Old and New Masters Part 15

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the rivals of the G.o.d of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid p.r.o.ne as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, no doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.

Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is Tchehov. He is so obviously not a G.o.d. He does not deliver messages to us from the mountain-top like Tolstoy, or reveal himself beautifully in sunset and star like Turgenev, or announce himself now in the hurricane and now in the thunderstorm like Dostoevsky. He is a man and a medical doctor. He pays professional visits. We may define his genius more exactly by saying that his is a general practice. There has, I think, never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as in the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the average man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people into books. They have written plays longer than _Hamlet_, and novels longer than _Don Quixote_, about ordinary people. They have piled such a heap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him out of existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has a sense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the big subject to literature.

Henry James complained of the littleness of the subject in _Madame Bovary._ He regarded it as one of the miracles of art that so great a book should have been written about so small a woman. _Tom Jones_, on the other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which few people complain. But then _Tom Jones_ is a comedy, and we enjoy the continual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom the common man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At the same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself, indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature.

Were it not for the oppression of his futile and philoprogenitive presence, imaginative writers would be poets and romancers.

The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinary people are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities is how to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will become better company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves the problem better than any of the other novelists. He sees, for one thing, that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumbling towards some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to be a break in the meanest life.

Tchehov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy. He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular novelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbia.s.sed att.i.tude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr.

Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circ.u.mstances and feelings with such finality that to pa.s.s judgment on them appears supererogatory." Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough--as clear as if it followed a summing-up from the bench. He portrays his characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the judgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moral and material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt as to their being ugly. His att.i.tude to a large part of life might be described as one of good-natured disgust.

In one of the newly-translated stories, _Ariadne_, he shows us a woman from the point of view of a disgusted lover. It is a sensitive man's picture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful. "This thirst for personal success ... makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to me, to nature, and to music." Tchehov extends towards her so little charity that he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a neck like goose-skin and a big Adam's apple," and who, as he talked, "breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled beef." As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her charm:

She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples or oranges.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover dissatisfied with l.u.s.t, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment, however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring and vulgar in s.e.xual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will to fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's critical mind:

She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete nonent.i.ty before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in tournaments.... She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great a.s.sembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting me.

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

As one reads _Ariadne_, one feels that those who say the artist is not a judge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is a prosecuting--perhaps even a defending--counsel.

Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no more in love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades as vice. _An Artist's Story_--a beautiful sad story, which might almost have been written by Turgenev--contains a fine critical portrait of a woman absorbed in the egoism of good works. She is always looking after the poor, serving on committees, full of enthusiasm for nursing and education. She lacks only that charity of the heart which loves human beings, not because they are poor, but because they are human beings.

She is by nature a "boss." She "bosses" her mother and her younger sister, and when the artist falls in love with the latter, the stronger will of the woman of high principles immediately separates lovers so frivolous that they had never sat on a committee in their lives. When, the evening after the artist confesses his love, he waits for the girl to come to him in the garden of her house, he waits in vain. He goes into the house to look for her, but does not find her. Then through one of the doors he overhears the voice of the lady of the good works:

"'G.o.d ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating--"'G.o.d sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow ... A piece of cheese ... Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps.

"It's I."

"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving Dasha her lesson."

"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad,"

she added after a pause. "'G.o.d sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese....' Have you written it?"

I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese ... G.o.d sent the crow a piece of cheese."

And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time--first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note.

"I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. G.o.d will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"

The people who cannot wound others--those are the people whose sharp pangs we feel in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s as we read the stories of Tchehov. The people who wound--it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In _Anyuta_, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in its squalor:

Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big filthy slop--pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion....

And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which a great part of the human race lives, neither are the people more beautiful than ordinary people. In _The Trousseau_, the poor thin girl who spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will never take place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of a stranger into her mother's house:

Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red first, and then the flush pa.s.sed up to her eyes and her forehead.

I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of it is distressing.

The woman in _The Darling_, who marries more than once and simply cannot live without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" to look at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish and adoring--especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin, yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on his forehead," and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment of endearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"

Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov's stories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathy in himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. His world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the same vision of men and women as lost sheep.

We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story writer who has yet appeared on the planet.

XX

LADY GREGORY

It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore, imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of Moliere, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her contemporaries.

She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr.

G.A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._, she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpa.s.ses the others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-cla.s.s patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a sort of aristocracy in exile.

Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great inheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did.

She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its hollows, its exquisite illogic, its pa.s.sionate underflow of poetry. Has she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of Bartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met a melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America." Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with the genius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful in her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her situations are as mad as hatters.

Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril.

Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she was not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her best dramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming it into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be translated. Thus, she gave us Moliere in Kiltartan--a ridiculously successful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In _Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking, not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the first of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers in their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this message from her:--

Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of.

And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!

I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard man--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as Macpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--

It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the big red sally tree beside the stream!

To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.

If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these pa.s.sages of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own notes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records a number of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in the plays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" of her book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note on _Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which Brian Boru defeated the Danes:--

Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the c.o.c.k crows in the morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark."

Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in that little note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three about Brian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book are nearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much more successful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies.

She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first and best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where the tragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days of Elizabeth. The princ.i.p.al character is a cowardly miller, who ensues nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties which is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of the neighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on the other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English Army. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terror is the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and his brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She flies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in a later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed to have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes in both his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicized under the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; it turns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_, however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive its occasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothing from their historical setting.

_The White c.o.c.kade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too, is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _White c.o.c.kade_ was produced," Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hear that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to turn from _The White c.o.c.kade_ to the impossible scene outside the post-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for the third of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interesting curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King's nursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characters talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and, in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers, invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_, even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a wonderful world of folk-history.