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Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin's poems is the poem which expresses his view of life in the elegy--

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine Is the remembrance of delirious days; But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs The past more sorely, as my days decline. My path is dark. The future lies in wait, A gathering ocean of anxiety, But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create, That is my prayer; to live and not to die! I know that ecstasy shall still lie there In sorrow and adversity and care. Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine, Be moved to tears by musings that are mine; And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

But the greatest of his short poems is probably "The Prophet." This is a tremendous poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin only attained once. It is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression; the syllables ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a silver clarion. It is, as it were, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language. Nothing finer as sound could ever be compounded with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing could be more perfectly planned, or present, in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the imagination. Even a rough prose translation will give some idea of the imaginative splendour of the poem--

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: And he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with My word to the hearts of the people.'"

But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with a passion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer; neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe.

He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, which gave him inspiration: to his own country home, which gave him leisure. He was censored. Yes: but the Emperor undertook to do the work himself. Had he lived in England, society--as was proved in the case of Byron--would have been a far severer censor of his morals and the extravagance of his youth, than the Russian Government. Besides which, he won instantaneous fame, and in the society in which he moved he was surrounded by a band not only of devoted but distinguished admirers, amongst whom were some of the highest names in Russian literature--Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol.

Pushkin is Russia's national poet, the Peter the Great of poetry, who out of foreign material created something new, national and Russian, and left imperishable models for future generations. The chief characteristic of his genius is its universality. There appeared to be nothing he could not understand nor assimilate. And it is just this all-embracing humanity--Dostoyevsky calls him ???????????--this capacity for understanding everything and everybody, which makes him so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of everyday life: a realistic poet, and above all things a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief and produce a noble fragment, he cannot set crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians the beauty of their landscape and the poetry of their people; and they, with ears full of pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and romantic stage properties, did not understand what he was doing: but they understood later. For a time he fought against the stream, and all in vain; and then he gave himself up to the great current, which took him all too soon to the open sea.

He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional; and all his life he was still learning to become more and more intimate with the savour and smell of the people's language. Like Peter the Great, he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic, and pure; there is never a blurred outline, never a smear, never a halting phrase or a hesitating note. His concrete images are, as it were, transparent, like Donne's description of the woman whose

"... pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought, That you might almost think her body thought."

His diction is the inseparable skin of the thought. You seem to hear him thinking. He was gifted with divine ease and unpremeditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child of the world and of his century; but if he was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen as well as a child of the world; and it is that which makes him the greatest of Russian poets.

His career was unromantic; he was rooted to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official by profession, a lover of society by taste. At the same time, he sought and served beauty, strenuously and faithfully; he was perhaps too faithful a servant of Apollo; too exclusive a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that "brave soldier in the war of the liberation of humanity," nor the agonized passion of a suffering Catullus. He never descended into Hell. Every great man is either an artist or a fighter; and often poets of genius, Byron and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently fighters than they are artists. Pushkin was an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what makes even his love-poems cold in comparison with those of other poets. Although he was the first to make notable what was called the romantic movement; and although at the beginning of his career he handled romantic subjects in a more or less romantic way, he was fundamentally a classicist--a classicist as much in the common-sense and realism and solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. And he soon cast aside even the vehicles and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively followed reality. "He strove with none, for none was worth his strife." And when his artistic ideals were misunderstood and depreciated, he retired into himself and wrote to please himself only; but in the inner court of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired he created imperishable things; for he loved nature, he loved art, he loved his country, and he expressed that love in matchless song.

For years, Russian criticism was either neglectful of his work or unjust towards it; for his serene music and harmonious design left the generations which came after him, who were tossed on a tempest of social problems and political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin's memorial at Moscow, the homage which he paid to the dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of the whole of Russia. His work is beyond the reach of critics, whether favourable or unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of the young.

FOOTNOTES:

Not 1763, as generally stated in his biographies.

LERMONTOV

The claim of his friend and fellow-student, BARON DELVIG, to fame, rests rather on his friendship with Pushkin than on his own verse. He died in 1831. YAZYKOV, PRINCE BARIATINSKY, VENEVITINOV, and POLEZHAEV, can all be included in the Pl?iade; all these are lyrical poets of the second order, and none of them--except Polezhaev, whose real promise of talent was shattered by circumstances --has more than an historical interest.

Pushkin's successor to the throne of Russian letters was Lermontov: no unworthy heir. The name Lermontov is said to be the same as the Scotch Learmonth. The story of his short life is a simple one. He was born at Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus when he was twelve. He was taught English by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, and afterwards to the University. He left in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with the professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Guards' Cadet School at St. Petersburg; and two years later he became an officer in the regiment of the Hussars. In 1837 he was transferred to Georgia, owing to the scandal caused by the outspoken violence of his verse; but he was transferred to Novgorod in 1838, and was allowed to return to St. Petersburg in the same year. In 1840 he was again transferred to the Caucasus for fighting a duel with the son of the French Ambassador; towards the end of the year, he was once more allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In 1841 he went back for a third time to the Caucasus, where he forced a duel on one of his friends over a perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, on the 15th of July of the same year.

The hero of the story, who is an officer in the Caucasus, analyses his own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and faults, with the utmost frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither of them will admit it; I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a tiring business." Or he writes: "I have an innate passion for contradiction.... The presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a passionate dreamer." Speaking of enemies, he says: "I love enemies, but not after the Christian fashion." And on another occasion: "Why do they all hate me? Why? Have I offended any one? No. Do I belong to that category of people whose mere presence creates antipathy?" Again: "I despise myself sometimes, is not that the reason that I despise others? I have become incapable of noble impulses. I am afraid of appearing ridiculous to myself."

On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes as follows--

"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage is there, Good-bye!"

"I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born? and I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers; but I did not divine my high calling; I gave myself up to the allurement of shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I am. Some will say he was a good fellow; others he was a blackguard."

During his period of training at the Cadet School, he led a wild life; and when he became an officer, he hankered after social and not after literary success. He did not achieve it immediately; at first he was not noticed, and when he was noticed he was not liked. His looks were unprepossessing, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. His physical strength was enormous--he could bend a ramrod with his fingers. Noticed he was determined to be; and, as he himself says in one of his letters, observing that every one in society had some sort of pedestal--wealth, lineage, position, or patronage--he saw that if he, not pre-eminently possessing any of these,--though he was, as a matter of fact, of a good Moscow family,--could succeed in engaging the attention of one person, others would soon follow suit. This he set about to do by compromising a girl and then abandoning her: and he acquired the reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when he came back from the Caucasus, he was treated as a lion. All this does not throw a pleasant light on his character, more especially as he criticized in scathing tones the society in which he was anxious to play a part, and in which he subsequently enjoyed playing a part. But perhaps both attitudes of mind were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed society, and hankered after success in it; and equally sincerely despised society and himself for hankering after it.

As he grew older, his pride and the exasperating provocativeness of his conduct increased to such an extent that he seemed positively seeking for serious trouble, and for some one whose patience he could overtax, and on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And this was not slow to happen.

At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life, resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet, and so recoiled upon himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the society were the worst possible for his peculiar nature; and the only fruitful result of the friction between himself and the society and the established order of his time, was that he was sent to the Caucasus, which proved to be a source of inspiration for him, as it had been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, "If only he had lived later or longer"; yet it may be doubted whether, had he been born in a more favourable epoch, either earlier in the milder r?gime of Alexander I, or later, in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he would have been a happier man and produced finer work.

"And you, the proud and shameless progeny Of fathers famous for their infamy, You, who with servile heel have trampled down The fragments of great names laid low by chance, You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne, Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, You hide behind the shelter of the law, Before you, right and justice must be dumb! But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize; There is an awful court of law that waits. You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds; And vainly you shall call the lying witness; That shall not help you any more; And not with all the filth of all your gore Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."

He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his indictment of his own generation, called "A Thought"; and in a poem written on the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to Paris, in which he pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and then acclaiming his ashes.

The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor Byron's Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that His evil is not good; nor does he cherish--

"the study of revenge, immortal hate,"

of Milton's Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. "I am he," he says to her, "whom no one loves, whom every human being curses." He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in good. And he pours out to her one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put Pushkin's descriptions in the shade. Lermontov's landscape-painting compared with Pushkin's is like a picture of Turner compared with a Constable or a Bonnington.

"And on God's world there lay the deep And heavy spell of utter sleep, Although the landrail called, and I Could hear the trill of the dragonfly Or else the lisping of the stream ... Only a snake, with a yellow gleam Like golden lettering inlaid From hilt to tip upon a blade, Was rustling, for the grass was dry, And in the loose sand cautiously It slid, and then began to spring And roll itself into a ring, Then, as though struck by sudden fear, Made haste to dart and disappear."

Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the Erl King's daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of the Caucasus.

When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov's romantic work, and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the West--from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda--we find that in Lermontov's work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the "intense inane" of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into a different world: for instance, Heine's quite ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.

Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov's descriptions; but they are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of "relish sweet, the honey wild and manna dew" of the "Belle Dame Sans Merci"; he wrote of places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of "ancestral voices prophesying war," but one has only to quote that line to see that Lermontov's poetic world, compared with Coleridge's, is solid fact beside intangible dream.

Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt with just the same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains imaginable, you never hear

"Le vent qui vient ? travers la montagne,"

"Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d'autrui; Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son ?me, Comme un luth ?olien, aux l?vres de la nuit."

Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer description--

"P?le comme l'amour, et de pleurs arros?e, La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la ros?e."

You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and creating from objects such as the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom" forms more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create a single image such as--

"Elle aurait aim?, si l'orgueil Pareil ? la lampe inutile Qu'on allume pr?s d'un cercueil, N'eut veill? sur son coeur st?rile."

This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact, presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.

A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the "Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--

"I want to be alone with you, A moment quite alone. The minutes left to me are few, They say I'll soon be gone. And you'll be going home on leave, Then say ... but why? I do believe There's not a soul, who'll greatly care To hear about me over there.

And yet if some one asks you there, Let us suppose they do-- Tell them a bullet hit me here, The chest,--and it went through. And say I died and for the Tsar, And say what fools the doctors are;-- And that I shook you by the hand, And thought about my native land.

My father and my mother, too! They may be dead by now; To tell the truth, it wouldn't do To grieve them anyhow. If one of them is living, say I'm bad at writing home, and they Have sent us to the front, you see,-- And that they needn't wait for me.

We had a neighbour, as you know, And you remember I And she ... How very long ago It is we said good-bye! She won't ask after me, nor care, But tell her ev'rything, don't spare Her empty heart; and let her cry;-- To her it doesn't signify."

The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life, and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes never talk like big whales.

All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when you read Pushkin, you think: "How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world did he do it?" You admire the "magic hand of chance." In reading Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.

With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his contemporary KOLTSOV , the greatest of Russian folk-poets. The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.

THE AGE OF PROSE

Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L. Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour, ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.

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