And Even Now
release! There would be processions, too; and who knows but that there
might even be a miracle vouchsafed, a rending of the veil? The only
procession that passes him is that of the intimidated orphans. No
heavenly power intervenes for him--perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for
fear of offending the Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously
at his back, but never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never
rots it. There is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a
shame and incubus to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted,
yet made a fool of; taken and left; a monument to Fate’s malice.
From under the hem of his weather-beaten domino, always, he just
displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and
serviceable marble boot. And this, I have begun to believe, is all that
I shall ever see of him. Else might I not be writing about him; for else
had he not so haunted me. If I knew myself destined to see him--to see
him steadily and see him whole--no matter how many years hence, I could
forthwith think about other things. I had hoped that by this essay I
might rid my mind of him. He is inexcutible, confound him! His pedestal
draws me to itself with some such fascination as had the altar of
the unknown god for the wondering Greek. I try to distract myself
by thinking of other images--images that I have seen. I think of
Bartolommeo Colleoni riding greatly forth under the shadow of the
church of Saint John and Saint Paul. Of Mr. Peabody I think, cosy in his
armchair behind the Royal Exchange; of Nelson above the sparrows, and of
Perseus among the pigeons; of golden Albert, and of Harvey the not red.
Up looms Umberto, uncouthly casting them one and all into the shade.
I think of other statues that I have not seen--statues suspected of
holding something back from even the clearest-eyed men who have stood
beholding and soliciting them. But how obvious, beside Umberto, the
Sphinx would be! And Memnon, how tamely he sits waiting for the dawn!
Matchless as a memorial, then, I say again, this statue is. And as a
work of art it has at least the advantage of being beyond criticism. In
my young days, I wrote a plea that all the statues in the streets
and squares of London should be extirpated and, according to their
materials, smashed or melted. From an aesthetic standpoint, I went
a trifle too far: London has a few good statues. From an humane
standpoint, my plea was all wrong. Let no violence be done to the
effigies of the dead. There is disrespect in setting up a dead man’s
effigy and then not unveiling it. But there would be no disrespect, and
there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were
ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they
are. That is a scheme which occurred to me soon after I saw the veiled
Umberto. Mr. Birrell has now stepped in and forestalled my advocacy.
Pereant qui--but no, who could wish that charming man to perish? The
realisation of that scheme is what matters.
Let an inventory be taken of those statues. Let it be submitted to
Lord Rosebery, and he be asked to tick off all those statesmen, poets,
philosophers and other personages about whom he would wish to orate.
Then let the list be passed on to other orators, until every statue
on it shall have its particular spokesman. Then let the dates for the
various veilings be appointed. If there be four or five veilings every
week, I conceive that the whole list will be exhausted in two years or
so. And my enjoyment of the reported speeches will not be the less keen
because I can so well imagine them.... In conclusion, Lord Rosebery said
that the keynote to the character of the man in whose honour they were
gathered together to-day was, first and last, integrity. (Applause.)
He did not say of him that he had been infallible. Which of us was
infallible? (Laughter.) But this he would say, that the great man
whose statue they were looking on for the last time had been actuated
throughout his career by no motive but the desire to do that, and that
only, which would conduce to the honour and to the stability of the
country that gave him birth. Of him it might truly be said, as had
been said of another, ‘That which he had to give, he gave.’ (Loud and
prolonged applause.) His Lordship then pulled the cord, and the sheeting
rolled up into position...
Not, however, because those speeches will so edify and soothe me, nor
merely because those veiled statues will make less uncouth the city I
was born in, do I feverishly thrust on you my proposition. The wish in
me is that posterity shall be haunted by our dead heroes even as I am
by Umberto. Rather hard on posterity? Well, the prevision of its plight
would cheer me in mine immensely.
KOLNIYATSCH 1913.
None of us who keep an eye on the heavens of European literature can
forget the emotion that we felt when, but a few years since, the red
star of Kolniyatsch swam into our ken. As nobody can prove that I
wasn’t, I claim now that I was the first to gauge the magnitude of
this star and to predict the ascendant course which it has in fact
triumphantly taken. That was in the days when Kolniyatsch was still
alive. His recent death gives the cue for the boom. Out of that boom
I, for one, will not be left. I rush to scrawl my name, large, on the
tombstone of Kolniyatsch.
These foreign fellows always are especially to be commended. By the mere
mention of their names you evoke in reader or hearer a vague sense of
your superiority and his. Thank heaven, we are no longer insular. I
don’t say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it, pyramids of it,
all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would England be but
for her good fortune in being able to draw on a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of anguished souls from the Continent--infantile wide-eyed
Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted Scandinavians, all of them
different, but all of them raving in one common darkness and with one
common gesture plucking out their vitals for exportation? There is no
doubt that our continuous receipt of this commodity has had a bracing
effect on our national character. We used to be rather phlegmatic, used
we not? We have learnt to be vibrant.
Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it is
true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he was.
But the quality of his genius, albeit nothing if not national and also
universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot
afford to close our eyes on his life--a life happily not void of those
sensational details which are what we all really care about.
‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.’ Kolniyatsch was born,
last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. At the age of nine he had
already acquired that passionate alcoholism which was to have so great
an influence in the moulding of his character and on the trend of his
thought. Otherwise he does not seem to have shown in childhood any
exceptional promise. It was not before his eighteenth birthday that he
murdered his grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his earlier manner. In
1907 he escaped from his sanctum, or chuzketc (cell) as he sardonically
called it, and, having acquired some money by an act of violence, gave,
by sailing for America, early proof that his genius was of the kind that
crosses frontiers and seas. Unfortunately, it was not of the kind that
passes Ellis Island. America, to her lasting shame, turned him back.
Early in 1908 we find him once more in his old quarters, working at
those novels and confessions on which, in the opinion of some, his fame
will ultimately rest. Alas, we don’t find him there now. It will be a
fortnight ago to-morrow that Luntic Kolniyatsch passed peacefully away,
in the twenty-eighth year of his age. He would have been the last to
wish us to indulge in any sickly sentimentality. ‘Nothing is here for
tears, nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death so
noble.’
Was Kolniyatsch mad? It depends on what we mean by that word. If we
mean, as the bureaucrats of Ellis Island and, to their lasting shame,
his friends and relations presumably meant, that he did not share our
own smug and timid philosophy of life, then indeed was Kolniyatsch not
sane. Granting for sake of argument that he was mad in a wider sense
than that, we do but oppose an insuperable stumbling-block to the
Eugenists. Imagine what Europe would be to-day, had Kolniyatsch not
been! As one of the critics avers, ‘It is hardly too much to say that
a time may be not far distant, and may indeed be nearer than many of us
suppose, when Luntic Kolniyatsch will, rightly or wrongly, be reckoned
by some of us as not the least of those writers who are especially
symptomatic of the early twentieth century and are possibly “for all
time” or for a more or less certainly not inconsiderable period of
time.’ That is finely said. But I myself go somewhat further. I say that
Kolniyatsch’s message has drowned all previous messages and will
drown any that may be uttered in the remotest future. You ask me what,
precisely, that message was? Well, it is too elemental, too near to the
very heart of naked Nature, for exact definition. Can you describe the
message of an angry python more satisfactorily than as S-s-s-s? Or
that of an infuriated bull better than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies
somewhere between these two. Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we
find him hard to fit into any single category. Was he a realist or a
romantic? He was neither, and he was both. By more than one critic
he has been called a pessimist, and it is true that a part of
his achievement may be gauged by the lengths to which he carried
pessimism--railing and raging, not, in the manner of his tame
forerunners, merely at things in general, or at women, or at himself,
but lavishing an equally fierce scorn and hatred on children, on
trees and flowers and the moon, and indeed on everything that the
sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into favour. On the other
hand, his burning faith in a personal Devil, his frank delight in
earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that every one but himself
will be brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in the next
glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as an optimist. By birth
and training a man of the people, he was yet an aristocrat to the
finger-tips, and Byron would have called him brother, though one
trembles to think what he would have called Byron. First and last, he
was an artist, and it is by reason of his technical mastery that he most
of all outstands. Whether in prose or in verse, he compasses a broken
rhythm that is as the very rhythm of life itself, and a cadence that
catches you by the throat, as a terrier catches a rat, and wrings from
you the last drop of pity and awe. His skill in avoiding ‘the inevitable
word’ is simply miraculous. He is the despair of the translator. Far
be it from me to belittle the devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway,
whose monumental translation of the Master’s complete works is now
drawing to its splendid close. Their promised biography of the murdered
grandmother is awaited eagerly by all who take--and which of us does
not take?--a breathless interest in Kolniyatschiana. But Mr. and Mrs.
Pegaway would be the first to admit that their renderings of the prose
and verse they love so well are a wretched substitute for the real
thing. I wanted to get the job myself, but they nipped in and got it
before me. Thank heaven, they cannot deprive me of the power to read
Kolniyatsch in the original Gibrisch and to crow over you who can’t.
Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege and the