INTRODUCTORY.
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
IT is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is
called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only
simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a
great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical
drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its
modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction. It has
produced its Gissing without producing its Scott. Everything that is
most sad and scientific, everything that is most grim and analytical,
everything that can truly be called most modern, everything that can
without unreasonableness be called most morbid, comes from these fresh
and untried and unexhausted nationalities. Out of these infant peoples
come the
oldest voices of the earth. This contradiction, like many other
contradictions, is one which ought first of all to be registered as a
mere fact; long before we attempt to explain why things contradict
themselves, we ought, if we are honest men and good critics, to register
the preliminary truth that things do contradict themselves. In this
case, as I say, there are many possible and suggestive explanations. It
may be, to take an example, that our modern Europe is so exhausted that
even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is difficult for every
one except the most robust. It may be that all the nations are tired;
and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest are not too tired to
say that they are tired. It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a
man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith
that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the
only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really
feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism. This is
one of the possible hypotheses or explanations in the matter:
that all Europe feels these things and that they only have strength to
believe them also. Many other explanations might, however, also be
offered. It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries like Russia
or Norway, which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the
extreme edge of the circle of our European civilisation, have a certain
primal melancholy which belongs to them through all the ages. It is
highly probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them
eternal. It is highly probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly
discovered in scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they
absorbed and experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human
sacrifice in black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in the
dark. Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their paganism, as
in old times, is merely devil-worship. Certainly, Schopenhauer could
hardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a country which
had once been full of slavery and the service of fiends. It may be that
these moderns are tricking us altogether, and are hiding in their
current
scientific jargon things that they knew before science or civilisation
were. They say that they are determinists; but the truth is,
probably, that they are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they
describe scenes which are sickening and dehumanising in the name of art
or in the name of truth; but it may be that they do it in the name of
some deity indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror
before the beginning of history.
This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly
disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one broad truth
in the matter which may in any case be considered as established. A
country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing
revolution in revolutionists than any country of the type of England
or America. Communities highly civilised and largely urban tend to a
thing which is now called evolution, the most cautious and the most
conservative of all social influences. The loyal Russian obeys the Czar
because he remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance. The disloyal
Russian frets against the
Czar because he also remembers the Czar, and makes a note of the
necessity of knifing him. But the loyal Englishman obeys the upper
classes because he has forgotten that they are there. Their operation
has become to him like daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of
nature. And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English
revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England is so
complete as to be invisible. The thing which can once get itself
forgotten can make itself omnipotent.
Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not
because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are
not), but because most Russians—indeed, nearly all Russians—are in
that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible and which makes
religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To be
a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is
necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe
or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of
what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic
righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold)
there never will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to
put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which they call
progress.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other
Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a
simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a
rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new. We cannot in
our graduated and polite civilisation quite make head or tail of the
Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the
tale of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the superman.
We hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite certain whether
his protest is the protest of the first anarchist against government, or
whether it is the protest of the last savage against civilisation. The
cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has done much to
burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time has left them one thing
which it has not left to the people in Poplar or West Ham. It has
left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power of seeing the
cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a tramp, a man of the people,
and also a critic and a bitter one. In the West poor men, when they
become articulate in literature, are always sentimentalists and nearly
always optimists.
It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky writes
in such a story as this of "Creatures that once were Men" are to the
Western mind children. They have, indeed, been tortured and broken by
experience and sin. But this has only sufficed to make them sad
children or naughty children or bewildered children. They have
absolutely no trace of that quality upon which secure government rests
so largely in Western Europe, the quality of being soothed by long words
as if by an incantation. They do not call hunger "economic pressure";
they call it hunger. They do not call rich men "examples of
capitalistic concentration," they call them rich men. And this note of
plainness and of something nobly prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky,
the most recent and in some ways the most modern and
sophisticated of Russian authors, as it is of Tolstoy or any of the
Tolstoyan type of mind. The very title of this story strikes the note
of this sudden and simple vision. The philanthropist writing long
letters to the
Daily Telegraph says, of men living in a slum,
that "their degeneration is of such a kind as almost to pass the limits
of the semblance of humanity," and we read the whole thing with a
tepid assent as we should read phrases about the virtues of Queen
Victoria or the dignity of the House of Commons. The Russian novelist,
when he describes a dosshouse, says, "Creatures that once were Men."
And we are arrested, and regard the facts as a kind of terrible fairy
tale. This story is a test case of the Russian manner, for it is in
itself a study of decay, a study of failure, and a study of old age.
And yet the author is forced to write even of staleness freshly; and
though he is treating of the world as seen by eyes darkened or
blood-shot with evil experience, his own eyes look out upon the scene
with a clarity that is almost babyish. Through all runs that curious
Russian sense that every man is only a
man, which, if the Russians ever are a democracy, will make them the
most democratic democracy that the world has ever seen. Take this
passage, for instance, from the austere conclusion of "Creatures that
once were Men."
Petunikoff smiled the smile of the conqueror and went back into
the dosshouse, but suddenly he stopped and trembled. At the door facing
him stood an old man with a stick in his hand and a large bag on his
back, a horrible odd man in rags and tatters, which covered his bony
figure. He bent under the weight of his burden, and lowered his head on
his breast, as if he wished to attack the merchant.
"What are you? Who are you?" shouted Petunikoff.
"A man . . ." he answered, in a hoarse voice. This hoarseness
pleased and tranquillised Petunikoff, he even smiled.
"A man! And are there really men like you?" Stepping aside he let
the old man pass. He went, saying slowly:
"Men are of various kinds . . . as God wills . . . There are worse
than me . . . still worse . . . Yes . . ."
Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from humanity,
Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and essential value of the
human being which is far too commonly absent altogether from such
complex civilisations as our own. To no Western, I
am afraid, would it occur when asked what he was to say, "A man." He
would be a plasterer who had walked from Reading, or an iron-puddler who
had been thrown out of work in Lancashire, or a University man who would
be really most grateful for the loan of five shillings, or the son of a
lieutenant-general living in Brighton, who would not have made such an
application if he had not known that he was talking to another
gentleman. With us it is not a question of men being of various kinds;
with us the kinds are almost different animals. But in spite of all
Gorky's superficial scepticism and brutality, it is to him the fall from
humanity, or the apparent fall from humanity, which is not merely great
and lamentable, but essential and even mystical. The line between man
and the beasts is one of the transcendental essentials of every
religion; and it is, like most of the transcendental things of religion,
identical with the main sentiments of the man of common sense. We
feel this gulf when theologies say that it cannot be crossed. But we
feel it quite as much (and that with a primal shudder) when philosophers
or fanciful writers suggest that it might be crossed. And if any man
wishes to discover whether or no he has really learnt to regard the line
between man and brute as merely relative and evolutionary, let him say
again to himself those frightful words, "Creatures that once were
Men."
G. K. CHESTERTON.