A Writer's Notebook (49 page)

No one can make excursions into Russian life or Russian fiction without noticing how great a place is taken by an acute sense of sin. Not only is the Russian constantly telling you that he is a sinner, but apparently he feels it, and he suffers from very lively pangs of remorse. It is a curious trait and I have tried to account for it. Of course we say that we are miserable sinners in church, but we do not believe it; we have the good sense to know that we are nothing of the kind; we have our faults and we have all done things that we regret, but we know quite well that our actions have not been such as to need any beating of our breasts and gnashing of our teeth. The majority of us are fairly decent, doing our best in that state of life in which chance has placed us; and if we believe in a judgment we feel that God has too much wisdom and good sense to bother much about failings which we mortals have no difficulty in forgiving in our neighbours. It is not that we are satisfied with ourselves, on the whole we are sufficiently humble, but we do the work which is next to our hand and do not trouble much about our souls. The Russians seem different. They are
more introspective than we and their sense of sin is urgent. They are really overwhelmed by the burden and they will repent in sackcloth and ashes, with weeping and lamentation, for peccadillos which would leave our less sensitive consciences untroubled. Dmitri Karamazov looked upon himself as a great sinner, and Dostoievsky saw in him a violent, passionate man on whose soul Satan had laid his hold; but a calmer judgment can only look upon Dmitri as a very gentle transgressor: he played cards and drank more than he could decently carry, and when drunk was boisterous and noisy; he had strong sexual passions and a quick temper which he could not always control; he was hasty and impetuous; but that is about the extent of his wickedness. Monsieur de Valmont and Lord George Hell, before love made him a happy hypocrite, would both have looked upon his delinquencies with good-humoured contempt. As a matter of fact the Russian is not a great sinner. He is lazy and infirm of purpose; he talks too much; he has no great control over himself so that the expression of his passions is more lively than their intensity warrants; but he is kindly on the whole and good-humoured; he does not bear malice; he is generous, tolerant of others' failings; he is probably less engrossed in sexual affairs than the Spaniard or the Frenchman; he is sociable; his temper is quick, but he is easily appeased. If he is weighed down by a conviction of sin, it is evidently not on account of his acts of omission or commission (and in point of fact it is chiefly for the first that he loves to reproach himself) but on account of some physiological peculiarity. Few persons can have gone to a convivial gathering of Russians without noticing that they take their liquor sadly. They weep when they are drunk. They are very often drunk. The nation suffers from
Katzenjammer
. It would be an amusing thing if the prohibition of vodka took away from Russia the trait which sentimentalists in Western Europe have found such an engaging subject for their meditation.

I have nothing but horror for the literary cultivation of suffering which has been so fashionable of late. I have no sympathy with Dostoievsky's attitude toward it. I have seen a good deal of suffering in my time and endured a good deal myself. When I was a medical student I had occasion in the wards of St. Thomas's Hospital to see the effects of suffering on patients of all sorts. During the war I had the same experience, and I have seen also the effects of mental suffering. I have looked into my own heart. I have never found that suffering improves the character. Its influence to refine and ennoble is a myth. The first effect of suffering is to make people narrow. They grow self-centred. Their bodies, their immediate surroundings, acquire an importance which is unreasonable. They become peevish and querulous. They attach consequence to trifles. I have suffered from poverty and the anguish of unrequited love, disappointment, disillusion, lack of opportunity and recognition, want of freedom; and I know that they made me envious and uncharitable, irritable, selfish, unjust; prosperity, success, happiness, have made me a better man. The healthy man exercises all his faculties, he is happy in himself and the cause of happiness in others; his abundant vitality enables him to use and improve the gifts that nature has endowed him with; his ripening intelligence enriches him with complicated thought; his imagination gives him sway over time and space; his educated senses enlarge the beauty of the world. He grows ever more complete a man. But suffering depresses the vitality. It coarsens the moral fibre rather than refines it; it does not increase a man, but lessens him. It is true that sometimes it teaches patience, and patience edifies. But patience is not a virtue. It is a means to an end and no more. Patience is essential to those who would do great things, but the patience exercised in doing small ones calls for no more respect than is due to small things. Waterloo Bridge is nothing in itself: it is merely a means of communication between two banks of the Thames, and it is London stretching on either side that gives it importance. You do not admire a man who uses infinite patience
to collect postage stamps; the exercise of this quality does not save it from being a trivial pursuit.

It is said that suffering results in resignation, and resignation is looked upon as a solution to the perplexities of life. But resignation is a surrender to the hostile whims of chance. Resignation accepts the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and calls them good. It kisses the rod that chastens it. It is the virtue of the vanquished. A braver spirit will have no dealings with resignation: it will struggle unceasingly against circumstances, and though conscious that the struggle is unequal, fight on. Defeat may be inevitable, but it is doubly defeat if it is accepted. To some Prometheus, chained to his rock and strong in his unconquerable courage, is a more inspiriting example than that other, hanging on a shameful cross, who besought His Father to forgive His enemies because they knew not what they did. Resignation is too close to apathy for the spirited mind. It submits sometimes to what neither need nor should be borne. It is the final attempt of slaves to make their lack of mettle a reason for self-complacency. And even though the fetters that bind a man cannot be broken, let him remain a rebel still: though he suffers from cold and hunger, illness and poverty and lack of friends, though he knows that the road
is
uphill all the way and that the night has no morning, let him refuse ever to acknowledge that cold and hunger, illness and poverty are good; though he has not the strength to continue the hopeless battle, let him keep that one last spark of freedom in his heart which enables him to say that pain is bad.

Where the Russian has the advantage over us is that he is much less than we the slave of convention. It never occurs to him that he should do anything he does not want to because it is expected of him. Why he bore with a certain equanimity the oppression of centuries (and he surely bore it with equanimity,
for it is inconceivable that a whole people could long endure a tyranny which they found intolerable) is that though politically coerced he was personally free. The Russian's personal freedom is much greater than the Englishman's. He is bound by no rules. He eats what he likes at the hours that suit him, he dresses as he chooses without regard to common usage (the artist will wear a bowler hat and a stiff collar as unconcernedly as the lawyer a sombrero); his habits seem to him so natural that everyone else accepts them as natural too; though often he talks for effect he never seeks to appear other than he is, he is only inclined to exaggerate himself a little; he is not shocked by a position he does not share; he can accept anything and he is perfectly tolerant of other people's eccentricities in thought or behaviour.

There is a deep streak of masochism in Russians. Sacher Masoch was himself a Slav and first drew notice to the malady in a volume of short stories which are not otherwise remarkable. According to the reminiscences of his wife he was himself a victim of the state he described. Briefly, it is a sexual desire in a man to be subjected to ill treatment, physical and mental, by the woman he loves. For example, Sacher Masoch himself insisted on his wife going for a trip with a lover while he, disguised as a footman, suffering agonies of jealousy, performed for the couple a variety of menial services. In Sacher Masoch's stories the women are described as large and strong, energetic, audacious and cruel. They use men with every sort of indignity. Russian fiction is full of characters of this sort. Dostoievsky's heroines are of this overbearing type; tenderness, sweetness, gentleness, charm do not appeal to the men who love them; on the contrary they find a horrible delight in the outrages to which they are exposed. They want to abase themselves. Turgenev's heroines are intelligent, alert, active and enterprising, while the men are weak of will, dreamers incapable of action. It is a characteristic of Russian fiction, and I imagine it corresponds
to a deep-rooted instinct in the Russian character. No one can have lived among Russians without being struck by the aggressive way in which women treat men. They seem to take a sensual pleasure in humiliating them before others; they are contentious and brutal in their conversation; the men will endure things said to them that few Englishmen would tolerate; you will see them flush at a gibe, but make no attempt to retaliate; they are femininely passive, they cry easily.