Chapter XIII

The last chapter of our study of the two literatures--Russian and American--has, in its study of four great figures, brought the story to a climax. Nothing is more characteristic of the mental history of the two countries than the way in which under Whitman and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Melville, the whole problem of democracy in relation to art, and the whole problem of human aspiration in its strife with evil, was examined and investigated. But the generation that followed was not able to profit by their example. The great climax was succeeded by an anti-climax; and Russian literature, no less than American literature, after the seventies, assumes the picture of a sterile and uncultivated plain.

This state of affairs was due to the operation of social and economic causes. The great reforms adopted in Russia by Alexander II to signalise his advent to the throne were halted; first, by an attempt at assassination made in 1866; second, by the sort of advance _en masse_ which always takes place in Russian history after a period of increasing internal peace and prosperity. The surplus population of released serfs and discontented landowners now swarmed east across the Urals and opened up the whole of the fertile lands of Siberia to the borders of Mongolia. This expansion was followed by the usual reaction in the shape of a war with Russia’s old enemy Turkey (1877); a war in which Russia gained nothing, and which disillusioned everybody, including even the Slavophils.

The course of events in America was not essentially different. The close of the Civil War marked an enormous expansion of the American territory westward, and the whole region, from the foothills of the Rockies to the Sierras and beyond to the Pacific became inhabited. The first transcontinental railway was built in the shape of the Missouri Pacific; and the period of the seventies was a period of furious speculation, of fierce political tension, of steady industrial growth and agricultural expansion. In this “Gilded Age” of America’s new-won prosperity, the question of a native culture and of the fine arts were largely lost sight of. The only part of the country that resisted the general drive towards increasing economic and industrial development was the South, and that lay fettered and bound by the Reconstruction Acts, and was unable to do anything for itself until after 1876--the date of the Tilden-Hayes election.

The prevailing characteristic of this period is the increasing influence of Europe upon the two countries. Alexander Second’s action in liberating the serfs had thrown the gates open to all the ideas of European liberalism. The opening up of the western plains and the vast region between the Rockies and the Pacific with its wealth in minerals, as well as its cattle-raising possibilities, opened the gates no less to the countless hosts of European settlers. The Irish had already been coming since the terrible famine years of 1845-7, and the Germans too had come over ever since the forties. By the outbreak of the Civil War the original native-born population had begun to be outnumbered by the hosts of immigrants that passed steadily through the Narrows. After 1870, with the Prussian monarchy in complete control over Germany, the House of Savoy in control of Italy, and England less disposed than ever to give the Irish Home Rule, the swarms of immigrants increased, fed by thousands whose ancestors had fought and died in the cause of Republicanism in some part or the other of Europe, and by millions who were attracted across the Atlantic simply by the steamer-agent’s tales of Western prosperity. The Italians, notably, soon became as prominent as the Irish and the Germans; and to all these races were added Scandinavians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles from the eastern frontiers of Europe, and Jews from every part of the world. The three states of the remote northwest, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho increased their population from 282,000 in 1880 to 763,000 in 1890 and to two millions in 1910; while California which contained only five hundred thousand people when the first transcontinental railway was finished in 1869, added more than half the same number to its inhabitants in the next decade. In twenty years after 1870, the population of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas was increased sixfold. The city of Chicago which had only 350 population in 1833, by 1840 contained over four thousand, and in 1870 had swollen to the enormous figure of three hundred thousand! Thus while Russia added to its power by spreading a homogeneous population over immense tracts of unsettled country eastward, America obtained a firm grip on its own domain by importing heterogeneous populations into the vast tract of unsettled country westward.[7]

It is impossible, therefore, in the thirty years that followed 1865, to construct anything resembling a cultural history of either Russia or America. At least, literature will not serve so completely as an index to the flow of ideas that took place in this period. The Russian genius during this period manifested itself best in music; this was the period of Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin. In America the genius of the race took up architecture, and it was the Golden Age of Richard Morris Hunt, of Richardson, Root, McKim, Louis Sullivan, and of the craftsmen like La Farge and St. Gaudens who worked with them. In each case, it was a period of eclecticism. In Russia the German-Italian form of symphony and opera was borrowed, and was filled with a content that was essentially rooted in folk-emotion; in America the style of the Beaux-Arts or of Ancient Rome or the Early Middle Ages was equally borrowed, to be infused with native-born force and energy. The most original--because the least foreign--elements in this development had the most difficult task to survive. They had to learn how to speak their message of purely native inspiration in a language that, through derivation from European tradition, was completely alien to them. One might draw a not uninstructive parallel between Mussorgsky, the most Russian of Russian composers, and the gifted but unfortunate Louis Sullivan. Each had much to say to their generation that no one would accept. But this is not the place for such a comparison, inasmuch as we have from the outset decided to confine our critical investigation to the limits of a single art, that of literature.

2

American literature during the period of the seventies and eighties was entirely dominated by the figure of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to innumerable admirers as “Mark Twain.” At first sight, his work is on so much a lower level than that of Hawthorne, Henry James or Whitman as to be unworthy of consideration in the opinion of the few culture-saturated critics who mostly arrange and settle the merit of authors. And it is worth noticing that Clemens carried out his work without any particular encouragement from such intellectual critics. Their encouragement only came to him at the close of his life, when he was already writing sentimental and feebly grotesque satires on life in general, and vainly setting up as a philosopher with his assault on Christian Science, and the desolatingly mechanistic view of life set out in “What is Man?” The fact is, that for the latter part of his life, Mark Twain, profiting by an immense popularity, wrote nothing but superior journalism or feeble echoes of his own inimitable early self. That early self left an immortal residue in only three volumes--“Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and the first twenty chapters of “Life on the Mississippi.” If we add to this the figure of Colonel Mulberry Sellers in the book appropriately called “The Gilded Age,” and a few chapters of “Roughing It,” we obtain all of Mark Twain that posterity will presumably read and cherish.

Mark Twain is the perfect type of the backwoodsman in letters. His early training as a newspaper man gave him sufficient command over the written word to express himself clearly, and an early roving life, with its picturesque experience, did the rest. In so far as he had any philosophy of life at all, it was a doctrine to the effect that the uncultivated and native present day is worth all the feudal past, and that homely shrewdness and simplicity is better than spiritual and intellectual mastery. This doctrine has its affinities to the glorification of the “average man” preached by Whitman, and in the later Mark Twain one finds as it were, Whitman simplified and caricatured:--the Yankee is superior to King Arthur, democracy is superior to aristocracy, machinery is more than great painting and music, woman is inevitably a superior _genus_ to man. But no one reads Mark Twain for his philosophy nowadays, though thousands have read him for his unsurpassed pictures of frontier types, for his description of an America that has vanished before the advance of the modern mechanical civilisation which it brought in its train. The finest of his works, “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Life on the Mississippi,” are immense picaresque epics of irresponsible adventure. To find anything resembling them one has to go back to Europe of the sixteenth century. They represent a stage of history Europe had long outgrown; a youth-time in a world which was innocent alike of culture and of morality. Mark Twain himself said of his finest book that it had no moral, and that “they who find a plot in it, shall be shot.” In “Huckleberry Finn” there is no plot but only happenings: a mad, gay, and cruel _reductio ad absurdum_ of life itself, as lived under frontier conditions, with the incurable nostalgia for romantic and picturesque escapades (witness Jim’s release from the lock-up, or the episode of the false Dauphin and the Duke) leading the story on.

The proper parallel here is with Nicholas Leskov (or Lyeskov). This author, practically unknown out of Russia, owed his popularity among the uncultivated public to the astounding freshness of his rendering of remote Russian life--the life of priests in tiny villages, of fishermen and hunters, of tramps and vagabonds. It is only of recent years that foreign critics have observed that in reading Lyeskov, we are reading the most Russian of authors. Dostoevsky’s Russia is a distorted picture, tinged with his own spiritual struggle; Tolstoy’s is a great epic warped by his own perverse intellect; but Lyeskov is observer pure and simple. He too, like Clemens, had to suffer from an early period in which his work was utterly despised by the literary intelligentsia--who were more highly polished and socialistic, in a materialistic sense, in their work. He also had a late period in which he comes nearer and nearer to the sentimental side of Tolstoy, as Clemens had a period in which he apes Whitman. But the essential Lyeskov is the unsurpassed portrayer of the Russian frontier, and of its cruel, care-free, and purposeless life. His masterpiece, “The Enchanted Wanderer,” recently translated into English, is even in its translation a work of immense sane humanity and humour. Like “Huckleberry Finn,” it is a picaresque novel, and like that book it has neither plot nor moral. It is folk-tale pure and simple, stripped of all accretions of superstition, symbolism, and magic, and with nothing but the rounded note of a persistent religious nostalgia (akin to Tom Sawyer’s nostalgic longings for romance and adventure) to give it coherence.

It would be a mistake however to suppose that either Lyeskov or Mark Twain were anything more than exceptions in the course of their respective literatures during this period. The whole epoch from 1870 down to the end of the century is marked by a progressive drifting apart of the two countries which had so nearly coincided in spirit in Whitman and Tolstoy, Melville and Dostoevsky. This drifting apart was marked by an increasing outward standardisation of effort. It was during this period that the standardised Russian revolutionary, mouthing all the catchwords of advanced European materialism, began to appear, to be matched by his contemporary, the standardised American business man. Each class consumed the sort of literature that was suited to its palate. In Russia there flourished the peasant novel of highly socialistic tendencies, the works of Gleb Uspensky, Pissemsky, Korolenko, and the bitterer and more intellectually upright Saltykov-Schedrin. In America the type of fiction most in demand dealt mainly with cultivated, well-to-do people, was generally optimistic in outlook, but was no less surely an article prepared to satisfy popular demand. Its best output was in the tales of Howells, Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Mrs. Wharton. The honest peasant of the one matches pretty completely the upright capitalist (usually the last scion of an old southern or New England family) of the other. But the line of advance, which was to produce the most revolutionary fruit in the nineties, lay through the short story.

3

The short story as practised in the Occident throughout the nineteenth century, is in fact a typically oversophisticated and decadent art-form. To the mind of the highly cultured but impotently sensitive reader it presents not the great curve of emotion that the finest poetry offers, not the “allegory addressed to the intellectual imagination” of great prose, not even the panoramic viewpoint of outer action or of spiritual abysses that the novel reveals, but a cool complete piece of minor architecture, a fragment of life, a detached statement that has neither past nor future implied in it. The short stories of the East are largely different. They are popular epics, and different also in their moral earnestness and immense range in short compass are the short stories of Balzac, Flaubert, Hawthorne. The technically perfect modern short story has no moral earnestness, no message, it merely is an incident revealed so completely as to leave no loophole for the imagination. It is objective reporting, informed by a mood; and no one carried the art of short story writing further in these respects than the American Stephen Crane and the Russian Anton Tchekhov.

The comparison between the methods of Crane and Tchekhov has been made before, but it is one that will bear reiteration. It extends even to personal and social characteristics. Both were descendants of old petty bourgeois families, long settled on the soil. Both graduated through journalism into their art. Tchekhov began by writing quite commonplace and feeble comic stories, and Crane wasted a great deal of his time on hackwork. Both were irregular workers, and were men of feeble health. Indeed the only difference is that Tchekhov, thanks to his life as a country physician, matured later and gained a greater final mastery over his material than Crane.

The aim of both was an entirely impersonal and objective presentation of life. This has been called realism, but in both Crane’s and Tchekhov’s case, it came nearer impressionism than realism. Each was at the mercy of a single mood which is reiterated in their stories _ad nauseam_. In Tchekhov’s case the mood is deliberately low-toned, sombre, and neutral--a mood of resignation, of quiescence, of Buddhistic absorption into Nirvana. In Crane’s case the mood is one of racketing excitement, fierce and brutal display of energy. On these two moods each exhausted the resources of their art: Crane his color vowels, and sudden startling comparisons; Tchekhov his monotonous deliberately prosaic effect. But in each case, the mood flows out of an attitude towards life that is the same. To both the world, and particularly nature, is deliberately hostile, alien to the human spirit. Before this tragic fact, Tchekhov counselled acceptance, endurance; Crane on the other hand advocated a furious display of heroic energy. Thus Crane is most completely the artist when his frequently violent satiric intention is laid aside, and he can play the part of the poet of action, as in the superb “Red Badge of Courage,” which first won him fame, and which is free from his stoical fatalism. Tchekhov is, on the other hand, at his best in his plays, notably “The Cherry Orchard,” where he loses sight of his own sentimentalism, and works with at least some underlying satiric intent. Neither, however, ever wrote a complete masterpiece, nor were they capable of doing so. Despite the activities of the Tchekhov cult we must insist that the American at his best frequently appears the finer artist, as in this story already mentioned, or in “The Open Boat.” He at least had a supreme power of visualising a scene, and a trick of individualising his characters by one outstanding trait or peculiarity which the Russian lacked, though this is perhaps counterbalanced by Tchekhov’s more complete mastery over architectural form.

Both were minor writers, because they were fatalists. To the great writer life is a fatality, frequently a tragedy, but not a tragedy preordained. But this sense of being doomed by external fatality, by the insignificant fact, is the very basis of Tchekhov’s work--and the same sense haunted Crane in his brief, agitated life. They were both, it is possible, depressed beyond the normal in their personal temperaments. But still more certainly, the period in which they lived was one in which major art was not possible. In America the plutocrats of the Gilded Age were going down in a blaze of glory. Outrageous and shameless coarseness and corruption was mingled with hypocritic parade of lip-service to genteel virtue; European snobbery walked arm in arm with a pretence of democratic simplicity. In Russia, the dreary record of reaction under Alexander III was trailing to its unhonoured grave in the sink of official corruption under Nicholas. Both Crane and Tchekhov were victims of their times, and both held the art for art’s sake theory far more sincerely probably than their European contemporaries. Both with supreme skill showed that even when held sincerely, it but resulted in the best cases, in something philosophically incomplete; at the worst, in a personal tic, a mannerism.

4

The high technical level to which Crane and Tchekhov had brought their art, combined with their avoidance of philosophic content, were both symptoms of the gulf down which the American and the Russian spirit had descended since the high-water mark in the sixties. Multitudes of men now knew that something was wrong; but few could suggest a remedy. Two men, however, by their personal effort, attempted at least to stay or fix the retrograde movement of the spirit by attempting the _Weltanschauung_ of a formal philosophy. These men were Vladimir Soloviev and William James.

Before their coming, neither country had known anything resembling a formal philosophy. Emerson, it is true, had raised himself to the dignity of being ranked as one; but Emerson was in truth at bottom partly a mystic poet, partly a shrewd detached commentator on events. His best work bears as little relation to philosophy definitely so called, as the more pessimistically colored--but not less philosophical in content--poetry of Tyutchev bears to the German transcendentalism of his time. In any case, James did not derive his philosophy from Emerson, but from an attitude much more matter-of-fact. He obtained it from the New England practical spirit, the “desire to get on in life,” the everyday common sense that was, when he wrote, proving so morally inadequate to deal with the ever-increasing problems of capitalism and industrialism. In his insistence on practicality, on the “truth that works,” on “the cash-value of thought,” William James was nearer to the needs and demands of the average man as posited by Whitman; and much of his democratic outlook, his homely honesty of phrase was in fact due to Whitman. Similarly Soloviev drew his own preoccupation with moral problems, not from any preceding thinker, but direct from the piercing analysis of Dostoevsky.

Both James and Soloviev were educated and spent much of their lives abroad. The substance of their thought was derived in part from European, in part from American sources. The aim in each case was to reconcile two divergent streams of thought, to bring them into harmony. James after an early career in which he had tried to be an artist, engineer and physician in turn, turned to psychology. But his real interest lay outside the bounds of psychology--at that time dominated by the methods of the purely psycho-physical school. His early upbringing as a Swedenborgian, as well as a highly sensitive temperament, drew him to the investigation of religious phenomena, and all his life he strove to reconcile the higher ranges of mysticism, ecstasy, union with God, heroic self-sacrifice, with the plain common-sense of the average American type. Thus he was led to attempt to find a common ground between “radical empiricism”--the search for the usable truth, the trial-and-error, rule-of-thumb, method of the pragmatist--and the utterly unpractical absolute standpoint of the visionary. In order to do so, he had to attack the point of view of the earlier idealists of the Kant and Hegel type, men who had inherited something of the old methods of scholasticism. He had to treat human life and aspiration not as an end, but an instrument; and to regard the universe not as a finished article, but as a pluralistic chaos. That he still strove to redeem that chaos consequently became merely a personal gesture, and not at all a question of final significance. In this, too, he resembles his spiritual progenitor, Walt Whitman.

Vladimir Soloviev was trained as a historian. He absorbed the historical sense from his father who had written a history of Russia, and his early work was devoted to Church History. In examining the history of Christianity he was struck by the fact that the Eastern and Western Churches had separated, and that neither was in agreement with Protestantism. This schism seemed to him to show that Christianity had somehow failed to fulfil the aim of its Founder, and he set himself the task of preaching the necessity of an undivided Church. This was the substance of his book “Russia and the Universal Church” which with its definitely Romanising tone was forbidden by the Russian censorship and had to appear first in a French translation. But even the Roman Church could not hold him for long. Christianity itself was worthless as a revelation of God’s purpose to man, except where based on a universal moral law, the “natural religion” of the eighteenth-century deists. To find this moral law seemed to him the aim of science; to invest it with all the grandeur of a revelation from on high was the purpose of religion. Thus Soloviev was led to try and reconcile the evolutionary theory of the West with the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In so doing he was forced to oppose the theories of the Schopenhauer and Tolstoy school which would strip religion of all its magic and mystic significance, and reduce life to passive non-resistance; a tendency which as he pointed out, was Buddhist, not Christian.

Moreover there remained for Soloviev the outstanding question which was, “If there is a universal moral law and if the Church itself can teach that law better than the Tolstoyan rationalist, why is there so much evil in the world, and what is the way to get rid of this evil?” The answer was that the evil was permitted by God, and that the only way to get rid of it was through ascetism, mortification of the flesh. There can be no doubt that Soloviev through the adoption of ascetic practices, deliberately shortened his own life. He was led therefore more and more to a position in which the whole history of the world appears as simply a gigantic conflict between Good and Evil. This position is not Christian; it is in reality, Manichean. There is not one God, but two; God and Satan divide mankind between themselves, until the end of the world. Thus Soloviev ultimately found his problem unsolvable, and lapsed into a pluralism more logical and definite, and far more honest and despairing than the optimistic pluralism of James.

It seems a great tragedy that the American in the end gave his adherence to the philosophy of Bergson, with its aimless yielding to the endless flux, and its refusal of all stability to the intellect; while the Russian in his turn, preoccupied with the problem of evil, saw in the end Tolstoy as a precursor of Antichrist and wrote the half-insane rhapsody of the end of history which fills the last pages of his “Three Conversations.” But in reality this tragedy was inevitable in both cases. The endless flux of Bergsonism bolstered James in the last of his illusions, the illusion that all good Americans are born and die with, the illusion that in the race of modern progress, America is ahead of the world and the world will be saved through her; while Soloviev’s ultimate denial of moral progress, apart from the established Orthodox faith, saved the last of his illusions, the typically Russian illusion that Russia by remaining backward and resisting the West, will yet save the world. Each of these men is a standing proof that outside the frontiers of Europe, impersonal thought, thought that is detached from daily circumstances is utterly impossible. Each is a vivid, embittered, and intensely honest and typical commentary on the hollowness and pretentiousness of European philosophy, when applied to conditions of life that remain outside the orbit of purely European interests.

5

With the onset of the twentieth century, we witness America and Russia taking up the same weapons in their rearguard battle with cosmopolitanism and Europeanism. The weapon in each case is that of realism. Thus in each country a school of writers sprung up to whom literature was largely a protest against unequal social conditions, injustices in the body politic, the yawning cleft between the rich and the poor, and the moral decay consequent upon the general nineteenth-century “_laissez-faire_” attitude. It is profitable to compare the school which is represented by Gorky, Kuprin, Bunin, in Russia with the group whose leading members in America were Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Robert Herrick. But we cannot really distinguish these writers on the basis of literary merit. They gave us naturalistic documents rather than artistic interpretations. Their work was interesting as protest mainly: the _Weltanschauung_ of these writers, if they possessed one, was pure naturalism, and as naturalists pure and simple they produced documents but not art. Some exception might be made for Gorky and Mrs. Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” but except for the fact that the Americans chose their favourite heroes from business men enmeshed in their own toils, and the Russians from tramps and outlaws, there is but little otherwise to choose between them.

It is more instructive to note the damage which the theories of this group did to highly talented individual artists, like Leonid Andreiev and Jack London. Both might, under happier auspices, have been poets and it is worth noting that whenever either dealt with the material most known to them, the life of little insignificant out-of-the-way villages in the case of Andreiev (“The Governor,” or “In the Fog”) or the life of the untamed frontier in the case of London (“The Call of the Wild,” “Burning Daylight”), each wrote something that might be called a minor classic. But Andreiev’s pretentious and melodramatic insistence on the “madness and horror,” the void of life, together with his heavy sentimentalism (derived from doses of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy) is as meaningless to us as was London’s confused minglings of Nietzschean master-morality with crude Socialistic strivings. London’s “Sea Wolf” is, as a character, as much a bit of pasteboard as Andreiev’s “Lazarus.” Both London and his Russian contemporary, were supremely honest men, who rejected with contempt the hypocritical lip-service to theory paid by the social reformers of their days; both preferred to be immoralists rather than sentimentalists, and it is for this that we must respect them, rather than for any good work. For it is obvious that both had their heads turned by early successes, and were victims of their own love of melodramatic excess. That two such men should have lacked moral stability sufficient to keep them from drinking themselves to death, shows how far the social order in America and Russia of their time was on the way to the abyss.

After their day the drive to naturalism continued, but on a lower level, having largely thrown overboard the general flavour of moral teaching that still persisted in the work of the earlier naturalists. The figure of the “business superman” appeared in America as the figure of the “sexual superman” appeared in Russia. Theodore Dreiser became responsible for the one, and Mikhail Artzybashev for the other. Whether there is really very much to choose between them as art-products is a question that time must settle. It is more important to note that this phase did not in any case last long. Between the year 1900 and the outbreak of the great war there rose up in both countries a revolt against the “social document,” and the naturalistic attitude towards life. This revolt took the form mainly of a more symbolical treatment of facts, and it expressed itself not in prose but in poetry. Thus Robinson, Frost, Lindsay, Sandburg, Miss Lowell, Conrad Aiken and Robinson Jeffers had their counterparts in time and aim in Balmont, Bryusov, Blok, Bely, Viacheslav Ivanov and Pasternak. The value of their work becomes more doubtful, as the younger, more savagely objective, post-war generation takes the field to-day. What is important to observe is that while cosmopolitan Naturalism held the field in 1900, by 1915 the situation was reversed and a new and more native symbolism, combined with a groping mysticism, derived from very primitive sources, and strongly dashed with sexual imagery, took its place. This even affected the prose writers such as Sologub and Sherwood Anderson.

This extraordinary reversal of literary taste, which took place in the limits of one half a generation, is a tragic indication of the fact that the mentality of Russia and America had already grown unstable. Instead of the long quarrel between upholders of mystic orthodoxy and advanced materialists, between Slavophils and Westernizers, literary conservators and outlaws, being settled, it had grown more acute until the whole structure of society was rent by it from top to bottom. In the early twentieth century both Russia and America had to choose to break again with their past, to become something essentially different, as they had chosen in 1688, between 1773 and 1790, and in 1860. To show what the break was, and its results, it is necessary to turn back to the course of our interrupted historical survey.