Chapter XXX (1)

‘There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing, had I such to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,
Which living waves where thou didst cease to live,
And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,
I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring,’

or in another manner (of the meeting of the Archangel and Lucifer)--

‘And yet between his Darkness and his Brightness,
There passed a mutual glance of great politeness,’

wrote bad verse.

“And to me he will always be what he was to Goethe, to Shelley, and to Arthur Strong--

‘A beautiful and mighty thing of Light.’

“The phrase is Byron’s.”

MODERN LITERATURE IN RUSSIA

At the beginning of last century there was in Russia, as in most other countries, a great wave of romanticism, which produced Pouskin, Lermontov, and other poets. The wave subsided, and no planets of great magnitude swam into the ken of the watchers of the skies of Russian literature until the period of the Crimean War. After the war and the liberation of the serfs there came another great movement, and a race of literary giants--Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Dostoievski--was born. It is a remarkable fact that the movements of literary renascence in Russia have always immediately followed movements of political renascence and change. This second movement subsided, and although the Russo-Turkish War gave a kind of flip to the country a general calm soon once more prevailed, which up till 1903 bore all the signs of stagnation. The writer who gives the most faithful picture of the general atmosphere of the period which preceded the Russo-Japanese War is Anton Tchekoff. In a multitude of short stories, some broadly humorous, others poignantly sad, and in half a dozen plays (in writing which he inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the stage and was the pioneer of a movement which at one moment made itself felt in London at the Court Theatre) he reflects the frame of mind of educated Russia during this period. It is a frame of mind of stagnation. Its prevailing characteristic is the hopelessness arising from the conviction that it is no use trying to do anything in Russia; that on those who would like to work for progress and enlightenment, education and liberalism in the larger non-political sense of the word, the doors are shut, and that therefore there is nothing to do but to play cards, drink vodka, and while away the tedious hours as best one can. It is not that Tchekoff despaired in the least of the advent of the dawn, only he felt he would not live to see it, and that it would break upon another generation.

They would march prospering not from his presence;
Songs shall inspirit them not from his lyre.

The dawn came quicker probably than he expected. Tchekoff’s last play was performed in 1904, and he himself died soon after, while the war was still going on. Then came the bursting of the dam, and with the swift and tumultuous events of the political movement, with the granting of the freedom of the Press and the inflooding of Russia with a light which it had never before known, came a new literary renascence. It is too soon as yet to discern and to gauge what is the literary value of the thick and turbulent mass of production which has been poured out in Russia during the last two years. But one thing is certain, namely, that there is nothing stagnant in the new phenomena. The writers of the younger generation are still often pessimistic in the extreme; they dip their pencils in the “hues of earthquake and eclipse,” but it is the gloom of the earthquake and not the monotonous greyness of a sunless atmosphere. They shriek, they vociferate and they anathematise, but they do not say: “There is nothing to be done. Let us sit down and play Vindt.” It is true that this revolutionary outburst was succeeded by weariness and apathy. It is true that reaction was again in its turn as triumphant as it was in France during the reign of Louis XVIII., that the Liberal movement suffered a great blow owing to the fact that a considerable part of the population, namely, the landed proprietors and all people of means, who were until 1905 nearly all of them staunch supporters of the Opposition, frightened by the spectres of expropriation, revolution, and anarchy and ruin, veered to the Right. It is true that some people think that it will need another war, a famine, an epidemic of cholera, and several other disasters of the kind to set the movement going again. But in spite of this we shall never get back to the old stagnation, because of the flood of light which has been let into the country, and which cannot now ever be driven out again.

The literature, for instance, cannot go back to the time when there was no political life, because there is a political life now. The Reactionaries may have the best of it; the Liberals may discredit themselves and they may fail again and again; but all this constitutes a thing called political life, and which is reflected directly in the daily Press and indirectly in the literature of the day. Therefore, so far, whatever may be the discouragement felt by political reformers, there is as yet no trace of a note of apathy in the literature of the day. The curious thing is that nearly all the literature which is now appearing--with the exception of a small æsthetic school which has plunged into mysticism, decadentism, and many other isms--has for its subject-matter political events and political events only. Prisons, police, Pogroms, meetings, elections, parties, assassinations, bombs, revolutionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, fanatics--these are the main elements of the new literature. Another interesting point is that with all this stock-in-trade of sensationalism the literature is not sensational. If one compares it with English or German books on the same subject one thinks one is reading about a different country. This is owing to the simple fact that the Russians understand the people about whom they are writing. They know that humanity is not divided into two clearly defined categories--Liberals who are all saints and Conservatives who are all monsters. They know that because a man is a policeman he does not necessarily cease to be a human being, or that because a man is a revolutionary he does not necessarily become a superman, endowed with the resistance of Prometheus, the energy of Cromwell, the kindness of St. John. These writers distinguish. Andreev, for instance, writes a touching story of the Governor of a town, who in a moment of riot gives the order for firing on the crowd. He then relates how this man knows he will be killed, how every one else knows it, and how slowly, deliberately, and helplessly he slides into his doom. Kouprin, one of the most talented writers of the younger generation, tells a story which he says is a true one, of how after one of the Jewish “Pogroms,” when a committee was sitting to organise relief for those who had suffered, a deputation of thieves arrives and addresses the President. The thieves are burning with indignation because they have been accused of having taken part in the “Pogrom.” They are wounded in their most sensitive spot: their _amour propre_. They cannot get over the fact that people such as they--thieves by profession, who take pride in their art, whether it consist in pocketpicking, or housebreaking--should be confused with the inglorious herd of hooligans; and what is to them the unkindest cut of all is that people should have thought them capable of siding with the police, since they say that the “Pogroms” are the work of the police, and that the police is but the instrument in the hands of what Prince Ourousov once called the “dark forces” which stand behind the Government, and who make it so difficult for people to govern Russia.

Again, the same author tells a story of a revolutionary student who betrays his companions because, when he is interviewed by the police inspector he loses his nerve. He is not otherwise a coward; but he is afraid of _people_. The police inspector, he says, was as civil as a dentist to his comrades, but him he hectored and bullied, feeling instinctively that he would give way, and he did. He shoots himself: he is not afraid of doing that. In a letter he writes before killing himself he explains that he is not in the least afraid of death or of danger; but that in the presence of people he loses his head, and he attributes the fact to his having been soaked in the atmosphere of the stagnant generation of his parents, from whose influence he never escaped. These writers afford us an infinite number of sidelights on the subtleties, the contradictions, the curious contrasts which the political events bring to light--in fact on human nature, which is the same everywhere, but which under the stress and pressure of untoward violence is sharply revealed to us as though by lightning. Then, of course, the very existence of conflicting parties, ideals, opinions and aims gives the writer endless “copy” and an unbounded field of dramatic material.

The Dreyfus case divided France into two camps and split up families. Much more powerful, then, must be the political question in Russia, where it is not merely abstract but concrete; not merely platonic, but full of living passion, where any day a Conservative statesman may learn that his son or his daughter has blown up one of his colleagues, or a revolutionary girl may ascertain that her betrothed has denounced her comrades to the police. In this domain vistas are opened on to endless “conflicts of wills,” the most rewarding stuff for drama.

All this does not make for stagnation, and it is impossible to sum up the characteristics of modern Russian literature better than in the following words, which Kouprin puts into the mouth of the student (in a story to which I alluded above) who shot himself. He is talking of the schoolboy of the present generation, and what he says of the schoolboy applies equally well to the new generation, its literature, and all that belongs to it.

“I am convinced that the schoolboy of the sixth form to-day in the presence of all the Kings of Europe, in any throne room you please, would fiercely and clearly--and even somewhat rudely--declare the claims of _his party_. He is, it is true, almost absurd, this premature schoolboy; but there is in him a sacred respect for his own joyful, proud, and free ego, for that very thing which the spiritual poverty and the cowardly morals of our parents extirpated in us, who belong to the former generation.”

THE RUSSIAN STAGE

Hamlet in one of those pointed phrases which appear to Count Tolstoi to be so foreign to his character, and to the rest of the world to be peculiarly in harmony with it, said that players were “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.” It is certain that at the present day in Russia the doings of the Russian stage and of the players throw many interesting sidelights on the present situation; in fact, Hamlet’s remark is especially applicable to Russia at the present day. Whatever one may think of Russian politics at the present moment, whether we are witnessing the slow phases of a revolution, an evolution, or merely a crisis, one thing is certain and that is that the country is not in a normal condition, and that the element of paradox which has always existed in Russian life has now reached an exaggerated point of intensity.

The country is still an autocracy in which the Monarch is constantly declaring that his autocratic sovereignty is to remain inviolate, and at the same time that he is determined to fulfil his promise that the people shall govern themselves. The most important political party is still outlawed. You may be hanged for stealing three roubles (six shillings); for shooting a student in a restaurant you receive a year’s imprisonment, and for arranging a bomb explosion which fails to kill the Prime Minister, but which does kill many other people, you are let off with penal servitude, and under no circumstances whatever can you be handcuffed. This is not a normal situation, and the people who are factors in such a situation cannot fail to be affected by it. Therefore it is interesting to study as manifested on the stage the “abstracts and brief chronicles” of this extraordinary epoch. Such a study is doubly interesting and valuable owing to the peculiar nature of the Russian stage at the present moment.

To explain why this is so I must state briefly what are the chief characteristics of the Russian stage. It differs entirely from the European stage in that it escaped the influence of the modern French stage and the French ideals of stagecraft, of the “well-made” play, which produced the skill of Scribe, the ingenuity of Sardou, the logic of Alexandre Dumas _fils_, which left so deep an imprint on the stage of all other European countries. This tradition of stagecraft and these ideals were absorbed by Henrik Ibsen, who, as soon as he had made himself absolute master of all tricks which this craft comprised, threw them overboard and wrote plays in which he showed how at a given moment Fate may deal to mortals terrific blows arising from their deeds in the past, and often what they considered to be their good deeds--the aforesaid blows making themselves manifest in that by the ordinary course and conversations of everyday life. Ibsen was, therefore, the great reformer of the modern stage; and he not only cast away the tricks of the French school, but he wrote plays about human beings ruthlessly and vividly portrayed instead of conventional puppets. In France there was likewise a revolt against the “well-made” play, and dramatists of the naturalist school gave to the public what they called “slices of life,” which in its turn produced a reaction towards romanticism and artificial comedy. But in spite of the various phases of Scribisme and naturalism, and in spite of the fact that the Scribe-Sardou tradition has been thrown to the winds, certain ideals belonging to this school remain in the modern French stage, namely, the necessity of “situations,” or of fundamental theses to be worked out logically, which cause many modern French plays to resemble mathematical problems. The Russian stage differs entirely from both the French and the Scandinavian. The Sardou-Scribe school never reigned in Russia, so that there was no necessity to dethrone it, but apart from this significant fact the Russian stage has just as little in common with Ibsen, the French naturalist school, and the modern French play _à thèse_ as it has with Sardou or Dumas _fils_. This is where the difference lies. Ibsen shows us human beings at a moment when Fate in the shape of the inevitable result of their actions falls upon them like a thunderbolt; the French naturalist school gave us slices of raw life, but slices of brutally raw life so brutal as to be exaggerated, abnormal, and therefore unreal; the modern French play _à thèse_ goes back for its machinery to the old ideal of the well-made play; that is to say, the wine is new, but the skins are old.

The Russian stage simply aims at one thing--to depict everyday life; not exclusively the brutality of everyday life, nor the tremendous catastrophes befalling human beings; nor to devise intricate problems and far-fetched cases of conscience in which human beings might possibly be entangled. It simply aims at presenting glimpses of human beings as they really are, and by means of such glimpses it opens out avenues and vistas on to their lives. The Russian stage, therefore is like the Russian novel, realistic because it is a reflection of life, and it is unlike the French naturalist novel or naturalist play because these two things never reproduced life as it is, but portions only of life exaggerated and magnified by the fantastic vision of men of talent who were sometimes men of genius. The reflection of anybody who has some experience of the stage, on reading this will, I imagine, be the following: The everyday life of ordinary human beings can be reflected in a novel, but not on the stage, which demands the observation of certain conventions and the presence of certain cardinal factors such as dramatic interest, the conflict of wills, etc., which are indispensable to the acted drama. Moreover, the public goes to the theatre to be amused, and the faithful photography of everyday life cannot be amusing; the public wishes to forget everyday life, and to find on the stage that which in everyday life is not predominant. Well, the Russian stage has proved that these two contentions are not necessarily true. Excellent plays can be written on the basis of strong situations, but the Russian playwrights have proved that excellent plays can be written in which the situations are neither more nor less dramatic than those which occur every day before our eyes among our immediate circle of acquaintance. They have also proved another thing--that the public finds this kind of play interesting in the extreme and flocks to see it; and this leads one to conclude that the secret of the matter lies possibly in the fact that these plays are _true_ pictures of life, and not would-be pictures of life which are in reality false, and that the former cannot help being interesting, and the latter cannot help being tedious. I believe that plays written about real life, in which the characters live and behave as they do in reality, would be not only interesting but successful in any country. However that may be, the fact remains that the modern Russian play consists of a series of pictures of everyday life faithfully depicted, without any research of special theses or situations more theatrical than those which everyday life abundantly affords, and that these plays are successful. They make money. A cosmopolitan traveller once said to me that he could no longer sit through a modern French play of the type of _Le Dédale_ or plays such as M. Bernstein writes, because he found them so intolerably artificial, and this was because he had seen many Russian plays, of which the pre-eminent characteristics were reality and naturalness. This being so it is easy to understand that Russian plays form an exceedingly interesting commentary, an illuminating “abstract and brief chronicle” of the Russian life of to-day.

I will give a few instances taken from plays which were being performed during the winter season.[3] It must be remembered that there is a censorship in Russia which is almost as severe where politics are concerned as our censor in England is severe when the public morality is liable to be shocked. In spite of this, politics, if not always mentioned outright, permeate the Russian stage just as much as they permeate Russian life, and in some cases they are allowed to be mentioned outright, for the Russian censorship acts in a way peculiarly its own, or rather it acts just as our censorship does when morals are concerned, in an utterly illogical and incomprehensible fashion. There is a play called _Walls_ being performed at the State-subventioned theatre in St. Petersburg. This play would be forbidden in England, not because it inculcates immorality, but because certain facts are mentioned in it over which we draw a veil in this century, but which Shakespeare did not shrink from mentioning in the days of Queen Elizabeth. That is by the way. In this play we get among other things a glimpse of the life of an old schoolmaster, who has retired, and his wife; they have a daughter aged fifteen. These nice old parents feel that there is a gulf between them and their child. The daughter conceals her movements. She hides a portion of her life from her parents, and this distresses them. We see the interior of their home, and we see them waiting for the daughter in anxiety when she is returning late from one of the expeditions about which she refuses to speak. The father is distressed by the young generation. “In my time,” he says, “we were Liberals, and we worked for the cause, but quietly; now every one howls in the street and there is no talent anywhere.” He looks at Hertzen’s portrait, which is hanging on the wall, and he says: “Where have they got a man like him?” At last the daughter arrives, a charming, simple, natural girl, pretty and attractive. They beg her to say where she has been, and to be admitted into her confidence. We, the public, know to a man that she has been to something political, socialistic or revolutionary; we know that the parents know, and that she knows that the parents know, and that the parents know that she knows that they know. In spite of this she refuses to give any details. The father tells her she is on a wrong tack. “It’s all words,” he says. “You don’t understand, you can’t understand,” she answers. Then after a while she gives the following astounding explanation of her ideals: “There are two loves--a small love and a great love. The small love is what one feels for one’s favourite chair, one’s table, one’s father, one’s mother; the great love is the love which Christ felt for the whole world, for humanity, for man, for the people.” The father revolts at the idea of being compared to a table, and she kisses and quiets him, but one feels that, as far as she is concerned, she spoke the truth. Therefore we are not surprised in the last act when she tells a man who loves her, and loves her in vain, that she is going for good; she has received orders and starts for the South by the twelve o’clock train. Here again the whole audience knows that she is going to obey the orders of the Revolutionary Committee, probably to kill some one. We see her leave the house. The parents are within drinking tea; we see them by the light of the lamp through the window; she has promised to be back soon; she is only going on a commission to the next street, she says; “she casts one longing, lingering look behind;” the man who is in love with her tries to keep her back by force, but she tears herself away from him and disappears into the night, and we see the parents waiting and waiting, and opening the window and listening for her return, and the curtain falls.

[3] 1907.

This character of the daughter is a perfectly faithful picture of a type that exists by the score in Russia to-day, and this play, acted (it sounds like a paradox) at the State-paid Imperial Theatre throws a searchlight on to the inner life of the throwers of bombs and the killers of governors. It explains to us what sort of people these are and why they do these things, and the spectacle is most instructive.

There was another play being performed this season[4] called _Chaos_, in which the hero is the son of an aristocratic family who is a Social Revolutionary. This play is far more stagy and less original than Russian plays are generally, but it also contains many interesting sidelights on the situation. We see the young wife of a high official gradually opening her eyes to the political situation and gradually becoming bitten with Liberal ideas, and finally plunging into the whole thing. We see the young Socialist’s agony when the family receive the news that their home in the country has been burnt and they tell him that he must go at once, and he cannot go because he is “wanted” by his party in St. Petersburg. We are shown the comic aspects also--the family in which every member takes in a newspaper of a different shade of political opinion and is quarrelling over the fact; and a meeting of students in the aristocratic home quarrelling over Karl Marx and throwing their cigarettes on the floor. We are shown, impartially, the good points and the ridiculous points of both parties. Altogether it is a most amusing play “palpitating with actuality.”

[4] January 1907.

I have seen Tchekoff’s last play, _The Cherry Garden_, either seven or eight times. It tells in four pictures the whole story of the aristocratic landed proprietor class in Russia. We see a charming old and rather foolish aristocratic landlord coming back to his country house with his sister, a young and beautiful married woman, after five years’ absence. Their affairs are in a shocking state, and a neighbour of theirs, whose father was a serf, and who himself was a peasant, but who has become a merchant and a millionaire, warns them that unless they let their property and allow it to be cut up into villas it will be sold by auction. They tell him he does not understand what he is talking about. The idea is simply inconceivable to them. They say that something will turn up and save them; but it does not, and the place and the beautiful cherry garden are sold by auction, and bought by the merchant whose father was their serf, and who ran about barefoot in their village as a child; and they go away, and the shutters are shut, and we hear the cherry garden being hewed down. That is the whole subject of the play; but I know no play more poignant and more intensely real. It has, I should add, the advantage of being played by the company of the “Artistic Theatre” of Moscow. The acting of this company seems to me as superior to any other acting I have ever seen as Shakespeare’s plays are superior to any other plays in verse. It is simply in another class. They are now performing Ibsen’s great poetical play _Brand_ so magnificently that it would be worth while for any stage lover to go to Moscow from London merely to see this performance. To see one of the greatest of poetical plays played with inspiration by the chief actors, not only magnificently but artistically staged and mounted, and perfectly interpreted down to the smallest part and the most trivial detail is very rare. It is worth a pilgrimage just in the same way as it is worth while going to Bayreuth to hear _Parsifal_. And for the perfection of ensemble in the interpretation and the inspiration of the principal units, it surpasses anything which I have seen at Bayreuth, or anywhere else.

A RUSSIAN MYSTERY PLAY[5]

I was once in a company of Russian people, when a lady suddenly asked to be explained what algebra meant. There were several mathematicians present, but they, perhaps because they were mathematicians, were unable to give a satisfactory explanation. I then said to the lady that algebra is to arithmetic what Andreev’s play _The Life of Man_ is to other plays. She immediately understood the nature of algebra. Andreev’s play, _The Life of Man_, which was produced for the first time last year in St. Petersburg, and which is now being given at the Artistic Theatre of Moscow, is written in the algebra of art. Shakespeare wrote plays in which Fate manifested its inexorable designs through the passions of individual men; for instance, he showed us the fate of a man who was warm-hearted, brave, simple and jealous--Othello; of a man who was dreamy, ambitious, superstitious and hysterical--Macbeth. Molière, on the other hand, synthesised into a series of vital types the various aspects of humanity, and showed us the misanthropy of the whole human race in _Le Misanthrope_, and the hypocrisy of all hypocrites in _Tartuffe_. Andreev in his play represents neither types nor individuals, but simply the algebraic symbol of man. Not man the miser, or man the infinitely complex Hamlet, but man the quantity, man _X_, in face of fate the quantity _Y_.

[5] _The Life of Man_, by Andreev.

His play is not a play but a morality, such as those which were played in the Middle Ages, without the buffoonery. It is a solemn mystery and it is treated as such. The audience do not applaud and the actors do not come before the curtain. The persons of the plays are puppets, the pictures shown are like a series of rough woodcuts such as those in a child’s newspaper; a penny plain and twopence coloured.

I have seen the play mounted and played with all the skill and subtlety which are at the command of M. Stanislavski’s company at the Artistic Theatre of Moscow. The acting was superlative, and the mounting curious and original; nevertheless I will describe the play as I saw it when it was given for the first time at the small theatre of Madame Komisarjevskaia at St. Petersburg; because there (although the acting was less excellent), owing to the simplicity of the staging, the poignancy and the _macabre_ effect of the play were to my mind even more forcibly brought home, and the effect, if not more impressive, was in closer harmony with the author’s written words.

The curtain goes up on a space of complete darkness (in Moscow they gave you the impression that you were looking into illimitable space), from which a figure in grey emerges (in Moscow there was a vast shadow behind him, shaped like that of Memnon’s statue)--a grey figure with shrouded head and only his mouth visible. This figure is called in Russian “He.” “He” is Fate, Life, Destiny, what you will--the _Y_ quantity which is inseparable from the _X_ quantity Man. The same thing as Alfred de Musset pictures in his _Nuit de Décembre_, the presence which was always with him “qui me resemblait comme un frère.”

The grey figure speaks a prologue, the beginning of which is as follows: “Behold and listen, you who have come hither for mirth and laughter. Here you shall see pass before you the whole life of Man, with its dark beginning and its dark end. Unborn hitherto and mysteriously hid in the womb of time, without thought, without feeling, without knowledge of aught, he mysteriously breaks through the barriers of nothingness and with a cry heralds the beginning of his brief life. In the night of oblivion a candle breaks into flame lit by an unseen hand.--It is the life of Man. Look upon its flame--it is the life of Man. As soon as he is born he receives the shape and the name of Man, and becomes like unto all men who dwell upon the earth. And their merciless fate becomes his fate, and his merciless fate is the fate of all men. Irresistibly compelled by Time, he passes through the unchanging stages of human life, from the depths to the heights, from the heights to the depths. With darkened sight, he shall never perceive the next step over which his uncertain foot is already raised; with obscured knowledge he shall never know what the coming day, what the coming hour, what the coming minute are to bring. And in his blind ignorance, outworn by foreboding and convulsed by hope and fear, submissive he fulfils the iron circle of his destiny.”

The prologue, of which I have only quoted a small part, is written in majestic prose, and it recalls the chorus in Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon”--

“He weaves and is clothed with derision,
Sows and he shall not reap.
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.”

The grey figure relates the varying stages, the changing vicissitudes of which the life of Man is composed. He tells of the death of Man, his return to nothingness, and he relates how he himself, the mysterious figure, shall ever be with Man, unseen and near, in his hours of joy and of sorrow; when he watches and when he sleeps, when he prays and curses, in his hours of gladness, when his free and brave spirit leaps high, in his hours of down-heartedness and anguish, when the spirit is darkened with a mortal weariness and the blood freezes in the heart; in his hours of triumph and defeat, in his hours of mighty wrestling with the inevitable, he will be with him. The prologue ends thus: “And you who have come hither for mirth, you who are allotted to death, look on and listen; here with its far-off and illusive echo shall pass before you, with its sorrows and with its joys, the short-spanned life of Man.”

The first scene is called the birth of the Man. The curtain rises on a dark room. A group of old crones--you cannot see them distinctly--like grey mice, are chattering in the obscurity. They are talking of the child that is to be born. Here are the first words of their conversation--

“I should like to know what will come to our friend: a son or a daughter?”

“Is it not all the same to us?”

“I like little boys.”

“And I like little girls. They always sit at home and wait, when you go to them.”

“And you like visiting?”

[_The old women laugh low._

“He knows.”

“He knows.” (_A pause._)

“Our friend would like to have a little girl. She says that boys are too boisterous and enterprising, they run after danger when they are little, and climb up high trees and bathe in deep water. They often fall into the water and get drowned. And when they grow up they go to war and kill one another.”

“She thinks little girls don’t get drowned. But I have seen many drowned maidens, and they were like all drowned people--wet and green.”

“She thinks that little girls don’t kill with stones!”

“Poor thing, it is going so hardly with her, it is the sixteenth hour that we have been here, and she has screamed the whole time. At first she screamed loudly, so that her cry made our ears sore, and then more gently, and now she only moans.”

“The doctor says she will die.”

“No, the doctor says that the child will be born dead, and that she will live.”

“Why are they born? it is so painful.”

“And why do they die? that is still more painful!”

[_The old women laugh low._

“Yes, they are born and they die.”

“And again they are born.”

[_They laugh. The low cry of the
suffering woman is heard._

“It has begun once more.”

“She has found her voice again, that is good.”

“That is good.”

“Poor husband: he was in such a state that he was funny to look upon. At first he was glad and said that he wished for a boy, he thought that his son would be a minister or general, now he wishes for nothing, neither for a boy or a girl, he only cries.”

“When the pangs began he himself writhed.”

“They sent him to the chemist’s to fetch medicine. He drove for two hours by the chemist’s and could not remember what he wanted. Then he returned.”

The old crones continue to chatter and to laugh their low, ghastly laugh, until, suddenly, all becomes still, and the grey figure enters and says, “Be still. The Man is born.” And as he says this a candle which he bears in his hand breaks into flame. The old women disappear, and the father of the Man comes in with the doctor. He says that he hates the child for the pain it has caused his wife, but when he hears that it is like him his heart overflows with gladness, and he thanks Heaven that his desire has been fulfilled, and he prays God that his son may grow up strong and healthy, intelligent and honest. Then come the relations; they are got up like puppets, like penny, wooden, painted dolls. They congratulate the father on the birth of his child, each with a set phrase, they say all the usual things. They leave no stereotype commonplace unsaid. Here is an example of their conversation--

_The Fat Lady speaks_: “Allow me, dear brother, to congratulate you on the birth of your son.”

_Fat Gentleman_: “Allow me, dear relation, to most heartily congratulate you on the birth of your son, an event which you have been expecting for such a long time.”

_The others_: “Allow us, dear relation, to congratulate you on the birth of your son.”

_The Father_: “I thank you, I thank you; you are all very good and kind people,” etc.

_A young Girl_: “What will you call the child, dear uncle? I should like him to have a pretty, poetical name; so much depends on the name of a man.”

_The Fat Lady_: “I should like him to have a simple and sensible name. People with pretty names are always unsatisfactory and rarely succeed in life.”

_The Fat Gentleman_: “It seems to me, my dear brother-in-law, that the child should be called after some of its older relations; that prolongs and maintains the race.”

_The Father_: “Yes, my wife and I often thought about it but could not come to a decision. The birth of a child gives rise to so many new cares and anxieties.”

_Fat Lady_: “It fills up life.”

_Fat Gentleman_: “It gives a splendid purpose to life. To educate a child, to cause him by our guidance to avoid those faults into which we ourselves fell, to strengthen his mind with the riches of our own experience;--by so doing we create a better man, and slowly but surely move towards the goal of our existence--perfection.”

_The Father_: “I entirely agree with you, my dear son-in-law!”

Here the doctor enters and says, “Sir, your wife is feeling very ill; she wishes to see you.” The Man goes out.

The relations, after discussing whether the mother will live or not, end by talking--always in set phrases--of ordinary topics, the men of whether smoking is harmful, the women of how to remove grease stains from silk; and then the infant is heard crying and the curtain falls. The second scene is called “Love and Poverty.” The Man is grown up. It is his room. He is married. His room is quite bare, the walls are damp but lit up with bright, warm light. The grey figure is there; a third of the candle that he holds in his hands has burnt down. The neighbours come into the room. They are bright, cheerful puppets, and they bring flowers and leaves and ribbons. They talk of the Man and his wife. They are so poor, the neighbours say, and so happy, they sing and dance for joy. They are so good and kind. They leave flowers for the Man and his wife, and a bottle of milk, a piece of bread and a very cheap, strong cigar.

They go, and they are followed by the wife of the Man. She is young and pretty. She tells of her poverty; of how her husband is a talented architect and cannot find work. She prays Heaven to send her bread so that her dear, good husband may not hunger; she prays that if her husband be cross to her, that it may be forgotten. She goes out and the figure in grey speaks and says, “She little knows that her desire is already fulfilled; that two rich men are already seeking the Man to give him work which shall bring him riches and fame. Thus does fortune come to Man, and thus does it go.” Then the Man and his wife return. The Man complains of his hunger and fatigue. He is cross and irritable. The wife’s eyes fill with tears, and then immediately he curses himself for his selfishness and his thoughtlessness and kisses away her tears. Hope rises triumphant in him, and turning to the grey figure, whom, of course, he does not see, he challenges Life and Fate: “Come out to battle,” he cries, “I _shall_ conquer,” and the wife of the Man applauds him. Then the Man and his wife play at make believe. They build castles in the air. They weave the future out of rainbows. They imagine palaces where they will live in Italy or in the North. They find the milk and bread and flowers brought by the neighbours. They eat it greedily together, and the Man lights the cigar, which tastes like heaven. They dance for joy. They imagine they are in a great palace giving a ball--that the wife of the Man is the queen of the ball. She puts the ribbons and flowers in her hair, and they dance wildly together, while the figure in grey looks on indifferent, and the candle in his hands burns brightly.

The next scene is called “The Ball in the Man’s House.” It is a huge room with great columns placed in a circle. Beyond the columns all is shadow, and the room is brilliant with cold, artificial light. Everything in the house is rich and gilded. An orchestra is playing; three little black puppets, one scraping the violin, one the ’cello, and the third blowing the flute. They only play one tune, a lively, monotonous and foolish polka.

[Music]

Under each column a guest is seated, stiff and lifeless as a waxwork: They are old, wrinkled, painted, bedaubed and ridiculous. The women guests are dressed in silk, satins, tinsel, and gaudy jewels; the men are like expensive, pompous dolls, some in uniform, some covered with orders, others in black and white clothes; they are all quite expressionless.

In the centre of the room young men and girls are dancing the polka, and they dance and disappear in and out of the columns. The figure in grey stands in one corner of the room and two-thirds of his candle have been consumed. The guests talk. Here is the beginning of their conversation--

“I must observe that it is a great honour to be invited to the Man’s ball.”

“You may add that this honour is given to extremely few. The whole town tried to get asked; very few were chosen. My husband, my children and myself are all proud of the honour the most highly-to-be-honoured Man has paid us.”

“I am sorry for those who were not asked, they will not be able to sleep all night for envy; and to-morrow they will invent calumnies about the tediousness of the Man’s ball.”

“They never saw such magnificence.”

“You might add such extraordinary magnificence and luxury.”

“And I say such enchanting and unceasing amusement. If this is not amusing I should like to know what is amusing!”

“Stop; it is useless arguing with people who are tormented by envy. They will say to you, that the chairs on which we are sitting were not of gold at all.”

“That they were the simplest wooden chairs bought at a second-hand shop!”

“That there was no electric light here, but ordinary tallow candles. They will have the face to deny that the pictures had such broad, gold frames. I seem to hear the sound of gold.”

“You see its gleam; that is enough, I think.”

“I seldom enjoyed music so much as at the balls of the Man. It is divine music and it lifts the soul into the higher spheres.”

“I should hope that the music was good considering what is paid for it; you should add that this is the best orchestra in the town; it plays on the greatest occasions.”

“You hear this music long afterwards; it takes the soul captive. My children, when they return from the balls of the Man, keep on humming the music a long time afterwards.”

And they continue to talk in detail of the splendour of the house of the Man, of his riches, of his many rooms, his numerous houses, his wonderfully appointed bathrooms, and they all say in chorus--

“How rich!”

“How splendid!”

“How gorgeous!”

“How rich!”

The Man and his wife pass through the ballroom. The Man has grown grey, but still seems strong and full of life; the wife is still pretty. The Man is followed by his friends and his enemies. His friends have good countenances and his enemies look horrible and evil. And as they pass the guests vie with each other in praises of the Man and his wife, with applause for the friends and hisses for the enemies. When they have passed through to supper, the guests begin to grow anxious lest they have been forgotten, and when at last they begin to grow convinced of this, one of them says, “I cannot understand, I must frankly own, why we came to a house with such a reputation. One should choose one’s acquaintances more carefully.” At that moment a man in a gorgeous livery enters and announces that the Man and his wife beg their honoured guests to come to supper.

The guests all file off, saying in chorus, “What a livery! What music! How gorgeous! How rich! What an honour! What an honour!”

The next scene is the misfortune of the Man. He has lost his money, he has sold all his possessions, even his books. His one servant, an old woman, tells this, and how there is nothing left in the large house but rats; and how a fresh misfortune had just happened. The Man’s child went for a walk, and some wicked person threw a stone at him and broke open his head, and now he is lying sick and in danger of life. The doctor comes and tells the anxious Man and his wife, who are now old and worn (for the candle the grey figure still holds in his hands is almost burnt down to its socket), that their son is asleep and will probably get better. The Man looks at his drawing-table. “Look,” he says to his wife, “I began to draw this when our boy was still well; I stopped at this line and thought ‘I will rest and go on later.’ Look what a simple and quiet line! And yet it is terrible to look upon, for it may be the last line which I drew when my boy was still alive.” Then he finds his son’s toys on the table; their presence there used to make his work easier. They were bought in the days of the Man’s poverty; a little wooden horse without a tail, and a squeaking clown. The Man remembers how he used to talk to his little boy playing with the gee-gee. “Where are you galloping to, gee-gee?” “Over the hills and far away, papa, to kill the dragon because I’m a knight.” Then the Man and his wife kneel and pray that their son may not die. Anything else, but not that. The mother says, “Let my son live.” And the Man’s prayer is as follows:--

“See, I pray to Thee, I bend my aged knees; I grovel in the dust before Thee, I kiss Thy earth. Perhaps I have offended Thee: if so, then forgive. It is true I was hard, envious, exacting: I often blamed myself; wilt Thou forgive me? If such is Thy will, punish me, only leave me my son; leave him, I pray Thee. I do not ask for mercy nor for pity, but only for justice. Wicked men tried to kill him--those who offend Thee with their works and make Thy earth hideous. Wicked, pitiless ruffians! who throw stones from behind corners, from behind a corner, the ruffians! Do not let them accomplish their evil work. Staunch the blood; give back life to my son who is so good. Thou didst take everything from me, but did I ever pray as a suppliant: ‘Give me back my riches, give me back my friends, give me back my talent’? No, never; even for my talent I never prayed. And Thou knowest what talent is--it is greater than life. ‘Perhaps it must be so,’ methought, and I bore everything--I bore everything. But now I pray on my knees, in the dust, kissing the earth, let my son live! give my son back his life. I kiss Thy earth.”

And then the wife goes to see after the child, and the Man falls to sleep on the sofa and dreams happy dreams of his boy.

And the grey figure speaks and says even now, while the Man is dreaming happily, his son has died. The Man awakes and his wife returns, and he asks if his son is dead, and she answers “Yes.” The wife falls at the Man’s feet and cries bitterly, and the Man turns to the grey figure and curses his life and the day when he was born.

The fifth and last scene is the death of the Man. It is in an underground cellar where drunkards are laughing and raving. The Man sits apart and alone with his head buried in his hands. His wife is dead, his house is empty; there is nowhere for him to go, he is utterly alone and he is dying, for the candle in the hands of the grey figure has almost burnt out. The old crones who appeared in the first scene of all return once more; they talk and they repeat the set phrases of the guests at the Man’s ball: “How rich! How gorgeous!” They dance round the Man to the tune of the foolish polka which was played at his ball. “Do you remember?” they whisper. “You are going to die. Do you remember? ‘How rich! How gorgeous!’”

The dance of the crones grows wilder and swifter, and at last the Man raises himself and cries, “Where is my sword and my shield? I am disarmed--help! Be cur ...” and he falls on a chair and dies. The candle in the hands of the grey figure goes out. The grey figure says, “Be still! The Man is dead.” The crones sing and dance round the dead Man to the sound of the foolish polka, but at last all grows dark and there is silence.

This play might have been written eight hundred years ago. And whatever happens to the world, as long as men exist, it will be understood. It could be played in Chinese without losing one jot of its import or its message; it is outside of time and place, independent of man’s fleeting customs and various manners, for it merely repeats the cry of pain uttered in sublime accents by the Hebrew poet, and re-echoed by all suffering singers in all times and countries, from Aeschylus to Leopardi. But it only shows one side of the mysterious medal; there is another, a shining side which other poets have seen and sung: Dante, Goethe, and Shelley, for instance, in his “high and passionate” “Adonais,” when he says--

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.”

A DREAM IN THE DUMA

In the following paper I have attempted to transplant the facts and atmosphere of recent Russian history into English surroundings: to imagine the Russian Revolution happening in England.

Two or three days ago, while I was listening to a Ministerial explanation in the Duma, I fell asleep and dreamt a strange dream which I will now relate.

I dreamt I was in a third-class carriage in England on the South-Western line; the train was evidently going to London, and we were somewhere between Cobham and Surbiton. In the carriage there was a mixed collection of persons. A clerk going up to the City, two workmen, a gay man in flannels with a straw hat, an elderly man with grey hair and spectacles, a young lady wearing a cotton blouse and a straw hat, carrying a hamper with flowers sticking out of it, a middle-aged man who looked like a commercial traveller, and a young mechanic.

“The _Morning Post_ out again to-day,” said the mechanic to the workman.

“Oh! ah!” said the workman.

“Under its own name?” asked the elderly gentleman.

“Yes,” said the mechanic, “they fixed it up with Scotland Yard.”

“Why was it stopped?” asked the young man in flannels.

“In the personal column there was a paragraph,” said the mechanic, “saying as Lord Kitchener was living like at Buckingham Palace--which he was--and at Scotland Yard they said as this was an instigation like to kill him.”

“I suppose they’re sure to kill him some time,” said the young man in flannels.

“Yes,” said the commercial traveller, “they’ll probably shoot him in the back; cowards and swine I call ’em. If only we had a strong Government they’d all be ’ung.”

“I suppose you think that is less cowardly than shooting down the workmen in Manchester,” said the young lady in great indignation.

“’Ere, ’ere,” said the workman.

“Got what they jolly well deserved,” said the commercial traveller. “In what other country would they stand workmen making barricades in the street and trying to kidnap the Governor, I should like to know.”

“It was Admiral Fisher’s fault,” said the young lady; “directly he was made Governor of Manchester he made such a tactless speech; on purpose, of course, to incite the people to rise.”