout in hand, he tried to force
upon them. On the soil of poverty, wretchedness and disease, which
distinguishes Russia to-day from the rest of Europe, these religious
sects have everywhere sprung up and flourished; some of an ascetic
type, with Asiatic tendencies, belonging more especially to the north
of Russia, such as those frantic devotees, the Skoptsy, who mutilate
themselves after the manner of the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele; or
of those sects, belonging more to the south, and rapidly gaining ground
over the others, who desire to lead a life of reason and love, such as
the Doukhobory, who recognize no more divinity in Jesus than resides in
all men, deny all dogmas, ceremonies, authority, give equal rights to
every man and woman, treat children with the same respect as the aged,
practise free marriages, and are in their daily lives both more moral
and more prosperous than their neighbours. One of the most recent of
these sects is the Soutaiefftsky, that first became generally known
about 1880. Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging to the
centre of Russia, from his early years pondered and dreamed over the
misery of the world. To obtain light he visited the priests, and one
referred him to the Gospels. His zeal induced him to learn to read, and
he studied the New Testament eagerly. One day he carried to the church
the body of a young son for burial. The pope asked fifty kopecks for
the ceremony; Soutaieff had only thirty, and the pope began to bargain
with him over the corpse. Soutaieff indignantly took up the body and
buried it in his own garden. From that time dated his criticism of
the Church, and side by side grew up also a criticism of the world.
He observed in his own trade the tricks of commerce and the perpetual
effort to amass money and to deceive the worker. He abandoned his work
as a mason and returned from St. Petersburg to the country to cultivate
the earth, distributing to the poor the money he had previously earned.
But in the country he found, from pope to peasant, the same vices as in
the town, and with no wish to found a new sect, he became, by example
as well as by precept, the teacher of a religion of universal love and
pity.
Soutaieff rejects all ceremonies, including baptism and marriage (for
which he substitutes a simple blessing and exhortation to a just
life), and all those external manifestations of religion which render
men hypocritical. At the same time he rejects all faith in angels or
devils, or in the supernatural generally, and is absolutely indifferent
to the question of a future life. We have to occupy ourselves with the
establishment of happiness and justice on this earth; what happens
above, he says, I cannot tell, never having been there; perhaps there
is nothing but eternal darkness.
He recognizes that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected
with social and economic questions. Private property is the source of
the hatreds, jealousies, and miseries of men. The proprietors must
give up the land of which they have arbitrarily gained possession, and
work for their living. But this end is to be gained, not by violence,
but by persuasion; men will recognize the hypocrisy and injustice of
their lives, and those who persist in evil will be shut out from the
fraternal community. Soutaieff refused, at one period at all events,
to pay taxes. Once he went to St. Petersburg to explain the state of
things to the Emperor; great was his indignation when not only was
an interview refused, but he was summarily expelled from the city.
Soutaieff and his disciples refuse military service, for the men of all
nations and religions are brothers: why should they quarrel?
This is the substance of Soutaieff’s teaching. Large numbers of persons
come to hear him, sometimes out of curiosity, more often as disciples.
He leads the life of a simple peasant. One evening, it is said, on
going to his barn, he found several men carrying away sacks of flour.
Without saying a word, he entered the barn and found a sack that the
robbers had not yet carried off. He pursued them, and on catching up
with them, he said: “My brothers, you must be in need of bread; take
the sack that you have forgotten.” The following day the robbers
brought back the flour, and asked Soutaieff’s forgiveness.
He has himself summed up his teaching. “What is truth?” a hearer once
asked him. “Truth,” answered Soutaieff with conviction, “truth is love,
in a common life.”
II.