Part 15

A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a genius for consolation--a genius for stretching out a hand to his floundering fellow-mortals--it was Tchehov. He was as active in service as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary men of genius. His attitude to Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend, Suvorin, editor of the _Novoe Vremya_, he wrote:

The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic--they are going towards something and summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects--the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects--God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.

Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his trial--that is unworthy of literature.”

We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English translation of his letters:

He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings.

This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In one letter he writes:

I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there all over Russia--educated people or peasants--they have strength though they are few.

In another letter he says:

Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come to know the truth of the real God--that is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four.

If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is an enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-marks and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.

In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort of realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent parable:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world. Writers must not imitate Ham....

On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the practice of honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is the object of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:

A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough, he mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent, out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers, would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?

In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,” he declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the great artist will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and withheld it from others.

On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual men, not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend from his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest often comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a widower, and has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a priest who is a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an unthinkable paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in nature: he accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was indifferent to the vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one occasion to a great journalist: “Why do they write nothing about prostitution in your paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our Sobelev street is a regular slave-market.”

Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He had the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also the doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in opposite directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war, instead of weakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great artist is a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to have lived aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that repeated summons to reconciliation in his plays is the _credo_ of a man who has plumbed the great secret of the liberalism of his time and, equally, of ours. Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. He tells us the truth even when it is most cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes like a doctor going his rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the sick world. That is why his stories delight us as the synthetic golden syrup of more optimistic authors never does.

XII

NIETZSCHE: A NOTE

“_And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros._” Nietzsche writes in one of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence” in an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt image of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude made him perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness. There are few more amazing passages in the annals of literature than those containing the last letters between the mad Nietzsche and the mad Strindberg. Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1888:

I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order ... to be shot.

Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.

On one condition only. Let us divorce.

Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving mad,” and concluded it:

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true to your

STRINDBERG (The best, the highest God).

Nietzsche’s reply was:

MR. STRINDBERG:

Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!

“THE CRUCIFIED.”

Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however, goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and a generous enemy”--“not the slightest trace of any lack of judgment”--“perfectly healthy and lucid”--such are the phrases in which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that “even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect sense.” Here is the letter:

TO THE FRIEND GEORG.

Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.

“THE CRUCIFIED.”

It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one of the inspired guides to life.

Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” About the same time--it was in 1880--he wrote:

One ceases from loving oneself properly when one _ceases_ from exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)

Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism, but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times too _low_.” He declares that he naturally belonged to “the modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her from Turin:

Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the world express their loyalty to me--the most charming women, a _Madame la Princesse Tenichefl_ not by any means excepted. I have genuine geniuses among my admirers--to-day there is no name that is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You see that is the feat--sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.

Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such adolescent advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:

... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about fifteen books (--among them that _non plus ultra_ “Zarathustra”), no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,” “psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity--but how is it that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop of human sympathy, not a breath of love.

He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding. “You do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in which the question of millenniums has been decided--speaking quite literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him with regard to Dostoievsky:

He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time quite _sadique_. His morals are wholly what you have christened “Slave Morality.”

“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.

Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however, brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:

I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I wished to get the new trousers.

At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.

There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:

Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”

This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time. This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.

In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of his imagination.

XIII

MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC

Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” Now, there are several things about _Hamlet_ that call for explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill, why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement, and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism. He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that there are “only a few of us”--perhaps “only one of us”--saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be left to the _précieuses ridicules_.

Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that _Hamlet_ is an artistic failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He believes that:

Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.