A Writer's Notebook (48 page)

The
Revisor
has an extraordinary reputation in Russia. In itself it makes up the whole of Russian classical drama. It is read by every schoolboy as
Hamlet
is read by us, and acted on high days and holidays as
Le Cid
is acted at the Comédie Française. For the Russians this one trivial little play is like Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Congreve and Wycherley, Goldsmith and the
School for Scandal
. The characters have become labels to attach to people and a hundred different lines have grown into proverbs. Yet it is an extremely insignificant farce, neither better nor worse than Kotzebue's
Kleinstädter
, which possibly suggested it. It is about on a level with
She Stoops to Conquer
. The intrigue is unimportant and the persons of the play are drawn from the standpoint of caricature rather than character. Whatever your goodwill you cannot suspend your disbelief in them. Gogol, however, had the good sense not to distort his picture by the introduction of any person of intelligence or decency. There is a certain artistic completeness in his collection of rogues and fools which would have been ruined by the introduction of an honest man or a man of parts. Congreve had the same wisdom and took care not to bring a virtuous person into the company of his rips. It is not very strange that Gogol and his contemporaries should have attached importance to this merry little farce, but it is surely surprising that critics acquainted with the literature of Western Europe should have done the same. For the most part the interpreters of Russia to the world have known little of other countries; they have praised various traits as typically Russian because they were not English, and have not known that, being due to physical conditions, they could be found in all countries where the physical conditions were similar. To know a foreign country at all you must not only have lived in it and in your own, but also lived in at least one other.
Arnold Bennett has never ceased to believe in a peculiar distinction of the French that they make their breakfast off coffee and rolls.

My native gifts are not remarkable, but I have a certain force of character which has enabled me in a measure to supplement my deficiencies. I have common-sense. Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. For many years I have been described as a cynic: I told the truth. I wish no one to take me for other than I am, and on the other hand I see no need to accept others' pretences.

The student of a country other than his own can hope to know comparatively few of its inhabitants, nor with the difference of language and of culture will he even after many years become intimate with them. Even with the English and American, between whom the differences of language are very small, there can be no real understanding. Probably people are best able to know one another when their early years and their education have been similar. It is the impressions of a man's first twenty years which form him. Between the English and the Russians the abyss is wide and deep. The difficulty of the language must always keep them apart. Even if you know it well you will not know it well enough for people to forget that you are an alien, and they will never be quite the same with you as when they are with one another, It is by reading that the foreigner will gain most insight into a strange people, and here writers of the second class will be of more service to him than those of the first. Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy. Chekov will tell you more about the Russians than Dostoievsky. By comparing then the people you
have known with the people you have read of an impression may be formed which if not coincident with the truth is at all events self-contained, reasonable and coherent.

I have my own views about learning a language. I think it waste of time to acquire a greater knowledge than suffices me to read fluently and talk enough for the ordinary affairs of life. The labour required to acquire a real familiarity with a foreign tongue is profitless.

God has of late years been very much the fashion among men of letters, and they have used the Almighty with picturesque effect to balance a phrase or give emotion to a paragraph. And now G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells have taken him up, though only just in time, and they have hurried along to set themselves at the head of the movement. It must be hard work to be a leader of thought when you are no longer so active as you were, and it is not astonishing if they both seem a little out of breath.

I wish some thoughtful person would write an essay on the reason for which even before the war there was in English letters a revival of religious belief. The curious thing about it was that it left the masses untouched and the churches remained empty; nor had it any great effect on the more intelligent and highly educated sections of the population. Men of law and science, merchants and business men were on the whole sceptical; the movement was purely literary. It certainly had something to do with a similar movement in France, where its origin was largely political and where the ground was prepared for it by the defeats of 1870: the generation that grew up after this was of diminished vitality, and so naturally inclined to
faith; the Third Republic was anti-Catholic, and all who were malcontent with it ranged themselves on the side of Catholicism; to many religion became identified with patriotism and the greatness of France; finally science had not fulfilled the promises which the unwise expected, and, dissatisfied at not receiving answers to questions that science never pretended to answer, many threw themselves into the arms of the Church.

Every literary movement in France has found imitators in England, and there have always been men of letters in our country who have acquired a reputation for originality by the simple process of reading attentively the French reviews. In England likewise many were dissatisfied with science. The universities had remained religious. They instilled into the young the notion that it was good form to believe in God. It is not hard to see why it should be chiefly among men of letters that this rebirth of religion showed itself: for one thing men with the religious instinct, who in former days would have taken orders, now that the Church is a profession little in favour, gave all or part of their time to writing; and for another, writers seek constantly after change, they are a volatile, inconstant race, and the upholding of a moribund belief not only gave them new themes, picturesque and telling, but appealed to their passion for romance. And the desire for romance, as we know, was a steadily growing passion among us during the last twenty years. We all sought Ruritania in the Bayswater Road. Then came the war, and grief, fear and perplexity brought many to religion. Many consoled themselves for the loss of persons they did not care very much about by their faith in an all-powerful, all-merciful and all-knowing Creator. Once, at sea, I thought I was in imminent danger of death, and words of appeal rose quite involuntarily to my lips, remains of the forgotten faith of my childhood, and it required a certain effort of will to suppress them and look forward to what might come with an equal mind. I was at that moment within an ace of believing in God, and it required an outraged sense of the ridiculous to save me from surrender to my fear. I tried in
Of
Human Bondage
to set down why I had lost the very ardent faith of my childhood, but it is difficult to describe such things accurately and I have never been satisfied with the result. Though the turn of my mind is concrete and my intelligence moves inactively amongst abstractions, I have a passion for metaphysics and I find a keen delight in the acrobatics of philosophers on the tight-rope of the incomprehensible. I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief in what is usually meant by the word religion. I have little patience with the writers who try to reconcile in one conception the Absolute of the metaphysician with the God of the Christian. But if I had had any doubts, the war would have effectually silenced them.