Lectures on Russian Literature Part 3

Beckon in vain for her thou wilt, My everlasting shame, my guilt!

Me forget thou shalt for aye, But thee forget shall not I; Shelter thou shalt receive from strangers; Who'll say: Thou art none of ours!

Thou wilt ask: Where are my parents?

But for thee no kin is found.

Hapless one! with heart filled with sorrow, Lonely amid thy mates, Thy spirit sullen to the end Thou shalt behold the fondling mothers.

A lonely wanderer everywhere, Cursing thy fate at all times, Thou the bitter reproach shalt hear ...

Forgive me, oh, forgive me then!

Asleep! let me then, O hapless one, To my bosom press thee once for all; A law unjust and terrible Thee and me to sorrow dooms.

While the years have not yet chased The guiltless joy of thy days, Sleep, my darling; let no bitter griefs Mar thy childhood's quiet life!"

But lo, behind the woods, near by, The moon brings a hut to light.

Forlorn, pale, trembling To the doors she came nigh; She stooped, and gently laid down The babe on the strange threshold.

In terror away she turned her eyes And disappeared in the darkness of the night.

12. This also is a narrative poem; but it tells something more than a story. A new element is here added. For it not only gratifies our curiosity about the mother and the babe, but it also moves us. And it moves not our low pa.s.sion, but it stirs our high emotion. Not our anger is here roused, as against the owner of the black shawl, but our pity is stirred for the innocent babe; and even the mother, though guilty enough, stirs our hearts. Here, too, as in the "Black Shawl," the art of the narrator is perfect. The few touches of description are given only in so far as they vivify the scene and furnish a fit background for the mother and child. But the theme is already of a higher order, and in rank I therefore place the "Outcast" one plane above the "Black Shawl."

13. The two poems I have just read you are essentially ballads; they deal indeed with emotion, but only incidentally. Their chief purpose is the telling of the story. I shall now read you some specimens of a higher order of poetry,--of that which reflects the pure emotion which the soul feels when beholding beauty in Nature. I consider such poetry as on a higher plane, because this emotion is at bottom a reverence before the powers of Nature, hence a wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. It is at bottom a confession of the soul of its humility before its Creator. It is the constant presence of this emotion which gives permanent value to the otherwise tame and commonplace writings of Wordsworth. Wordsworth seldom climbs the height he attains in those nine lines, the first of which are:--

"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky."

But here Pushkin is always on the heights. And the first I will read you shall be one in which the mere sense of Nature's beauty finds vent in expression without any conscious ethical purpose. It is an address to the last cloud.

THE CLOUD.

O last cloud of the scattered storm, Alone thou sailest along the azure clear; Alone thou bringest the darkness of shadow; Alone thou marrest the joy of the day.

Thou but recently hadst encircled the sky, When sternly the lightning was winding about thee.

Thou gavest forth mysterious thunder, Thou hast watered with rain the parched earth.

Enough; hie thyself. Thy time hath pa.s.sed.

The earth is refreshed, and the storm hath fled, And the breeze, fondling the leaves of the trees, Forth chases thee from the quieted heavens.

14. Observe, here the poet has no ultimate end but that of giving expression to the overflowing sense of beauty which comes over the soul as he beholds the last remnant of a thunder-storm floating off into airy nothingness. But it is a beauty which ever since the days of Noah and his rainbow has filled the human soul with marvelling and fearing adoration. Beautiful, then, in a most n.o.ble sense this poem indeed is.

Still, I cannot but consider the following few lines to the Birdlet, belonging as the poem does to the same cla.s.s with "The Cloud," as still superior.

THE BIRDLET.

G.o.d's birdlet knows Nor care nor toil; Nor weaves it painfully An everlasting nest; Through the long night on the twig it slumbers; When rises the red sun, To the voice of G.o.d listens birdie, And it starts and it sings.

When spring, nature's beauty, And the burning summer have pa.s.sed, And the fog and the rain By the late fall are brought, Men are wearied, men are grieved; But birdie flies into distant lands, Into warm climes, beyond the blue sea,-- Flies away until the spring.

15. For a poem of this cla.s.s this is a veritable gem; for not only is its theme a thing of beauty, but it is a thing of tender beauty. Who is there among my hearers that can contemplate this birdlet, this wee child of G.o.d, as the poet hath contemplated it, and not feel a gentleness, a tenderness, a meltedness creep into every nook and corner of his being?

But the lyric beauty of the form, and the tender emotion roused in our hearts by this poem, form by no means its greatest merit. To me the well-nigh inexpressible beauty of these lines lies in the spirit which s.h.i.+neth from them,--the spirit of unreserved trust in the fatherhood of G.o.d. "When fog and rain by the late fall are brought, men are wearied, men are grieved, but birdie--" My friends, the poet has written here a commentary on the heavenly words of Christ, which may well be read with immeasurable profit by our wiseacres of supply-and-demand economy, and the consequence-fearing a.s.sociated or Dissociated Charity. For if I mistake not, it was Christ that uttered the strangely unheeded words, "Be not anxious for the morrow.... Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feedeth them." Fine words these, to be read reverently from the pulpit on Sunday, but to be laughed at in the counting-room and in the charity-office on Monday. But the singer was stirred by this trustfulness of birdie, all the more beautiful because unconscious, and accordingly celebrates it in lines of well-nigh unapproachable tenderness and grace!

16. There is, however, one realm of creation yet grander and n.o.bler than that visible to the eye of the body. Higher than the visible stands the invisible; and when the soul turns from the contemplation of the outward universe to the contemplation of the inward universe, to the contemplation of affection and aspiration, its flight must of necessity be higher. Hence the high rank of those strains of song which the soul gives forth when stirred by affection, by love to the children of G.o.d, whether they be addressed by Wordsworth to a b.u.t.terfly, by Burns to a mouse, or by Byron to a friend. You have in English eight brief lines which for this kind of song are a model from their simplicity, tenderness, and depth.

LINES IN AN ALb.u.m.

As over the cold, sepulchral stone Some name arrests the pa.s.ser-by, Thus when thou viewest this page alone May mine attract thy pensive eye.

And when these lines by thee are read Perchance in some succeeding year, Reflect on me as on the dead, And think my heart is buried here!

17. It is this song of love for one's kind which makes Burns, Heine, and Goethe pre-eminently the singers of the human heart when it finds itself linked to one other heart. And it is this strain which gives everlasting life to the following breath of Pushkin's muse:

TO A FLOWER.

A floweret, withered, odorless, In a book forgot I find; And already strange reflection Cometh into my mind.

Bloomed where? When? In what spring?

And how long ago? And plucked by whom?

Was it by a strange hand, was it by a dear hand?

And wherefore left thus here?

Was it in memory of a tender meeting?

Was it in memory of a fated parting?

Was it in memory of a lonely walk In the peaceful fields, or in the shady woods?

Lives he still? lives she still?

And where is their nook this very day?

Or are they too withered, Like unto this unknown floweret?

18. But from the love of the individual the growing soul comes in time to the love of the race; or rather, we only love an individual because he is to us the incorporation of some ideal. And let the virtue for which we love him once be gone, he may indeed keep our good will, but our love for him is clean gone out. This is because the soul in its ever-upward, heavenward flight alights with its love upon individuals solely in the hope of finding here its ideal, its heaven realized. But it is not given unto one person to fill the whole of a heaven-searching soul. Only the ideal, G.o.d alone, can wholly fill it. Hence the next strain to that of love for the individual is this longing for the ideal, a longing for what is so vague to most of us, a longing to which therefore not wholly inappropriately the name has been given of a longing for the Infinite.

19. And of this longing, Heine has given in eight lines immeasurably pathetic expression:

"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Hoh'.

Ihn schlafert; mit weisser Decke Umhullen ihn Eis und Schnee.

Er traumt von einer Palme, Die, fern im Morgenland, Einsam und schweigend trauert Auf brennender Felsenwand."

Heine has taken the evergreen pine in the cold clime, as the emblem of this longing, and a most n.o.ble emblem it is. But I cannot help feeling that in choosing a fallen angel, as Pushkin has on the same subject, he was enabled to give it a zenith-like loftiness and a nadir-like depth not to be found in Heine.

THE ANGEL.

At the gates of Eden a tender Angel With drooping head was s.h.i.+ning; A demon gloomy and rebellious Over the abyss of h.e.l.l was flying.

The spirit of Denial, the spirit of Doubt, The spirit of purity espied; And unwittingly the warmth of tenderness He for the first time learned to know.

Adieu, he spake. Thee I saw; Not in vain hast thou shone before me.

Not all in the world have I hated, Not all in the world have I scorned.

20. Hitherto we have followed Pushkin only through his unconscious song; only through that song of which his soul was so full as to find an outlet, as it were, without any deliberate effort on his part. But not even unto the bard is it given to remain in this childlike health. For Nature ever works in circles. Starting from health, the soul indeed in the end arrives at health, but only through the road of disease. And a good portion of the conscious period in the life of the soul is taken up by doubt, by despair, by disease. Hence when the singer begins to reflect, to philosophize, his song is no longer that of health. This is the reason why Byron and Sh.e.l.ley have borne so little fruit. Their wail is the cry not of a mood, but of their whole being; it is not the cry of health temporarily deranged, but the cry of disease. With the healthy Burns, on the other hand, his poem, "Man was made to Mourn," reflects only a stage which all growing souls must pa.s.s. So Pushkin, too, in his growth, at last arrives at a period when he writes the following lines, not the less beautiful for being the offspring of disease, as all lamentation must needs be:--

"Whether I roam along the noisy streets, Whether I enter the peopled temple, Or whether I sit by thoughtless youth, My thoughts haunt me everywhere.

"I say, swiftly go the years by: However great our number now, Must all descend the eternal vaults,-- Already struck has some one's hour.

"And if I gaze upon the lonely oak, I think: The patriarch of the woods Will survive my pa.s.sing age As he survived my father's age.