Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some investigation which was being made by the government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy.
Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation related to some investigation which was being made by the government, he would show that he also knew something about the tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, he knew all about brandy.
This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now, said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these “dead souls”; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get hold of a piece of land, and move all these “dead souls” to that land, and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are dead.
To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from Oriental barbarism to modern individualism.
The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of Gogol to praise the work of this great master—which so incensed the government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write as he pleased.
The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called “A Sportsman’s Sketches”; pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and surely no government could object to a gentleman’s describing the peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs.
Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor, amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier, Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of artistry, the pictorial charm, the “enamels and cameos” ideal. He had no need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that was his Russian heritage.
He wrote seven novels, all short and simple; the theme of each being the stock theme of leisure-class fiction, a man and a woman at the crisis of their love. His girls are very much alike; direct and honest, they flame up, and are ready to act upon their feelings, to go anywhere with the man they love. But the man does not know where to go or what to do. The hero of the first novel, Rudin, is a kind of modern Hamlet, who became proverbial as the type of Russian intellectual. He is incapable of anything but talk, and tells the girl that they must submit to her family, which opposes the marriage.
In the other novels the heroes do not always submit. There is, for example, Bazarov, the Nihilist; he is a fighter, and ready for action—but Turgenev tells us what he thinks of man’s dream of accomplishment, when Bazarov scratches his finger and dies of blood poisoning. Another hero is a Bulgarian, and there is a chance for action in Bulgaria; but unfortunately this man’s lungs are weak, and he dies in the arms of the brave girl who eloped with him.
You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris. Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad; he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem, even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe. He loathes this loafing class, and satirizes it without mercy; but also he cannot help seeing the weaknesses of the revolutionists—and the revolutionists were of course indignant at that, because they were fighting for human freedom, and thought that a man of culture and enlightenment ought to help them.
So there was furious controversy over each of Turgenev’s novels, and it hurt the feelings of the great, good-natured giant, and he did a lot of explaining, some of it contradictory. The truth is that he did not know quite what he believed; he was not a thinker, but merely an artist in the narrow sense of the word, one who sees what exists and portrays it with cunning skill. This makes him, of course, a darling of the leisure-class critics, art for art sakers and dilettanti. The French translations of his novels had an enormous vogue, likewise the English translations, and men like Henry James thought him a god. But out of Russia there now comes a new voice; the revolutionary proletariat is making Russia over, and the young students report themselves bored with Turgenev; he whines and moans and gets them nowhere.You see, the Russians can now act, like other people; and so the Russian Hamlet is laid on the shelf.
A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God.
Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an instant impression.
Its author was drawn into literary circles—which in those days meant also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and again in his books.
He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten and tormented—in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and recently by the United States government at Leavenworth.After a few years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.”
Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type. He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every mood of their unhappy beings real to us.
His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia, and together their souls are redeemed by love.
I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money, and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies, and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected miracle does nothappen—Father Zossima stinks like any other corpse!—That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know the outcome, you will have to do your own reading.
This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied, propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian; also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement, the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells. All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment.
We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical, psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary critics to take mental disease at its own valuation.
In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a Russia redeemed by monks.Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk appeared—Gregori Rasputin by name!
Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them, or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove the divine nature of epilepsy.
And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.”
“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and deal with that.”
Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen—”
Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to him? How competent is he to judge about “masters of fiction” who are “truly spiritual”? How much sincerity is there in such literary criticism, emanating from the elm shadows of New Haven, Connecticut?
Picture a great ruling-class university, founded on “the Bible, rum and niggers”; that is to say, the African slave-trade, covered by a mantle of religiosity. The students at this university are young aristocrats, heirs-apparent of ruling-class families, who attend “prep” schools so exclusive, and with so long a waiting list that you have to make your application when you are born. In these schools they “make” certain exclusive fraternities, and when they come to Yale they “make” certain secret societies, whose spirit is symbolized by the “Skull and Bones.” Their other ideal in life is to win athletic contests, whose temper they embody in the “Bull-dog.”
The trustees of this pious university you will find listed according to their economic functions in “The Goose-Step.” Their favorite alumnus, the high god of the present Yale religion is a three-hundred-pound plutocrat by the name of William Howard Taft, who was made president of the United States some years ago for the purpose of allowing the land thieves to get away with the natural resources of Alaska. Having fulfilled that function for his class, and having, when he came up for re-election, succeeded in carrying the states of Vermont and Utah, he was made chief justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as a bulwark of the liberties of the American people: the liberty of the individual hunky and wop to negotiate independently with the Steel Trust; the liberty of railroad directors to compel their wage-slaves to toil when the wage-slaves want to rest; the liberty of little children of Georgia crackers and North Carolina clay-eaters to work all night in cotton mills. Having solemnly delivered such pronouncements in defense of liberty, this all-highest alumnus brings his three hundred pounds to the commencement ceremonies, and walks in solemn procession clad in scarlet and purple robes.
That is Yale, and the spirit of Yale; the academic apologist of the most efficient system of plunder yet seen upon the face of the earth. Capitalistic exploitation is Yale’s religion; and you will note that in all essentials it is identical with the religion of Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas. When the tsar’s armies marched out to protect the lumber concessions of the grand dukes on the Yalu River, the priests and archbishops in the Kremlin officially blessed the ikons. And just so do chaplains of NewHaven bless the flags when the American marines set out to shoot up natives in the West Indies and Central America, for failing to pay their interest upon the bonds of J. P. Morgan and his Yale trustees.
This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.
Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes them—precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion—just as Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the “Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers through a hundred thousand years.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to the Bull-dog.”
Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t get it away from them.”
We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that, just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with shaping it.
Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man, therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police system which strangled the life of Russia.
He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict, “Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer.
He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; butstill his conscience troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort. Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the first one who entered the house.
Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote “War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called different names by different groups of persons—to say nothing of diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I failed.
Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of “The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an ax.”
There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with most of the “heavy” novelists, thatthere is nothing for the various characters to do but to die horrid deaths.
Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that, because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down. It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the sex relationship.
If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes, who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion.
Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes and spent his time cobbling shoes. Hegave up his copyrights, but he could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property, like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the time.
Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the Russian people were accustomed.
Tolstoi had met some of the revolutionists of his time, but had been cold to them; he was not interested in politics, only in religious and moral questions. His conversion first took the form of absolute non-resistance to evil. Later on he came to modify it to the doctrine which Gandhi is now spreading throughout all Asia, “non-violent resistance.” You shall not use physical force against your enemy, but you oppose him by word and teaching, by your power of endurance and of moral conviction; so you shame him, or rouse the moral forces of the whole world to rebuke him.
Tolstoi applied that treatment to the state church and to the police. Of course, if he had been a peasant ora workingman, or even a poor student or literary man, he would have been beaten to death with the knout, or shipped off to Siberia to perish in a convict camp. But he was a member of the nobility, and his family influence protected him, until he had become so famous throughout the world that he was greater than the Tsardom itself. In his last years he lived as a majestic symbol of the protest of the Russian people; he poured out arguments against war, against government cruelty, against landlordism, against priestcraft; and all the powers of darkness in Russia did not dare to lay a finger upon him.
In his later years he wrote several novels, one of which I personally consider his greatest. This is “Resurrection,” which tells the story of a young Russian nobleman who seduces a peasant girl, and later on in life discovers her as a prostitute. He becomes conscience-stricken because of what he has done, and sets out to redeem her, follows her to Siberia and saves her, and in the end they live that life of brotherly and sisterly love which Tolstoi had come to preach. This story contains frightful pictures of the whole Russian system; it was translated into an immense number of languages, and it probably did more than any other one book to undermine the Tsardom.
Tolstoi published a work of criticism, and some people think that I got my ideas from it. Therefore, let me say that if you want to find the germ of “Mammonart,” you will do better to consult Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” published a generation before Tolstoi’s work.
The thesis of Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” resembles mine in just one particular; that is, we both believe that art has to do with moral questions—a belief which we share with Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes and Aristophanes and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and Moliere and Victor Hugo and Dostoievski and Tennyson and Ibsen—and so on through a long list of persons still to be considered.
But from what point of view shall the artist approach morality? Tolstoi answers as one who distrusts the intellect, distrusts science, and has no use for or belief in progress, whether social or political or intellectual. He believes that the one basis of hope for human beings is in a return to the primitive, elemental forms of life; hewants art to confine itself to those simple emotions which can be understood by the uneducated peasant. I should say that the easiest way to make plain his thesis would be to change his title from “What Is Art?” to “What Is Children’s Art?”
Whatever faults the critic may have to find with “Mammonart,” I beg him to realize that its author is not a primitive Christian, but a scientific Socialist; one who welcomes the achievements of the human intellect, and looks forward to a complex social order, and to social art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and fastidious individualist culture of our time.
We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long delayed.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality they gave to the creatures of their brain.
It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to that purpose; the style mustbe flexible, it must, like the music of the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance, they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them, and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an academy of their own.
Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a preface:
Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the people—this world beneath a world—were to remain under the literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.
Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the people—this world beneath a world—were to remain under the literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.
Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spareyou no most hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to know about sexual pathology.
Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have acquired this knowledge—when we have visited the hospitals and the jails and the brothels and the morgues—our minds are automatically led to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.
And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl, brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities; but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done, whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by political and economic readjustments.
All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules was dying—Jules even watched himself—in order to report the details of this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they needed was fresh air and exercise.
Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to put a beetle under themicroscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of acquired characteristics?
We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about them, but proceeds to alter them—to make cactus without spines, and blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi.
Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober fashion he worked his way to the top.
When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” This writer had used words never before used in literature, and described actions never before described; the critics could find but one explanation—that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that everlived. He wrote that “‘l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true book.”
He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become?
He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little, when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and degradation.
For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana, peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are committing.
Zola has no graces of style, no charms of personality, no humor, hardly even any sentiment. He is hag-ridden by the misery of the modern world, and in plodding, matter-of-fact, relentless fashion he proceeds to overwhelm you with a mass of facts. A few such facts you might evade, but the sum of them is irresistible; youknow that this is the truth. Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination and driving him to his task.
There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In “Nana” he shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of all—the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress, a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks, jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another masterpiece, “The Downfall,” showing war with all its horror of mass suffering and national collapse.
Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels, “Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris,” which exposed the church as a bulwark of hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats, needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upona certain cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime, that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil’s Island. Another officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was shipped off to Africa.
It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his fight in the Calas case; and here was “l’Infame” at the same old game of the “frame-up.” Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled “J’Accuse.” He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal, and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on Devil’s Island, and so Zola’s task is completed.
He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In “Labor” he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another, called “Truth,” deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned, “Justice,” but this he did not live to write. In all these works you notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the future belongs.
What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and friend of Zola, ten years his junior, who proceeded to make a laboratory test.
Guy de Maupassant was a healthy young Norman animal, who came up to Paris to make his way as a journalist. He was a tremendous worker; in the course of his short life he wrote six novels and two hundred and twelve short stories. He made himself master of the latter form, and has had a dominating influence upon it. No one has been able to pack more meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words. Therefore all young writers of short stories go to school to him. What has he to give them—aside from the tricks of the trade?
Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him.
Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French peasants with their greed and cruelty, andthe French bourgeois and cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the butterflies he has created.
Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these years—and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!
There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the particular trick this demon will play—for example, that the lost necklace would turn out to have been paste—but you can be sure that something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope.
And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on toopium and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working class.
Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was one in the field of art.
He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.
Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen’s plays it works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress the individual and thwart his full development. Butyou must not assume that he is willing to make a formula out of self-realization; straightway he will turn about and show you some selfish egotist engaged in realizing himself and wrecking everyone else.
Ibsen wrote two long poems, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” into which he put ideas resembling those of “Don Quixote.” Brand is a Norwegian preacher, who has his formula of perfect righteousness, the sacrifice of the individual to God. He acts as blindly as Don Quixote tilting at wind-mills, and destroys a number of people, himself included. “Peer Gynt,” on the other hand, is a scamp who, like Sancho Panza, fools himself by those very qualities of which he is most proud, his ability to take care of himself, his unwillingness to consider anything but his own interest.
Ibsen also fell under the spell of gloomy materialistic science. Like Maupassant, he sees men as the sport of circumstances. The difference is that he believes, in spite of his theories, in fighting against circumstance, and his whole being is absorbed in the task of helping men and women to fight wisely and effectively.
He took the French device of the “well-made play,” a simple, unadorned picture of reality, compressing a great mass of character and incident into a small space. He used this art form to deal, not with the great world of fashion, but with the middle-class people he knew in small Norwegian towns: doctors and lawyers and clergymen and merchants, with their wives and sons and daughters. They are wretchedly unhappy people, and Ibsen shows how they make their own unhappiness, because their ideas are false, because they are slaves of traditions which have no relation to present-day reality. “The Pillars of Society” tells about a business man who makes his life a string of lies in order to hide an offense he has committed; he is helping to preserve civilization, by not letting anybody know that a business man can do wrong. “A Doll’s House” tells about a woman who discovers that she is a pet and an ornament in her household, and leaves her husband and children and goes out into the world to become an individual.
There are three stages in one’s attitude toward thesis plays of this sort. First, the thesis is new, and whether it pleases you or angers you, it rouses and stirs you.Second, you know the thesis by heart, and have accepted it and lived it. At that stage the play bores you; you say that you do not go to the theater for Sunday school lessons. The third stage comes when the thesis has become so familiar that you no longer think of the play in that way; it holds you then, if it holds you at all, by the human realness of its characters and their fates.
Eighteen years ago I saw “A Doll’s House” acted. I was at the second stage of development, and it seemed to me a tiresome little sermon, I could not stay to the end. But a few days later I saw “Hedda Gabler,” and this was different; I forgot the thesis, and was interested in a psychological study of the modern parasitic female. We all know Hedda; some of us have been married to her. She has been brought up in idleness, she lives by vanity, she is bored, and preys upon men, not because she is sexual, but because she wants attention and applause, and cannot endure that anyone else should have these things in her presence. One of Hedda’s victims is a poet; he has labored to produce a manuscript, and in his despair over her he tears it up. When Hedda hears of that she is thrilled to the depths, and cries: “A deed! A deed!” Let that be a symbol of the art-for-art’s-sake attitude to life!
The greatest of Ibsen’s plays is “Ghosts.” It has a thesis so wicked that the critics hardly yet dare to state it. This thesis happens to be the exact opposite of the one in “The Scarlet Letter”: that a true and good woman, unhappily married, who finds that she loves her clergyman, ought to elope with the clergyman instead of staying with her husband. In Ibsen’s play the woman stays with her husband, and helps to make him comfortable, while he gets drunk and commits infidelities. She bears him a son, and lavishes her love and devotion upon this son, only to see him go the way of his father, and eventually die of syphilis.
This unpleasant disease had never before appeared upon the stage, and when “Ghosts” was produced in the pious city of London in the year 1891, the critics and newspapers went out of their minds. You may find a record of their opinions in Bernard Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism”; starting with the London “Daily Telegraph,” which called the play “an open drain; aloathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open ... candid foulness ... bestial and cynical ... offensive cynicism ... melancholy and malodorous world ... absolutely loathsome and fetid ... gross, almost putrid indecorum ... literary carrion ... crapulous stuff.” All this referring to a play now recognized as one of the great tragic masterpieces of all time!
“An Enemy of the People” deals with Ibsen’s attitude toward politics and social questions. The “enemy” is a young doctor in a Norwegian town, who discovers that the famous baths, the basis of the town’s prosperity, are infected with typhoid. The doctor insists upon making the facts public, and so of course he has an unhappy time. Curiously enough, you will find the same story in “The Goose-Step”; it happened at the University of Oregon—quite a distance from Norway. The “enemy of the people” in this latter case was a young professor, who was duly compelled to move on.
The world is forty years older than when Ibsen wrote this play; we have had time to analyze the economic forces in our society, and we are no longer satisfied with a crude distrust of democracy. It is true that the people stone the prophets; but later on they build monuments to them; and the world must be saved by the people, if it is to be saved at all. Ibsen’s attitude is the natural one for an artist, who has to take care of his own mind, and does not want anyone to tell him what to think. He is distrustful of discipline, preaches individualism—and finds the reactionaries glad to quote his words. But you see, all the poet has to do is to portray the world; the masses have a more difficult job—they have to change it. So they cannot rest in the anarchist attitude; they have to have discipline and solidarity, they have to organize and find leaders, and learn to stand by those leaders, and at the same time to control them. All that is a new task, and calls for new types of thinkers, not merely critical, but constructive.
Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century. He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly emotional man of genius, who just about boxed the compass of thought, and believed everything there was for a man to believe. He was too much of a propagandist, even for me; I like an artist to have ideas, but not so many that they contradict!
August Strindberg’s father was a bankrupt shop-keeper; his mother was a bar-maid, and three illegitimate children had preceded him. He was raised in a family of eleven in a small house, and the first emotions he knew were fear and hunger. He was lonely and unhappy all his life, and poured out his troubles in a torrent over Sweden.
He began writing at twenty-one; he had the artist’s passion for all kinds of knowledge, and in those early days he was a Socialist and a champion of labor, also of the economic emancipation of women. But at the age of twenty-six he chose a wife, and illustrated the formula we used to sing in childhood: