Chapter X

There comes a moment in the history of every people when, by some almost imperceptible inner growth of cultural self-consciousness, a great, new, and original art is born among them. This moment coincides with the first slackening of the impulse that has made the particular people whose history we are surveying, free and victorious in their long struggle for unity and liberty. The period that follows in every case depends upon an emergence from early political upheaval and chaos, and in its frankness and joyousness, resembles the coming of spring. A slackening of unified political effort takes place, and a corresponding increase of individual talent in other fields. Italy reached this moment with her pictorial arts and literature early in the fourteenth century; France under Ronsard and the Pleaid; England under the Tudors. In Russia and America the old cultural background, such as it was, blocked the path of a new birth down to the period at which we have now arrived in the course of our study. Russia’s Renaissance and America’s Renaissance coincided; both began about 1830. The first great figures that these two Renaissances produced in the field of literature were Gogol and Hawthorne.

Let us look for one moment at the social conditions under which these two men came to maturity. In Russia the whole period is covered by the reign of Nicholas I. Alexander I, who had succeeded in 1794 and whose reign had led to a complete triumph over Napoleon after Moscow, died in 1825. His reign had strengthened the hold of the autocracy upon the great mass of the population, and had enormously increased as well the prestige of Russia in Europe, but had successively alienated the more enlightened nobility, who were all for the contemporary remedy of Western liberalism--a constitution. His death was the signal for the abortive uprising of the Decembrists, who were one and all nobles and could command little support in the army. The aim of Nicholas was to preserve everything exactly as it had been left by Alexander. Personally friendly as he was to liberal thought at the beginning, patron of both Pushkin and Gogol, possessed of great native courage and invincible determination, the movement of events in Europe from 1830 to 1848 forced him little by little into the camp of the extreme reactionaries, and the close of his reign found even the Slavophils in opposition to the Czar. By his personal interference in the affairs of Poland and Turkey he drew down upon him the enmity of Austria, England, and France, at that time the three greatest European powers. In regard to literature and the spread of ideas, his reign was marked by a steady growth in the power of the censorship, tending to abolish every manifestation of original thought.

All during this time, the pressure of Russia on its westward frontier, the frontier of Europe, was enormous, as during the same period America exerted immense pressure on its own westward frontier--the frontier that led through the Spanish colonial possessions, to the Pacific. The increase in repressive autocracy in Russia, under Nicholas I, was counterbalanced in America by a great increase in expansive democracy. The period opens with the disappearance of the last of the old Federalist “dynasty” among the Presidents, which had ruled (with the slight interregnum of Jefferson’s presidency) from Washington’s presidency down to 1829. At that date John Quincy Adams went out of office. He was succeeded by Andrew Jackson who was not only a democrat, but a backwoodsman, a Southerner, and an apostle of the common people. The only opposition Jackson need fear was from the aristocratic and older South, in the person of John C. Calhoun, and to a slight extent from the Northern Whigs. The latter party were soon conciliated, and for the rest of that period under review, down to the Civil War, we have a series of presidents whose democracy, slightly tainted with Whiggism, leads to a remarkable series of compromises between the agricultural and slave-holding South and the industrial and trading North, and the ever-expanding Western territory which in theory (but not in fact) lay equally open for both sections--Northern and Southern--to settle upon and inhabit. What makes this period remarkable in American history is first, the constant succession of characterless and feebly respectable presidents--Van Buren, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan--so characterless and feeble that a single Calhoun who spent his lifetime in opposition to the whole system resembles a giant by comparison; second, the increasing pressure on the southwest, on Mexico, which resembles Nicholas First’s increasing pressure on Turkey; and third, the growth of literature in the midst of a system which was politically corrupt and persisted wholly on the principle of “to the victors belong the spoils,” yet did such lip-service to respectability that Hawthorne himself dared scarcely mention directly the word “adultery” in his masterpiece. We would do well to recall the Russian censorship in this connection, as also the fact that under Nicholas I, government bribery and corruption (as revealed by the Crimean War) reached a level only paralleled later under Nicholas II.

Under such conditions, the genius of Gogol and Hawthorne came to flower. So close were they, not only in the themes upon which they worked, but in their personal psychology, their inmost successes and failures, that it matters little which we take first. But inasmuch as to the English-speaking Occidental, the Russian’s art illuminates by contrast that of the American’s, whereas the reverse is less likely to be true, we will take first the career and activity of the unhappy man who more than any other, made Russian literature what it specifically is.

2

Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol was born on March 19, 1809, in a market town of Sorochintsky in the province of Poltava. He came from a family of Ukrainian Cossack gentry. The district in which he had been born he himself immortalized in his story of “Taras Bulba.” It was the district beginning about two hundred miles south of Moscow, embracing Kiev and the dangerous shallows and rapids that encumber the course of the lower Dnieper, which was the important “river road” leading to what throughout the Middle Ages was Russia’s main sea frontier: the frontier of the Black Sea. In the words of an able American commentator on Russian affairs this district, known as the Ukraine, was “the Border Marches. Naturally it has varied, in different epochs, just as our western frontier (pretty nearly its exact equivalent) varied at different periods throughout the history of the United States, and was pushed further and further from the eastern centre of civilisation. In the case of Russia, Moscow represented that centre.”[6]

In this district, then, Gogol was born. His people were the Ukrainian Cossacks. This word meant to the Russian mind not an independent race, but an independent class: the freebooter, the military nomad of the boundless plain, the man whose home was the saddle, and whose roof was in the sky, the exact counterpart of the Western American “bad man.” But unlike the “bad man” of the West, these Cossacks had been deliberately sent to populate the Ukraine by the policy of the government. In the reign of Ivan the Terrible, it became necessary to have a military force on this southwest frontier, in order to hold back the Crimean Tartars, who were continually threatening Moscow through advance from the Kherson peninsula. Czar Ivan thereupon collected all the young men of adventurous disposition and warlike tendencies that could be found for this purpose. Most of them were, in fact, criminals--a body of men, warring alike upon Pole and Turk, who lived in semi-monastic state in a movable capital on the banks of the Dnieper, and who had become so great a menace to the Czar himself that after Pugachev’s rebellion in the reign of Catherine the Great, they were suppressed. It was from this group Gogol sprang.

He was, in fact, the last flower of the old Cossack independence of spirit. After a sensitive, sickly, and morbid boyhood, he drifted to St. Petersburg at the age of twenty, equipped with nothing but a bad idyllic poem and a boundless ambition and vanity. Here he was taken up by literary society and his first book of Ukrainian tales, “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka,” made such a sensation that he rapidly became a social lion. He produced more tales and attempted to become a teacher of history with small success. But he became increasingly the idol of the more idealistic Russian intellectuals whose spiritual home was Moscow, and whose aims were Slavophilism. Towards this group he gravitated increasingly. His comedy, “The Government Inspector,” was an immediate and unqualified success of mingled admiration and disparagement, and he was now able to go abroad, choosing Rome as a place of residence. From there, he came back to Russia, with the first part of his masterpiece “Dead Souls” (published 1842). But life abroad and still more the homage paid to him, had convinced him that he must have some greater mission than merely to be a writer. He must become a prophet, and regenerate Russia spiritually. His first attempt in this direction took the form of the religious prose polemic, “Select Passages from a Correspondence with Friends.” In this book, he throws overboard the St. Petersburg Liberals and the Moscow Slavophils alike, and reveals himself shamelessly as a preacher of nothing but dumb obedience to the Czar, ready to transform his mission of regeneration into the rôle of an upholder of complete reaction in religious and political matters. Only an intense egotist could have written such a book, with its attacks on all who had helped him in the past, and henceforth Gogol had no friends. He could not find peace either within or without Russia, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, restless self-abnegations, tormented repentances, were alike in vain. In 1852, he died having by his own act destroyed the greater portion of the manuscript of the second part of his “Dead Souls.”

The inner history of Gogol is that of a man who seeks freedom everywhere but can find it nowhere in the self-satisfied, petty bourgeois civilization of his epoch, with its scum of semi-concealed political corruption floating on the top of artificial manners, its apeing of foreign fashion, its sentimentality and sordidness. All this comes out very strongly in the novel which is Gogol’s unquestioned masterpiece, his “Dead Souls.” The hero of this book, Chichikov, is a sort of picture of Gogol himself, in his aimlessness, his self-satisfied inferiority, his timidity with women. He has conceived a brilliant plan, of obtaining an heiress in marriage by representing himself as a large landowner with a great number of serfs. To carry this plan into effect, he buys up from the landowners of a certain district, the serfs that have recently died or run away, and whose names, not having been struck off the census rolls, still leave their owners liable to payment of poll tax for them. Equipped with this list of “dead souls” he intends to pose as a wealthy man, but his scheme fails through his own impudence. Gogol certainly meant to make Chichikov attractive, and even to show his “regeneration” in the second part, which was never finished; but Chichikov remains at best a mean-spirited busybody, at worst a base adventurer with an undeveloped moral sense. What the book is chiefly remarkable for is its extraordinary portrait gallery of characters each set in their appropriate surroundings of Russian landscape. As Chichikov drives hither and thither on his enterprise of cheating, we are treated to a panorama of Russian landscape and of Russian life, and each is as dreary as the other. This novel has been compared to “Pickwick Papers,” but the laughter of “Dead Souls” is bitter and harsh and menacing. One cannot avoid a feeling as one reads on and on that the dead peasants whom Chichikov absorbs were at least once men, fully alive, unspoilt and integral (however degraded their conditions of existence); but that the living landowners who possess them--with the exception of the half-crazy old maid Korobotchka who gives the plot away, and the embittered miser Plyuskin,--are neither wholly alive nor honest. They are walking ghosts, horrible simulacra; rotting away within, the degenerate self-satisfied scions of all manner of public and private corruption.

“Dead Souls” remains valuable therefore chiefly as satire--a bitter satire by a “soul” itself in peril of death; one who had come to central Russia from the freer, wilder atmosphere of the frontier, and who had there earnestly sought for truth and beauty only to find stifling mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption. From this strain of satire, Gogol himself vainly sought escape; escape into the wild heroism of the old Cossack life vividly described in “Taras Bulba,” escape into peasant folklore, escape into morbid religious introspection. Gogol is usually credited with being the first thorough-going Russian realist, but in fact realism was to him always the enemy. On its face appeared the grin of the evil one, or the smirk of the hypocrite. Only once is Gogol the objective realist in his play the “Government Inspector.” Here he merely set down the facts, and gave his skill in dialogue a free run. The result was equal to the most bitter and cruel of all his satires; all the bitterer because here there is no fantasy to fly to, no charm of sentiment to colour it. For the whole of his life, Gogol struggled like a man in a net. He must speak the truth, but the truth only hurt him. He must create beauty. He had the courage to call “Dead Souls” a poem, and his whole career was like a boldly planned and beautifully conceived raid of a daring chief into the heart of a hostile country. But when he had arrived at the summit of his career, beauty still mocked him from far away. Gogol left Russian literature neither romantic nor realistic; he mingled humor with bitter earnest, and magnificence with sordidness. In the end he could not write any more. The warring forces within his soul tore him to pieces.

3

The career of Hawthorne, if we set aside slight differences in early environment and upbringing, was startlingly parallel. In his inner life, Hawthorne was the exact counterpart to Gogol. He was born in 1804 of what might be called America’s radical aristocracy, the long line of Puritan legalists, divines, and shipmasters that had been the bulwark of the attacks against England’s unifying and centralizing tendencies, from 1629 to the Revolution. An ancestor had taken part in the hanging of witches and whipping of Quakers; just as an ancestor of Gogol probably took part in the scenes of raid and rapine that are so vividly told in “Taras Bulba.” A delicate childhood, a melancholy, secretive and hypochondriac disposition, a precocious desire to write, complete the picture. But unlike Gogol, Hawthorne did not have to travel from his home to attain fame as a writer. He was born and already established at the centre where all movement of ideas took place: within sight of Boston. In his day, the force that had made the Revolution a success, and had given New England the intellectual and moral primacy of the New World, was already weakening. Further and further off the frontier was moving, across the Mississippi. As each new barrier interposed by nature was passed, the power of New England waned. Already its trade and shipping were passing into the hands of New York. Its population, moving out to the richer agricultural lands of the Middle West, were maintaining all the faults of the Puritan system, the greed, avarice, stiffness, and ugliness, without the redeeming Puritan mental discipline. Hawthorne was therefore almost the last flower of idealistic New England; the last flower of the old stock that was to produce the first fine fruit of American literature. And like Gogol, Hawthorne was primarily a humorist; but whereas Gogol’s humour is lit up by savage hatred (which blazes to a great flame in “Dead Souls,” despite Gogol), Hawthorne’s humor is made poignant by the nostalgic hopelessness of regret. Behind Gogol’s mask is a sneer; behind Hawthorne’s face one sees the terrible infinite vanity of all earthly things.

It is instructive in this respect, to compare Hawthorne’s finest novel, “The House of Seven Gables,” with Gogol’s masterpiece, “Dead Souls.” Where Gogol adopts a setting that seems to take in its sweep the whole of the Russian landscape, Hawthorne confines his action to the precincts of a single house. Yet in this small compass of space, with the use of barely more than half-a-dozen characters, he conveys the sense of a past stretching back to infinity; a past so remote, awful and unchangeable that the present day of his novel is but a feeble echo of its long-appointed doom. Over this thought of the past, as an event that cannot be recalled or redeemed, Hawthorne returns again and again, as Gogol returns again and again to his motive that the souls of his characters are really dead and can only be brought to life in the future. The ruin of a people is here summed up in the downfall of a single family within the four walls of a house, as in Gogol the same ruin pursues Chichikov everywhere. Both novels are novels about what are literally “dead souls”--Hepzibah and Clifford and old Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist Holgrave are as impotent to break the doom that weighs upon them as any of Gogol’s landowners. But the doom here is concentrated on a single point, whereas in Gogol it is widespread and diffused.

In his admirable study of Hawthorne, Henry James suggests that the “House of the Seven Gables” is more like a prelude or unfinished sketch for a novel than a complete story. We know that Gogol was unable to finish his novel, though he schemed that Chichikov should be regenerated. Hawthorne did finish his, but the last chapters are an anticlimax after what is the real end; the death of Judge Pyncheon, and the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford. The real end is the railway: “At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished ... the spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away.” This flight into the external world away from the accursed house which held them, is a liberation; it is a removal without an aim, a complete escape from “what we call real estate--the solid ground to build a house on--which is the broad foundation on which nearly all of the guilt of the world rests.” This, and not the weak anticlimax by which the story actually ends, is the real conclusion, so far as there can be any conclusion, in Hawthorne’s mind. To get away from property--to get away from land, to own nothing--that is Hawthorne’s solution, his magic charm for breaking the spell of the past.

In Gogol’s novel, the same flight motive, which Hawthorne introduces with skilful effect as a liberation from the House of Seven Gables, rotting into ruin, is introduced and maintained throughout the story. Chichikov moves hither and thither, forever aimless, forever wandering, seeking to obtain something lasting; a mythical estate, imaginary domain lures him on. He cannot be regenerated until he settles down and heroically transcends his sordid past. Hawthorne’s characters cannot be regenerated until they fly away from the past and become nonentities.

4

Here we see in its purest form the workings of that power-land antithesis that we have already described as lying at the root of the contrasted Russian and American psychology. The land on which Hawthorne’s own characters pursue their existence warps their characters; the power that the Russian helplessly desires to achieve, warps the minds not only of Chichikov, but of all the other landowners about him. Hawthorne himself could no more escape his heritage than Gogol. He attempted to escape, in brilliant excursions into folklore, such as “The Scarlet Letter,” in faintly objective comedy such as “The Blithedale Romance,” finally even in life abroad. But in the end he too had to confess himself beaten. The life of which he was so fine a recorder became more and more a regretful memory of tradition; and meantime the flood of democracy surged irresistibly past him to other aims. Hawthorne could only be outwardly, but not inwardly, a democrat. His political support of Franklin Pierce, and consequent upholding of the rights granted to the Southern States at the time of the making of the Constitution--including the right to hold slaves, and to extend their territory--made him anathema to his own neighbours, the abolitionists, to whom the Mexican War had become a shameful memory, and who were about to give their support to the mad fanatic, John Brown. Hawthorne went abroad after this, where he remained, very indecisive in his attitude and writings till the eve of the Civil War. That event disillusioned him completely. He declared publicly that he considered that John Brown had been justly hanged; and that the American’s allegiance, in the nature of things, was always to one’s own native state, rather than to the country as a whole. These remarks, duly deprecated by the editor of the paper in which they appeared, only served to show that Hawthorne was now as much of a disillusioned aristocrat as Gogol had been before him. He died, in a fit of black melancholia, after making several abortive attempts at writing a romance which would deal with the subject of a supposed elixir of life,--attempts which came to nothing. Like Gogol, he was one who had sought for happiness within his own country, and later without, and had found it nowhere; but could not abandon the idea that somewhere there existed a magic talisman that would set things right and make life worth living. Because of the bitter fanaticism of this hope--a hope which Europe from time to time also entertains but always abandons--Gogol and Hawthorne were the first supremely great figures in their national literatures.