Old and New Masters Part 9

which had murmured of--

older seas That beat on vaster sands,

and of--

lands Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial in England_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. But it has many n.o.ble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of _G.o.d Save the King_.

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as _The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_, and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human pa.s.sions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of the South._ His pa.s.sion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon which Mr. Squire comments:

There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images of Fire, of a s.h.i.+p, and of an old white-bearded man recur frequently in his poems.

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a s.h.i.+p was almost an obsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver s.h.i.+p.

In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of the future are seen sailing like s.h.i.+ps. The keeper of the West Gate of Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

when no wind breathes or ripple stirs, And there on Roman s.h.i.+ps, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how much in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination was haunted. His world was a world of nursery s.h.i.+ps and nursery caravans.

"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His att.i.tude is too impa.s.sive for that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He is occasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word "meticulously," or makes his lost mariners say:

How striking like that boat were we In the days, sweet days, when we put to sea.

That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination also tended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-design and "the good coloured things of Earth" was tempered by a kind of infidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of a brilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart and soul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walked a golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was an artist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in the _Queen's Song_, he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul.

Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The cla.s.sical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book, indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty, _The Old s.h.i.+ps_ is, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it is foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:

I have seen old s.h.i.+ps sail like swans asleep Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those s.h.i.+ps were certainly so old-- Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese h.e.l.l-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.

But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted the mid-sea blue or sh.o.r.e-sea green, Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest of his verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithful priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.

XII

TURGENEV

Mr. Edward Garnett has recently collected his prefaces to the novels and stories of Turgenev, and refas.h.i.+oned them into a book in praise of the genius of the most charming of Russian authors. I am afraid the word "charming" has lost so much of its stamp and brightness with use as to have become almost meaningless. But we apply it to Turgenev in its fullest sense. We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming. He is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some persons who, when they come into a room, immediately make us feel happier.

Turgenev seems to "come into the room" in his books with just such a welcome presence. That is why I wish Mr. Garnett had made his book a biographical, as well as a critical, study.

He quotes Turgenev as saying: "All my life is in my books." Still, there are a great many facts recorded about him in the letters and reminiscences of those who knew him (and he was known in half the countries of Europe), out of which we can construct a portrait. One finds in the _Life of Sir Charles Dilke_, for instance, that Dilke considered Turgenev "in the front rank" as a conversationalist. This opinion interested one all the more because one had come to think of Turgenev as something of a shy giant. I remember, too, reading in some French book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in the literary circles of Paris--a large figure with a curious chast.i.ty of mind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilized men of genius.

There are, indeed, as I have said, plenty of suggestions for a portrait of Turgenev, quite apart from his novels. Mr. Garnett refers to some of them in two excellent biographical chapters. He reminds us, for example, of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals, as when he introduced the work of Tolstoy to a French editor. "Listen,"

said Turgenev. "Here is 'copy' for your paper of an absolutely first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master--for he is a _real_ master--is almost unknown in France; but I a.s.sure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes." The letter he addressed to Tolstoy from his death-bed, urging him to return from propaganda to literature, is famous, but it is a thing to which one always returns fondly as an example of the n.o.ble disinterestedness of a great man of letters. "I cannot recover," Turgenev wrote:--

That is out of the question. I am writing to you specially to say how glad I am to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think my request would have an effect on you!... I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it all! My friend--great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!... I can write no more; I am tired.

One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever have quarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev.

Perhaps it was that there was something barbarous and brutal in each of them that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They were both men of action in literature, militant, and by nature propagandist.

And probably Turgenev was as impatient with the faults of their strength as they were with the faults of his weakness. He was a man whom it was possible to disgust. Though he was Zola's friend, he complained that _L'a.s.sommoir_ left a bad taste in the mouth. Similarly, he discovered something almost s.a.d.i.s.tic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let his imagination dwell on scenes of cruelty and horror. And he was as strongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by his sensationalism among horrors. One can guess exactly the frame of mind he was in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "You see, I consider myself a German." This has been quoted against Turgenev as though he meant it literally, and as though it were a confession of denationalization. His words were more subtle than that in their irony.

What they meant was simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European."

Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences in _Rudin?_ He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the narrowness with which it has been too often a.s.sociated.

This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his lifetime. It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued with belittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death. He had that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox. This sense of truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an insult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circles of the political partisans. A great artist may be a member--and an enthusiastic member--of a political party, but in his art he cannot become a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist. In his novels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russia truthfully, not to paint and powder and "prettify" it for show purposes, and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who were asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the master-pieces of a professional flatterer. When _Fathers and Children_ was published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemies of everything in which Turgenev believed. "I received congratulations,"

he wrote,

almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies.

This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy.

This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he belongs, as his subject. He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he is compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way as to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of his enemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as daylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by the propagandist as worse than an enemy--a treacherous friend. Turgenev deliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead to the miseries of being misunderstood. When one thinks of the long years of denunciation and hatred he endured for the sake of his art, one cannot but regard him as one of the heroic figures of the nineteenth century. "He has," Mr. Garnett tells us, "been accused of timidity and cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries.... In an access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was comprised in one word--'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity nor cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth. His first and last advice to young writers, Mr. Garnett declares, was: "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations." And if Turgenev was remorseless in nothing else, he was remorseless in this--truth as regards both his own sensations and the sensations of his contemporaries. He seems, if we may judge from a sentence he wrote about _Fathers and Children_, to have regarded himself almost as the first realist. "It was a new method," he said, "as well as a new type I introduced--that of Realizing instead of Idealizing." His claim has, at least, this truth in it: he was the first artist to apply the realistic method to a world seething with ideas and with political and philosophical unrest. His adoption of the realistic method, however, was the result of necessity no less than of choice. He "simply did not know how to work otherwise," as he said. He had not the sort of imagination that can invent men and women easily. He had always to draw from the life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom the various elements were harmonized together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly."

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance.

That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity. The world before the war was afraid above all things of losing vitality, and so it turned to contortionists of genius such as Dostoevsky, or lesser contortionists, like some of the Futurists, for fear restfulness should lead to death. It would be foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but he has that element in him. Mr. Conrad suggests a certain vice of misshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenev in comparison with his. "All his creations, fortunate or unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors," he says in his fine tribute to Turgenev in Mr. Garnett's book, "are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie, or d.a.m.ned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions." That is well said. On the other hand, it is only right to remember that, if Turgenev's characters are human beings, they (at least the male characters) have a way of being curiously ineffectual human beings. He understood the Hamlet in man almost too well. From Rudin to the young revolutionist in _Virgin Soil_, who makes such a mess of his propaganda among the peasantry, how many of his characters are as remarkable for their weakness as their unsuccess!

Turgenev was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination in regard to his fellow man--at least, his Russian fellow man. In _On the Eve_, when he wished to create a central character that would act as an appeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weakness and apathy" (as Mr. Garnett puts it), he had to choose a Bulgarian, not a Russian, for his hero. Mr. Garnett holds that the characterization of Insarov, the Bulgarian, in _On the Eve_, is a failure, and puts this down to the fact that Turgenev drew him, not from life, but from hearsay. I think Mr. Garnett is wrong. I have known the counterpart of Insarov among the members of at least one subject nation, and the portrait seems to me to be essentially true and alive. Luckily, if Turgenev could not put his trust in Russian men, he believed with all his heart in the courage and goodness of Russian women. He was one of the first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul.

With the majority of novelists, women are s.e.xual or sentimental accidents. With Turgenev, women are equal human beings--saviours of men and saviours of the world. _Virgin Soil_ becomes a book of hope instead of despair as the triumphant figure of Marianna, the young girl of the Revolution, conquers the imagination. Turgenev, as a creator of n.o.ble women, ranks with Browning and Meredith. His realism was not, in the last a.n.a.lysis, a realism of disparagement, but a realism of affection.

His farewell words, Mr. Garnett tells us, were: "Live and love others as I have always loved them."

XIII

THE MADNESS OF STRINDBERG

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense--it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. Miss Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intent upon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt to a.n.a.lyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will be gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published in Sweden. The biography will supply the need of that part of the public which has no time to read Strindberg, but has plenty of time to read about him. It will give them a capably potted Strindberg, and will tell them quietly and briefly much that he himself has told violently and at length in _The Son of a Servant, The Confession of a Fool_, and, indeed, in nearly everything he wrote. On the other hand, Miss Lind's book has little value as an interpretation. She does not do much to clear up the reasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter of interest in every civilized country in the world. She does, indeed, quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death, compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to help humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his breast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way." "Strindberg," Miss Lind declares, "patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil, the flame of his self-immolation was seen, pure and inextinguishable." This will not do. "Patiently" is impossible; so is "pure and inextinguishable." Strindberg was at once a man of genius (and therefore n.o.ble) and a creature of doom (and therefore to be pitied). But to sum him up as a spontaneous martyr in the greatest of great causes is to do injustice to language and to the lives of the saints and heroes. He was a martyr, of course, in the sense in which we call a man a martyr to toothache. He suffered; but most of his sufferings were due, not to tenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves.

Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility.

Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability--even an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest worries until they a.s.sumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of man who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that the Devil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteous Job, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regarded the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil than the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies of exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you cannot do better than turn to those pages in _Zones of the Spirit_ (as the English translation of his _Blue Book_ is called), in which he tells us about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals of _The Dream Play._

My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within forty days I had six changes of servants--one worse than the other.

At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove.

I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.

Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with it.

Then came the dress-rehearsal of _The Dream Play._ This drama I wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had pa.s.sed. There seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days'

fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.

There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part, simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations of life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesser irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them is very noticeable in _The Dream Play_ itself--in that scene, for instance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married, the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and the Daughter to complain of the dirt:

THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!

THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in the pot.