Mimesis (89 page)

About this time, that is, from the eighties on, the Scandinavian countries and above all Russia enter the limelight of European public attention with realistic works of literature. Among the Scandinavians the most influential personality is the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. His dramas of society are tendentious; they oppose the rigidity, restriction, and falseness of moral life among the upper classes of the bourgeoisie. Although they are all set in Norway and deal with pronouncedly Norwegian conditions, their problems nevertheless were pertinent to the Central European bourgeoisie in general. Ibsen’s masterly dramatic technique, his unerring conduct of the action, and his sharp outlining of his characters—especially of some of his women—carried away the public. The impression he made was very great, especially in Germany, where the naturalistic movement of 1890 revered him as a master on an equality with Zola, where his plays were excellently produced by the best theaters, and where the remarkable renewal of the drama which took place at that time is in general linked to his name. Through the complete transformation of the social status of the bourgeoisie since 1914 and in general through the upheavals brought about by the current world crisis, his problems have lost their timeliness and we can now better see how calculated and contrived his art often is. Yet it remains to his credit that he accomplished the historic task of giving a style to the serious bourgeois drama: a problem which had been pending since the
comédie larmoyante
of the eighteenth century and which he was the first to solve. It is his misfortune, though perhaps it is also in a small degree due to him, that the bourgeoisie has since changed beyond recognition.

More lasting and important is the effect of the Russians. Gogol, it is true, had scarcely any influence in Europe, and Turgenev, who was on friendly terms with Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, would
seem on the whole to have received more than he gave. From the eighties on, Tolstoi and Dostoevski begin to come into the picture. From 1887 we find them named and discussed in the Goncourt diary. But it seems that a real appreciation of their work, especially Dostoevski’s, came about only very slowly. German translations of Dostoevski do not appear until the twentieth century. This is not the place to discuss the Russian writers in general, their roots and premises, their individual significance in Russian literature itself; we can only take up their influence upon the European way of seeing and representing reality.

It seems that the Russians were naturally endowed with the possibility of conceiving of everyday things in a serious vein; that a classicistic aesthetics which excludes a literary category of “the low” from serious treatment could never gain a firm foothold in Russia. Then too, as we think of Russian realism, remembering that it came into its own only during the nineteenth century and indeed only during the second half of it, we cannot escape the observation that it is based on a Christian and traditionally patriarchal concept of the creatural dignity of every human individual regardless of social rank and position, and hence that it is fundamentally related rather to old-Christian than to modern occidental realism. The enlightened, active bourgeoisie, with its assumption of economic and intellectual leadership, which everywhere else underlay modern culture in general and modern realism in particular, seems to have scarcely existed in Russia. At least it cannot be found in the novels, not even in Tolstoi or Dostoevski. There are in the realistic novels members of the higher aristocracy, noble landowners of various ranks and degrees of wealth, there are hierarchies of civil servants and of the clergy; then there are petty bourgeois and peasants, that is, the people in its most living multiplicity. But what lies between, the wealthy upper bourgeoisie and the merchant class, is still generally split up into guilds and in any case is completely patriarchal in attitudes and forms of life. We may think for example of the merchant Samsanov in Dostoevski’s
Brothers Karamazov
or of the Rogoshin family and their house in the
Idiot
. This sort of thing has nothing whatever in common with the enlightened bourgeoisie of central and western Europe. The reformers, rebels, and conspirators—of whom there are many—come from the most varied classes, and the manner of their revolt, however different it may be in the individual instances, still everywhere shows a close connection with the
Christian and traditionally patriarchal world from which they manage to break away only through painful violence.

Another characteristic feature which strikes the western reader of Russian literature is the uniformity of the population and its life in that vast country, an obviously spontaneous or at least very long established unity of all that is Russian, so that it often seems superfluous to state in what particular region the action takes place. Even the character of the landscape is much more homogeneous than in any other European country. With the exception of the two principal cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, whose distinctly different characteristics are clearly to be recognized from literary sources, it is a rare occurrence if a city, hamlet, or province is identified. In Gogol’s
Dead Souls
or in his famous comedy
The Inspector General
the place of the action is given simply as “the capital of a government” or “a provincial town,” and the situation is very much the same in Dostoevski’s
The Possessed
or
The Brothers Karamazov
. The landowners, civil servants, merchants, clergymen, petty bourgeois, and peasants seem everywhere to be “Russian” in much the same way. There are but rare instances where speech peculiarities are noted, and where it is done, it is not a matter of dialectal regionalisms but of personal idiosyncracies, or of social stigmata (as for instance the special pronunciation of the vowel ‘o’ which is current among the lower classes), or finally of peculiarities characteristic of the minorities domiciled in the country (Jews, Poles, Germans, Little Russians). As for the born Orthodox Russians, throughout the entire country, and regardless of class distinctions, they seem to form a single ancient patriarchal family. True, this sort of thing may be observed elsewhere in the nineteenth century, for example in individual German districts, but nowhere so pronouncedly and above all not over so vast a territory. Everywhere in this gigantic country the same Russian regional atmosphere seems to exist.

Now, within this great and homogeneous national family (which is differentiated from contemporary European society above all by the fact that an enlightened bourgeoisie, conscious of its value and working toward a definite end, has scarcely begun to exist) all through the nineteenth century an inner movement of the most powerful nature prevails. This is unmistakably recognized in the literary output of the time. Considerable movement prevails in the other European literatures of this period too, especially in French literature; but it is a different kind of movement. The most essential characteristic of the inner movement documented in Russian realism is the unqualified, unlimited,
and passionate intensity of experience in the characters portrayed. That is the strongest impression which the western reader receives, before and above all else, especially in Dostoevski but also in Tolstoi and the others. It seems that the Russians have preserved an immediacy of experience which had become a rare phenomenon in western civilization of the nineteenth century. A strong practical, ethical, or intellectual shock immediately arouses them in the depths of their instincts, and in a moment they pass from a quiet and almost vegetative existence to the most monstrous excesses both in practical and spiritual matters. The pendulum of their vitality, of their actions, thoughts, and emotions seems to oscillate farther than elsewhere in Europe. This too reminds us of the Christian realism which we have tried to elaborate in the early chapters of this book. There is something truly monstrous—especially in Dostoevski but elsewhere too—in the change from love to hatred, from humble devotion to animal brutality, from a passionate love of truth to the most vulgar lust for pleasure, from pious simplicity to the most cruel cynicism. Such changes often occur in one person—almost without transition—in tremendous and unpredictable oscillations. And each time the person spends himself completely, so that his words and acts reveal chaotic instinctive depths of a kind which to be sure were not unknown in the countries of the west but which scientific detachment, sense of form, and respect for social proprieties prevented the writers there from expressing without restraint. When the great Russians, especially Dostoevski, became known in Central and Western Europe, the immense spiritual potential and the directness of expression which their amazed readers encountered in their works seemed like a revelation of how the mixture of realism and tragedy might at last attain its true fulfillment.

In addition one final point needs to be considered. If we ask what it was that released the powerful inner movement in the characters who people the Russian works of the nineteenth century, the answer must be as follows: In the first place, the infiltration of modern European and especially of German and French forms of life and thought. These in all their power collided in Russia with a society which, though frequently rotten, was wholly independent, which had its own will, and which above all was hardly yet prepared for such an encounter. For moral and practical reasons it was impossible to avoid coming to terms with modern European civilization, although the preparatory periods which had brought Europe to the position it then occupied had not nearly been lived through in Russia. The process of coming
to terms was dramatic and confused. Observing it as it is reflected in Tolstoi or Dostoevski we clearly grasp the savage, tempestuous, and uncompromising nature of Russian acceptance or rejection of European culture. The very choice of the ideas and systems over which the struggle takes place is somehow accidental and arbitrary. Then too, nothing but their final result is extracted, as it were, and this is not evaluated in its relation to other ideas and systems, for example, as a more or less significant contribution within a rich and many-sided intellectual production, but is immediately evaluated as an absolute, which is true or false, an inspiration or a devilish delusion. Immense theoretical countersystems are improvised. The most complex phenomena, fraught with historical premises and very difficult to formulate in a clear synthesis—phenomena like “western culture,” liberalism, socialism, the Catholic Church—are judged in a few words, in accordance with a particular and more often than not erroneous point of view. And always the points at issue are “ultimate” ethical, religious, and social questions. An extremely characteristic case in point is the postulate which Ivan Karamazov sets up and which represents the basic motif of the great novel: that there can be no morality without God and immortality, that indeed crime must be recognized as the unavoidable and rational way of escape from the position of every atheist—a postulate in which the radical passion for “Everything or Nothing” brings into the thinking something which is at once amateurish and disconcertingly magnificent. But Russian coming to terms with European civilization during the nineteenth century was significant not only for Russia. However confused and amateurish a process it often was, however much it was impaired by inadequate information, false perspectives, by prejudice and passion, there was at work in it an extremely sure instinct for the things that were unsound and critical in Europe. In this respect too the effect of Tolstoi and still more of Dostoevski in Europe was very great, and if, in many domains, among them that of realistic literature, the moral crisis became increasingly keen from the last decade before the first World War, and something like a premonition of the impending catastrophe was observable, the influence of the Russian realists was an essential contributing factor.

20

THE BROWN STOCKING

“And even if it isn’t fine to-morrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay, raising her eyes to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now,” she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it, “and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,” for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg.

Smiling, for an admirable idea had flashed upon her this very second—William and Lily should marry—she took the heather mixture stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it, and measured it against James’s leg.

“My dear, stand still,” she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to serve as measuring-block for the Lighthouse keeper’s little boy, James fidgeted purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it too short? she asked.

She looked up—what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?—and saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then what was the point, she asked herself, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind: the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his library and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her, and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: “For her whose wishes must be obeyed …” “The happier Helen of our days…” disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Groom on the Mind and Bates on the
Savage Customs of Polynesia (“My dear, stand still,” she said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain moment, she supposed, the house would become so shabby that something must be done. If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them—that would be something. Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to dissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed, one could not prevent it; or Rose’s objects—shells, reeds, stones; for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You couldn’t tell any more that those were roses on it. Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open, and no lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt, things must spoil. What was the use of flinging a green Cashmere shawl over the edge of a picture frame? In two weeks it would be the colour of pea soup. But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she had opened herself. That windows should be open, and doors shut—simple as it was, could none of them remember it? She would go into the maids’ bedrooms at night and find them sealed like ovens, except for Marie’s, the Swiss girl, who would rather go without a bath than without fresh air, but then at home, she had said, “the mountains are so beautiful.” She had said that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes. “The mountains are so beautiful.” Her father was dying there, Mrs. Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the recollection—how she had stood there, how the girl had said “At home the mountains are so beautiful,” and there
was no hope, no hope whatever, she had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James: