Russian essays and stories

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

CXLI

“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—

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.

“Goethe is usually thought to be a great poet. But Goethe’s claim to 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—

or

or

or

or

or

or

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

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—

and the song that ends

the stanzas beginning

(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

II

III

“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

CLXXXIV

CLXXXV

CLXXXVI

CLXXXVII

CLXXXVIII

CLXXXIX

CXC

“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

CXCVII

CXCVIII

“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

or in another manner (of the meeting of the Archangel and Lucifer)—

wrote bad verse.

“And to me he will always be what he was to Goethe, to Shelley, and to Arthur Strong—

“The phrase is Byron’s.”