V.
When Gogol was spoken of to the great romancer Turgénief, he said simply, “He is our master; from him we get our best qualities.” But when Turgénief came to speak of “Taras Bulba,” he grew animated, and went on with an accent of admiration which, for my part, I cannot forget, and said, “The day when our Gogol stood the colossal Taras on his feet, he showed genius.”
It would have been a very delicate question, to ask Turgénief his opinion of another of Gogol’s little masterpieces, “Old-time Proprietors.” The question would have seemed indiscreet to the author of “Virgin Soil;” for when this last romance of Turgénief’s appeared, all the Russian readers, when they came to the charming chapter where the two old men, Fímushka and Fómushka, come upon the stage, uttered the same cry: “It is Gogol, pure and simple! it is the Starosvyétskié Pomyéshchiki!” If the model and the imitation are examined closely, a great quantity of differences in detail are unravelled; and it may be said that here as elsewhere Turgénief is personal, original in his work, in his own fashion. But at first glance one has the right to be struck by the resemblances.
“Old-time Proprietors” is a novel of a number of pages. In this novel there are no intrigue, no abrupt changes, nothing fantastic, no theatrical climaxes, no surprising characters, no unexpected sentiments. Gogol dispensed with all the elements of success: he seems to have wished to reduce the interest to the minimum, and he wrote a masterpiece.
He introduces us to one of those country houses whose appearance alone tells the story of the calm and peaceful life of its inhabitants: “Never had a desire crossed the hedge which shut in the little dvor.”
In this habitation of sages, all is friendly, all is kindly, “even to the phlegmatic baying of the dogs.” What is to be said of the reception which we meet with at the hands of the owners of the dwelling? The husband, Afanasi Ivanovitch, generally sitting down and bent over, always smiles, whether he be speaking or listening. His wife, Pulkheria Ivanovna, on the other hand, is serious; but there is so much goodness in her eyes and in all of her features, that a smile would be too much, would render insipid her expression of face which is already so sweet.
Afanasi Ivanovitch and Pulkheria Ivanovna had grown up without children: thus they had come to love each other with that affection which is usually reserved for beings in whom one’s youthful days seem to bloom anew. Their youth had been full of life, however, like all youth, but it was far away. The husband had served in the army; he had eloped with his sweetheart. But this wild period had been followed by so many days of a calm, secluded, uniform, absolutely happy existence, that they never spoke of the past, and it may be doubted if they ever thought of it either.
These delicious hours are disturbed only by such events as an indigestion, or a pain in the bowels. They are filled only by collations and repasts of greater or less degree. They leave room for no other care than that of varying the bill of fare, of bringing into agreement the most diverse viands, of tempting appetites sated but not satiated.
At first thought, nothing seems more commonplace than such a subject. What poetry, what interest even, could be attached to that complaining belly whose ever-recurring pangs must be lulled to sleep the livelong day and a portion of the night? Herein shines forth all the power of Gogol’s talent. He paints egotism for us, double egotism: but he paints it with such delicate shades that the picture excites something more than admiration; it arouses a sort of sympathy.
Gogol knows well that happy people are the best people; that their joy radiates out, as it were, and that it warms, lightens, enlivens, just as sadness, even though legitimate, chills, wounds, warns away, every thing that approaches it. The two old people are happy, not so much by the quality of the pleasures which they taste, or by the value of the goods which they enjoy, as by the assurance which they feel that as long as they live they are not going to see this luxurious abundance disappear, nor these far from ruinous pleasures lose their flavor. Notwithstanding the thefts of the prikashchik, of the housekeeper, of the hands, of the visitors, of their coachman, of their valets, “this fertile and beneficent soil produced all things in such quantity, Afanasi Ivanovitch and Pulkheria Ivanovna had so few necessities, that all these depredations could have no injurious effect on their well-being.”
These two fortunate people are worshipped for their indulgence, which comes from unconcern; and for their liberality, which takes its rise, if not from the vanity of giving, as La Rochefoucauld would have expressed it, yet at least from the need of feeling further satisfaction, after having taken full enjoyment of what is indispensable, in allowing others to have a certain portion of the superfluous.
In the same way their pity is, above all, a selfish consideration, and a movement of dismay at the idea of falling into such disagreeable or trying situations as they have seen in the cases of others. “Wait,” says Afanasi Ivanovitch to each visitor: “we don’t know what may happen. Robbers may attack you, or you may meet with rascals.” “God protect us from robbers!” said Pulkheria Ivanovna: “why tell such stories when it is night?”
In this association for happiness, which is scarcely any thing else than the joining of two aspirations towards well-being, how did Gogol succeed in bringing about his return to the idea of sacrifice? In point of fact, one of these good old egotists acts to a certain degree in a spirit of self-sacrifice, without ever rising above self-love; becomes partially absorbed in the affection of the companion, who is more indifferent, more inclined to accept fondling without offering return. All love, it has been said, is reduced in last analysis to this: the one kisses, the other offers the cheek. In this case the one who offers the cheek—that is to say, the one who permits the fondling, and limits all manifestations of feeling to not ill-natured but not kindly teasing—is the husband. His wife adores him after her fashion. This adoration it is vain to express in vulgar language, and translate by attentions of far from exalted order: it is real, and it brings to the reader’s lips a smile full of indulgence, even at the moment when it compels from the eyes a tear of a rare quality, the discreet witness of the deepest and purest feeling.
This good old woman feels that she is dying; and at the moment when death “comes to take her,” she knows only one grief,—that of leaving alone, and, as it were, orphaned, this poor old child for whom she has lived, and who without her will not know what to do with his sad life. With prayers, even with threats, good soul that she is, she intrusts him to a maid-servant old as themselves; and after making all arrangements and dispositions, so that her companion “need not feel too sorely her absence,” she goes whither death calls her.
Afanasi Ivanovitch at first is overwhelmed with grief. On his return from the funeral, his solitude comes to him with the sensation of an irreparable void; “and he began to sob bitterly, inconsolably; and the tears flowed,—flowed like two streams from his dull eyes.” Is it not striking to find here the expressions of Homer? “He sat down, pouring forth tears like a stream of dark water, which spreads its shady water along the cliff where even the goats do not climb.” And is there not here, as in the epic tale of Taras Bulba, the power of the pathetic, the savory freshness of emotion, the secret of which is known only to primitive poetry?
But what is not primitive, what, on the contrary, reveals Gogol as a very well-informed writer, a very watchful psychologist, a satirist whose scheme was well thought out in advance, and whose slightest details are calculated with perfect precision, is the little parable which at the most touching moment of this tale interrupts its thread, and brings out its hidden significance, its moral bearing, its psychological lesson.
Gogol leaves the husband and wife at the very hour of their most touching separation, and tells us rapidly the romance of a young man madly in love with a mistress who is dying. In the effervescence of his grief, the lover twice in succession tries to kill himself: the first time, by a pistol-shot in the head; somewhat later, when he is barely recovered, by throwing himself under the wheel of a passing carriage. Again he recovers; “and a year later,” says Gogol, “I met him in a fashionable salon. He was seated at a table, playing boston, and was saying in a free and easy tone, ‘Little Misery.’ Behind him, leaning on his chair, stood his young and pretty wife, toying with the counters in the basket.”
The old Afanasi Ivanovitch does not try to kill himself; but he dies slowly day by day from the ever-growing regret for her whom he has lost, from the wound, always more keen and more deep, which has been left in his heart, or, if the expression be preferred, left in his very flesh by the torn cluster of his imperishable habits.
“I have never written from imagination,” said Gogol: “it is a talent which I do not possess.” “Pushkin,” he says in another place, “has hit it right when in speaking of me he declared that he had never known in any other writer an equal gift of making a vivid picture of the miseries of actual life, in sketching with a firm touch the nothingness of a good-for-nothing man.” This talent, which will be seen illustrated in such a brilliant way in the great romance of “Dead Souls,” already begins to give a striking character to the stories written by Gogol about St. Petersburg. Here he describes in a most fascinating way the mortifications, the humiliations, the tortures even, which he had felt or anticipated at the time of the painful beginning of his literary career, and his wearisome sojourn in the bureaucracy.
“The Portrait,” for example, is a fantastic tale which is distinguished from the stories of the former collection by a satiric accent full of bitterness. It is the account of a painter kept in the depths of wretchedness just as long as he takes his art seriously. A happy chance places in his hands a sum of money which allows him to engage rooms on the Nevsky Prospekt. He allows trickery to usurp the place of work. He grows rich from the day when he loses his talent: however, the feeling of having deserted his ideal follows him like remorse, and this remorse leads him straight to madness.
“The Cloak” is the story of a small official, gentle, conscientious, but timid, slow, and absent-minded. The poor devil has a fixed purpose,—the purchase of a cloak to keep him from the cold. This never-to-be-realized idea finally unsettles his somewhat feeble brain.
It is noticeable that the most lugubrious refrains serve for the conclusion of these different moral analyses. “The recollections of a Lunatic,” known in France under the title “Les Mémoires d’un Fou,” take the reader one step farther into this region of mental trouble, which is explored with a boldness truly disquieting. Involuntarily one thinks of the author’s own final insanity; and the tale has the effect of a prelude, or at least of a prognostication.
At the risk of repetition, I lay especial emphasis upon this evolution which took place in the mind and in the work of Nikolaï Gogol. In the “Evenings at the Farm,” the satirical note scarcely appears, except in a few details; it is found tempered, and as it were refreshed, by a pure breath of poetry; Nature spoke there almost as much as man, and she spoke a language of very penetrating sweetness and of superb grandeur. In the novels on St. Petersburg, satire has already entirely usurped her place. There is added, to be sure, an element of fancy, and of caprice, which is no longer the poetry of the first novels, but which still draws on the imagination; a troubled, unregulated imagination, which in Gogol shows a physical and moral state sufficiently akin to the hyperæsthesia of seers, of the insane. This period of excitement is followed by several years of rather morose observation and contemplation, during which Gogol writes or plans for his two great works, the comedy of “The Revizor,” and the romance of “The Dead Souls.” Here we are in full satire, and the satire is fully in the domain of reality,—reality often vulgar, and sometimes odious. The author paints only what he sees; and if amid the objects of his contemplation, and his keen pitiless glance, there passes often as it were a shade of illusion, it is only a gloomy illusion, a reflection of melancholy obscuring the real day, and making the colors of things more sombre, the aspect of men more pitiable.
It is not that the romance of “The Dead Souls,” and especially the comedy of “The Revizor,” have not details, or even whole scenes, which are very amusing. There is no satire without gayety; and Gogol understands how to indulge in raillery, that is to say, how to make fun at the expense of another, as perfectly as any satirist that ever lived. But never was laughter more bitter than his, and it never came nearer the ancient definition, “cachinnus perfidum ridens.” This bitterness of style is only too well explained by a morbid state of mind, the first manifestations of which can be traced back even to Gogol’s infancy, while its tragic end was madness.