The Common Reader
natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the great
emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must be drowned
clasping her brother in her arms. The more one examines the great
emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and
gathering and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our heads at
the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity. It is
partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack;
and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue
from the effort of emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to
talk too much. She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring
taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene
within that. “Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at
the Westons’ ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma; and she
has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we
should have looked out of the window.
Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to the
agricultural world of her “remotest past”, and you not only diminish her
greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here we can have
no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the
principal features, the ruddy light of the early books, the searching
power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and
expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the heroines that we would
cast a final glance. “I have always been finding out my religion since I
was a little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray so much—now
I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself. . . .”
She is speaking for them all. That is their problem. They cannot live
without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are
little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which
makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of
the book—still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no
longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the
ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do
not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness
of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages
dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand
for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps
incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too
strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a
humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the
supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines,
in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their
story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself.
For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not
enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the
strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women
have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance—the
difference of view, the difference of standard—nor accept an
inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure,
inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved,
shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were
satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching
out with “a fastidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could
offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine
aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for
her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect
all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against
her—sex and health and convention—she sought more knowledge and more
freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out,
we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of
laurel and rose.
_The Russian Point of View_
Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand
English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their
enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might
protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by “understand”.
Instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who
have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of
ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken
legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they
understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days
foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of Henry James were
written by a man who had grown-up in the society which he describes, or
that his criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read
Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or three
hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation
from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of
vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of
self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values
which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of
familiar intercourse.
Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but a
much more serious barrier—the difference of language. Of all those who
feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty
years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in
Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who
have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the
language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and
implicitly, upon the work of translators.
What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole
literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a
sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a
little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each
other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version
of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men
deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their
clothes, but also of something subtler and more important—their
manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the
English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration, something
very powerful and very impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in
view of these mutilations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute,
to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is false.
They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for
some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity,
startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which
Russian literature, whether it is due to translation, or to some more
profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it
through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. “Learn to
make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make yourself
indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for
it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.”
“From the Russian,” one would say instantly, wherever one chanced on
that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption
that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to
understand our fellow-sufferers, “and not with the mind—for it is easy
with the mind—but with the heart”—this is the cloud which broods above
the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched
brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade—and of
course with disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious;
denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and
simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say “Brother”
with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one
of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of
misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The
English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate”—a very different word, with
something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met
though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus
accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes,
spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money
to prevent poor devils from calling each other “Brother” on the
Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than common happiness,
effort, or desire that produces the sense of brotherhood. It is the
“deep sadness” which Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian
people that creates their literature.
A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some
degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed
profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other
questions arise. It is seen that an “attitude” is not simple; it is
highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a
railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things,
difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and
simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions of
Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of
it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story
after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and
meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what
means they can be free from “this intolerable bondage”.
“‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as though
in a little while the solution would be found and then a new and
splendid life would begin.” That is the end. A postman drives a student
to the station and all the way the student tries to make the postman
talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly,
“It’s against the regulations to take any one with the post.” And he
walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. “With
whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn
nights?” Again, that story ends.
But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have
overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the
expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and
proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories
ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the
question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and
the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues
exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong,
but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or
merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov,
we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the
tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.
Probably we have to read a great many stories before we feel, and the
feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that we hold the parts
together, and that Tchekov was not merely rambling disconnectedly, but
struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his
meaning.
We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these