Chapter IX

Apart from the influence of politics, the greatest spiritual influence that Russia and America have had on the world for a century past has been manifested through their respective literatures. It is to this field that we must now turn, for the most striking series of our parallels. This literature has been, in both cases, something so entirely apart in its inner development from anything produced in Europe before the end of the eighteenth century, that we cannot apply to it the traditional standards of European criticism. Unlike what has been the case in European literatures, the literary form itself has not emerged from the sociological and moral factors generally prevailing at the moment. Rather has it been used as a weapon of protest, as a means for overcoming the stultification of the environment, in both America and Russia. It has been essentially revolutionary, dictated by a small protesting minority, rather than rooted in the traditional lore of the soil.

At the close of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the mind of Europe became divided between the rival claims of absolutism and of radicalism. A wave of romantic sentiment, of revolutionary storm and stress, with its longing for a past that could no longer exist, together with its intense democratic feeling for the forgotten folk sources of art, swept over England and Germany, and began to appear in France. It made impossible henceforward the frigid artificialities of form displayed in the poetry of Pope and Johnson, the dramas of Voltaire, the essays of Addison and Fontenelle, the epic of Klopstock. And it was from this rising wave of Romantic sentiment that both America and Russia started on their careers as independent producers of literature. They have continued on their way as literary countries thanks altogether to nineteenth-century romanticism. Without some understanding of the struggle between romanticism and realism, their literary history does not make sense, it has neither cohesion nor development. It is true that both countries have produced devotees of classical form, but for the most part in the shape of critics, not creators. The underlying genius of both countries has been unable to accept the European tradition, even when it was imitated; it has forced itself into alien moulds only to burst them. One cannot deny for example that Whitman’s poems are poems, nor that Dostoevsky’s novels are novels. Only they correspond to nothing either in form or content or mental attitude that was done before them as poems and novels. The word itself, freed from considerations of economy, tradition, and classical usage, makes here its own form; arbitrary, intensely personal, always stumbling and shambling on the brink of incoherence.

It is therefore impossible to write a just and final literary history of either country. In this field everyone is a partisan. According to whether the critics’ prepossessions are for literature that reflects that social struggle, or for finished beauty of form, or for profound and tragic revelation of unsuspected depths of life; according to whether the critic of Russian and American literature is primarily a social reformer, an academic humanist, or an advanced radical theorist, the judgment will fall. Kropotkin cannot endure the later Dostoevsky; hundreds of American professors cannot endure Whitman. The utmost that can be done is to let one literature illuminate the other, to show how the same psychological factors produce often closely corresponding results, to draw parallels between those portions of the literature of both countries that have most closely affected Europe. So only do we get any insight into the mysteries of the Slav and American soul. Only in literature is so close an insight possible; in American painting and architecture, and in Russian dance and music, we have also national expressions, but limited, tentative, and owing to their fundamental differences in formal approach (the static and plastic as against the auditory and agitated) very difficult of comparison. It is possible in some respects to bring the products of the written word in each European country together; we can for example set up a comparison between the drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, the drama of Corneille and Racine, the drama of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. But it would be far more difficult if we tried to compare sculpture and painting as practised in the three countries mentioned over that period. So in the case of Russia and America, we must concentrate on the written word as being the most accessible and comprehensible means of comparison.

We may admit at the outset that to most observers modern Russian literature is far richer in individual talent, and in works of high ability, than American literature has hitherto been. This is due to the working of three very important factors. In the first place, Russia from the outset had a racial, soil-rooted language of its own and was not forced to transform traditional English modes of expression to fit an altered environment, or to teach an immigrant population. In the second, the fact that political discussion of every sort was forbidden in Russia during most of the period under review, while America has lived in a perpetual atmosphere of constant political agitation, made many more choose the profession of authorship in Russia, while in America it tended to make many who might have been writers, into politicians, orators, publicists. In the third place, before beginning to create a modern literature on her own account, Russia had already a rich folklore and legendary history of the past to draw upon. In the case of the Americans, the folklore and traditions of the early Indians, even of the French and the Spanish settlers, were in a sense so foreign to the dominant English-speaking psychology, that they could not be used, except as exotic colour. The result was that to this day the American writer, with all the ability in the world, has less material to his hands. Homer could not have been Homer had he come to Greece from, let us say, Egypt, without understanding or appreciation of the past. The American writer is more frequently found in that predicament than the Russian. He has neither a tradition of folklore to fall back upon for the past, nor essentially an individual experience, out of which to build up his present day. Only too frequently in America a usable past (to borrow the phrase of a well-known American critic) and a meaningful present fail to coincide to produce the literary masterpiece.

Yet a parallel between both countries is not only necessary, but psychologically illuminating. This parallel will follow the lines of the historical parallel, already tentatively traced for the outward events, in the first book of this study. Here too we will see two forces starting from opposite poles approaching a coincidence only to diverge and to again approach coincidence. Here too we watch the interplay of the same underlying climatic and soil factors on extremely mixed races that start life under widely different political and social constants. What is more, this parallel supplements and completes the other. It enables us to disentangle the essentially Slavic element from the essentially American element of the two cultures. It may even show how these two forces operating freely in the world for a century and a half, like the opposing poles of an electric battery, may ultimately be reconciled, if not in the field of the practical, at least in the field of the ideal; how they not only closely correspond to each other, but ultimately become one.

2

The first stirrings of independent American literature (as distinct from Colonial literature, or Red Indian traditions) appear most clearly in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The first stirrings of Russian literature as distinct from a few court writers such as Derzhavin in the Catherine period, to whom might be added Catherine herself (although she wrote in French), and the remnants of old Slavonic traditions, appear in the writings of Krylov. What strikes us instantly about these two writers--the penniless American journalist who steadily climbed the ladder of success until he reached the top, and the son of the poor army officer who likewise spent a lifetime in journalism to emerge at last as a sort of social lion--is the curious impression of shrewd, canny and independent worldly wisdom that emerges from the pages of both. Neither is a literary hero, nor an independent creator, nor a prophet. Both have a utilitarian side, a leaning to moral teaching, closely allied to a great deal of homely common sense. It is true that Franklin spent much of his energies in political agitation and in scientific research, which detracts from his magnitude as an author. But as has already been pointed out, the same field was not open to the Russian, with the result that his satire is both sharper and tenser. Yet Franklin’s “Autobiography” is a fable of the industrious apprentice making his way through the ranks of Colonial society, as Krylov’s so-called fables are real pictures of the artificial and vain social order (shaken by the French Revolution) in which Krylov, the idle and pleasure-loving, found himself. Both contain elements of poetry, but these elements are of small importance as compared to the prose content. And both were, precisely because they limited their aims to what was immediately possible, rather than to what was the ideal statement, immensely popular.

From such small beginnings American and Russian literature emerged on the world’s stage with Alexander Pushkin and Washington Irving. It may seem to the casual and purely objective observer that no parallel is at all possible between these two men. Irving was simply an agreeable minor writer, with a prose style of considerable urbanity and charm, who happened for a time to be ranked above his merits abroad as at home, and who now is conveniently forgotten; whereas Pushkin was above all a great and original poet. Yet this verdict which might be passed by nine out of ten European literary critics is, quite possibly, a false one. Of the two writers it is Irving who is the most original, as he had none of the stock of folklore or of ancient tradition to go on; all that had been swept away from under his feet by the Revolution, and had to be discovered or invented afresh. He was in the position of an artist who has to paint a new picture on a blank canvas without either brushes or colors. On the other hand, Pushkin could simply use the old material that lay to his hand, and his task was merely to interfuse it with a new revolutionary spirit. If we can think of Irving as detached from European literature as Pushkin was; if we can remember that living on the Hudson, he was as socially remote from the world of Addison and Goldsmith, whom he admired, as Pushkin in the Caucasus was remote from Byron and Sterne whom he worshipped, we can reach a juster estimate of the achievement of both men.

There is a feeling of nostalgia for the past that, particularly in autumn, assails one in such a new country as America with even greater force than anywhere in Europe. To the European, especially to the dweller in a cosmopolitan city, the relics of the Middle Ages, the richness of the Renaissance, the courtliness of the eighteenth century are, after all, dead and vanished remnants of a force that has long since flowed into other channels. But to the American who has never known them, these things appear under their most Utopian aspect, as examples of a life full of leisure, where work was despised, people were free, natural and gracious, and harmony with inner and outer nature was achieved. The American is afflicted therefore with an incredible nostalgia for the past, the European past, but the country he sees about him offers no past at all but that of the wilderness, of the pioneer and the Indian. He therefore aims, according as he is sensitive to beauty, or fundamentally in discord with his own surroundings, either to transfer the riches of Europe bodily to his shores and to strive to live in the midst of them; or to revert to pure and simple savagery. The first path was that trodden by Irving; the second was that chosen by Cooper.

The quality that made Irving a classic author during his lifetime and that kept him so, arose from his overwhelming grace of expression. Around the poor and threadbare material of folklore at his disposal he threw the beauty of an incomparable style, a manner of telling that makes of him still the most readable of American authors. “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The History of New York” are all minor incidents of life, enlarged and expanded to their utmost limit, avoiding the tensity of great tragedy, but crammed with the humor of a disillusioned romanticism. They are not, like the works of their contemporary Scott, direct assimilations and fresh re-creations of the material of the past. Irving stands aloof from his own fantasy, and warns us that this is how life may have been once lived, but that after all life cannot go on in this way. Thus an undercurrent of melancholy is unavoidable to the careful reader of these stories. When Irving’s heart is more closely engaged, as in his fantasies of the Alhambra, he becomes at once even more supreme as an artist, but less human in range. He seems to be thinking always that all this enchantment is purely imaginary, and that his people are not real men and women. His Alhambra is not so much a castle in Spain, as a castle in the air. Later Irving tried to remedy this defect by writing objective history, and busied himself with the life of Columbus, of Washington, of Astor. But even here he was dogged by the curious unreality that is the fate of the romantic who cannot find romance in the world that is about him, or in his own immediate race-memories. His Columbus is a mediæval stained-glass saint. His Washington is a classical plaster-cast. Only his Astor has any reality. Thus Irving’s later works are inferior to his earlier. He was not equipped to draw men of action but only such dreamers as Rip Van Winkle and Wouter van Twiller. And an underlying mistrust of women--explainable by the fact that Irving was a bachelor with several unsuccessful love-affairs to account for--emerges equally from these classically built pages.

The problem that Pushkin set himself to solve was, in all essentials, similar to the problem that bothered Irving. Only in Pushkin’s case there was no lack of material for his talent--rather the reverse, which explains why, in his short and disordered life, he was able to turn out so much that is memorable. Pushkin’s question was how to put this material into classic form, how to make it appear light, graceful, easy and charming. That he solved this question, and wrote works of great exhilaration and formal perfection in his youth, in a language which was before his day barely more than a barbaric dialect, is the considered verdict of everyone who knows Russian. But this achievement did not satisfy Pushkin. He did not believe in the world that he himself had created, and an endless succession of folk-heroes, of Russians and Ludmillas, could not satisfy him for long. His private attitude was atheistic and what is more anarchistic, as is indicated by the obscene Gabriliad and many another youthful poem. As he grew older he tried more and more to find a world in which to believe, with the result that this scion of the nobility took to posing as a peasant, and cultivated an air of heroic misanthropy, derived from Byron. The two forces flowed together in “Eugene Onegin,” which is the one work of Pushkin that has united all his qualities. Here under the mantle of Byronism which he had wrapped round himself, and which essentially belied his own care-free temper, we get a world which is real but detestable, and in which the bitterness stands close to the surface. Yet this world, from which neither Pushkin nor any other later Russian has found escape, was in a sense forced on him by outer circumstances, particularly by the great early emotional crisis of his life, which came from his secret sympathy with the Decembrist uprising in 1825 (when he was twenty-six) which he later had to disavow in order to escape Siberia. This crisis was fatal to Pushkin’s harmony, in the same way as Irving’s early emotional crisis, his engagement broken by death, was fatal to Irving. The remainder of his work is a prolonged emotional dissatisfaction, much on the lines of Irving’s half-humorous stories. Pushkin became a realist despite himself, as Irving a romanticist despite himself. Each is therefore a classic in the Russian or American sense, but not in the European.

3

With James Fenimore Cooper we approach a very different problem. This honest, stern and embittered man, at war with society and himself, whose best writing was done at the latest period of his development, is perhaps to-day the least known and least appreciated of American writers. This is due to the fact that about much of his work he deliberately threw the false glamour of an idyllic romanticism. Hating the frontier as he did, hating equally the time-serving and vulgar democracy of his own period, he sympathised at heart with nothing but the already remote past of the Indian scout (of whom he has left us an immortal portrait in Leatherstocking) and fundamentally the Indian himself. An aristocrat to the bone, he threw himself repeatedly back upon the eighteenth century. In his love of what was already a remote and murky past, he recalls the Russian historian Karamzin, who similarly after an early period of political polemic, went back to the past and strove to glorify it. And the result was much the same in both cases. Karamzin’s Russian history is, in the opinion of most critics of standing, not really a history at all, but a marvellous portrait gallery of living men and women held together by a flowing stream of narrative tending to idealise and prettify the details of the picture he was presenting. Cooper’s romances are similarly not romances at all, but wonderful pictures of bygone events, storms at sea, revolutionary battles, adventures in the wilderness, similarly vitiated by a tendency to write idyllically about the past. And as Cooper influenced Melville and hundreds of other American writers of adventure tales, so Karamzin influenced Gogol and Dostoevsky. Cooper was indeed more important as an influence than as an actual creator. Where he was great was in Uncas and Chingachgook and Leatherstocking; his noble and persistent belief in character saved him from incredible sentimentality of incident and a viciously mannered style. The untold glory of the already vanishing heroic age of American life when men took their lives in their hands and lived alone with the wilderness, fired Cooper. He was scarcely adequate to the tragic implications of his own theme.

Here we reach a point that is important for us to understand if we are to grasp the real nature of the underlying contrast between American and Russian culture, and the common causes of their failure. Under the system of levelling democracy such as America adopted and practised, men could not combine together to wrest a meaning and significance from frontier conditions except by making sacrifice of some part of their own personality. The complete personality, therefore, as such, stood outside the bounds of American organised society, and became inarticulate, unformed, illiterate, and to all intents and purposes, a pariah and an outlaw. A Daniel Boone, a Leatherstocking, or in a later age, a Kit Carson, or a Huckleberry Finn, are the authentic “originals” of the American landscape. In their presence everything else becomes feebly Colonial; an imitation of remote European manners and traditions. Only in the South, where some elements of settled aristocracy had rooted themselves, could culture and personality exist side by side in the same individual, and this culture took social and political, rather than literary forms. The North and the ever-widening frontier of the West were incapable of producing a single personality of the intellectual range and poised character of Jefferson. At the other end of the scale, under the increasing centralisation and autocracy of the Muscovite Czars, no one could have independent personality except the Czar himself and a few important nobles of his entourage. The system of abolishing local independence worked, as a leveller of the mass, with equal efficiency as the system of mob-democracy. Only a few of the older Slavonic and Baltic nobility resisted, and it was within their ranks that literature was cultivated, as it was within the ranks of the better-bred families of America that the first attempts at an indigenous culture took place.

4

In both Russia and America, therefore, the rage for imitation of European ways of life and thought early became of equal importance with the suppressed desire to shape life according to local conditions. This fact explains the popularity of such figures, for instance, as Bryant and Zhukovsky. Bryant simply transported bodily the nature feeling of Wordsworth to the American scene, as Zhukovsky tried to interfuse the idyllic sentiment of Parny and Chenier into his aboriginal background. Both spent a large part of their lives as translators; a task far easier to the Russian than to the American, as the Russian could not fail to enrich his material (chosen frequently from third-rate European sources) by contact with far deeper and more lasting earthborn springs of inspiration, whereas the American impoverished his by a scrupulous and Puritanic zeal for correctitude. Both translated Homer, but while Zhukovsky’s translation became and remained a Russian classic, Bryant’s translation is a monument of Puritanic austerity and plainness and is likely to abandon the mind of the cultivated English-speaking reader in favour of the surging violence of Chapman, the artifice of Pope, or the rich and tender idyllism of Butcher and Lang. But for all that, Bryant’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are Greece as seen through American eyes, and their homespun dignity are more valuable, because more native, to the American critic than any European version. The impulse both Bryant and Zhukovsky gave to translations has persisted throughout the whole range of Russian and American literature; it is symptomatic of the fact that culture in both countries is not a natural growth, but something that has to be propped up and supported by continual reference to what goes on without, in lands where authors are born to more settled traditions.