When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there was another, a different England from that of today. As examples Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings, Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm, the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished, she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested modernism, which does not become her, are working their will.
The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it.
I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best is doing the impossible.
I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, Die Familie Golowlef, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same power by which the African desert grows grand, monotony, a level unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it vividly for years.
I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know, to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble.
In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease, hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises.
Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see. People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener, in pleasure, the arrière pensée. Before that, the Merrie England, gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy fields, the flowers of England.
If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music, rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and the sea.
But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence can only be written through the great forgetting. One slight touch of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.
In Daudet’s Contes du Lundi I usually begin with the words: Cette nuit le mistral était en colère. What a charmeur was Daudet! Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in Le Pape est Morte, the morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he ran away! Next, Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale. The opening lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine, evocative precision of etching, with that beauty beyond no one can name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century, that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. My old age regrets the rivers. Loti’s descriptions of the Orient.