Part 9 (1/2)
Make way there, constable. (_Cracks his whip and sings._) Come all ye jolly rovers As wants to hear a tale Will make your hearts as merry As a bellyful of ale.
I'll sing of Captain Thunder, And his das.h.i.+ng slas.h.i.+ng way, How he kissed the queen and he cuffed the king, And threw the crown away!
(_Exit_)
POLICEMAN
Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!
THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN
It would be a relief to meet a man who would tell honestly why he likes Artzibashev and some of the rest of the modern Russian realists. It would be a relief to have some young radical say: ”Yes, I know Chekhov is dull and prolix, but then the atmosphere of his work is delightfully unwholesome, and every now and then there is something pleasantly morbid, like the man with phosphorous poisoning in 'The Steppe,' and his agreeable custom of eating live fish. And then there's dear Michael Artzibashev. Of course his style is no better than that of Laura Jean Libbey, and his plots are cheap melodrama, but you can't deny that he is consistently nasty. And I do like to read about s.e.xual depravity.”
But the young radical of this sort is hard to meet. Instead we find the lofty-foreheaded young man who praises Artzibashev's psychological insight, Gorky's sympathy with humanity, and--actually!--Chekhov's humor! Of course he does not mean what he says. He likes ”Sanine” for the same reason that he likes ”Three Weeks.” But he would not dare to confess a liking for ”Three Weeks” because that book is English trash.
And ”Sanine” is Russian trash. And from the point of view of intellectual sn.o.bbery, there's all the difference in the world between these two sorts of trash.
Now, it would of course be absurd to condemn all modern Russian fiction, or to characterize all admirers of contemporary Russian novelists as hypocrites and sensualists. Americans and Englishmen who know almost by heart the great poems and stories of Pushkin, who know Lermontov as they know Byron, and Gogol as they know d.i.c.kens, who were brought up on the novels of Turgenieff, have every right in the world to seek for new delight among the outpourings of the presses of Petrograd and Moscow.
But the sort of person who is feverishly enthusiastic over Gorky and Artzibashev has discovered Russian literature, in all probability, during the few years which have pa.s.sed since his graduation from Harvard. His most serious offense is not that he prefers that which is evil to that which is good, and praises untrue and inartistic work because the worst part of his nature responds to its salacious appeal.
His most serious offense is that he thinks that the Hall Caines and Marie Corellis of Russia really are representative writers, and that he insults a race of great romanticists and great realists by calling works that are thoroughly morbid and vile ”very Russian.”
What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement, during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them that it was not Artzibashev's ”power of psychological a.n.a.lysis” that attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more honest men.
But this most desirable course has not the virtue of practicality.
Perhaps some of the more or less recent activities of American publishers will so educate the public that they will no longer be impressed by critics whose acquaintance with Russian literature is confined to ”Sanine” and some of Gorky's plays. Not long ago was published Stephen Graham's admirable translation of Gogol's ”Dead Souls,” a novel which in its rich humor and sympathetic realism suggests ”Pickwick Papers,” while its whimsical romanticism brings to mind some parts of ”Don Quixote.” It is one of the world's cla.s.sics; no one who has not read it has a right to an opinion on Russian literature.
About the same time appeared Tolstoy's ”The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” a book of short stories by the great novelist, half genius and half mountebank, who wasted his genuine talent in developing a new religion, which is merely a grotesque parody of Christianity. The stories in this book are compelling, in spite of their somewhat mad philosophy, for they faithfully reflect Russian manners and certain picturesque phases of Russian idealism. Another volume issued at about this period is Maurice Baring's ”Russian Literature,” the best one-volume work on the subject in existence. And it is to be hoped that other publishers will publish those Russian novels which really belong to literature, rather than those which are of interest chiefly to the pathologist and alienist.
But meanwhile the market is flooded with viciously sensational works which are tolerated only because their exotic quality gives them a certain distinction in the eyes of the provincial. Here, for example, is Maxim Gorky's ”Submerged.” Mr. Jerome's ”The Pa.s.sing of the Third Floor Back,” and Charles Rand Kennedy's ”The Servant in the House” were sentimental, but on the whole, effective treatments of a very dangerous theme: that of the miraculous reformation of certain phases of modern society or groups of individuals through the appearance on earth of a man possessing Divine attributes. Gorky's plan has a similar plot, but, of course, he differs from the two English writers in making vice triumph in the end. The poor wretches who have endeavored to regain a little of their lost decency are thrust back into the slime. The people who make up this typical Gorky offering are drunkards, thieves, depraved creatures of every kind. They are utterly lost and the author seems to gloat over their depravity and misery. But then what else is he to do?
He must live up to his name. Gorky, you know, is a pen name meaning ”bitter,” and Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov feels that he must justify the t.i.tle he has so proudly a.s.sumed. But ridiculous affectation it is! It is as if Matthew Arnold had called himself ”Matthew Sweetness and Light.”
And there is a translation of Leonidas Andreiev, ”The Red Laugh.” This was an attempt to flash upon the astonished world the novel idea that war is a very, very unpleasant thing. Mr. Andreiev spills gore on every page, and the publisher a.s.sists him by making the t.i.tle of the book blood red on a black ground. All the characters in the book go mad, and the author's utter inapt.i.tude for literature turns what might have been pa.s.sable third-rate melodrama into a farce. As a contribution to letters, and as a piece of pacifist propaganda ”The Red Laugh” is inferior to ”I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”
And then there is Artzibashev: so much boomed and press-agented; praised by the radical magazines for his ”a.s.sault on ordinary morality” and his ”desperately poignant artistry”; long-haired young men with large eyes have told the women's clubs all about him. Well, of course, ”desperately poignant artistry” means nothing at all, and ”artistry” is meaningless when used in connection with a man like the author of ”The Millionaire.”
He doesn't write novels, he merely throws something evil-smelling into the reader's face.
If the scene of ”The Millionaire” and ”Nina” were laid in the United States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the literary sn.o.b. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of the Russian criminal cla.s.s, they reflect the life of people who have added to their native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture of the Russian people as something at once b.e.s.t.i.a.l and human, a monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.
ABSINTHE AT THE CHEs.h.i.+RE CHEESE
Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an ill.u.s.trative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death, among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney--and, by the way, Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story--”Do you know, I have found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read it to you.” Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:
Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara!
Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the phrase, ”Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” and had hastily copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's ma.n.u.script at some meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith, attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.
Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic critic, Miss Katherine Bregy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Bregy's interpretative appreciations of the ”sculptural beauty” of Dowson's religious poems.
But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called ”decadent” wrote.