Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov’s descriptions; but they are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of “relish sweet, the honey wild and manna dew” of the “Belle Dame Sans Merci”; he wrote of places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of “ancestral voices prophesying war,” but one has only to quote that line to see that Lermontov’s poetic world, compared with Coleridge’s, is solid fact beside intangible dream.
Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt with just the same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains imaginable, you never hear
“Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne,”
and you know that it will never drive the Russian poet to frenzy. On the other hand, you never get Victor Hugo’s extravagance and absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset dealt with romantic themes si quis alius; but when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, which of all subjects belonged to the age of Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes lines like these—
“Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d’autrui;
Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son âme,
Comme un luth éolien, aux lèvres de la nuit.”
Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer description—
“Pâle comme l’amour, et de pleurs arrosée,
La nuit aux pieds d’argent descend dans la rosée.”
You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and creating from objects such as the “yellow bees in the ivy bloom” forms more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create a single image such as—
“Elle aurait aimé, si l’orgueil
Pareil à la lampe inutile
Qu’on allume près d’un cercueil,
N’eut veillé sur son coeur stérile.”
In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes in his youth. All his best work, the finest passages of Childe Harold, and the whole of Don Juan, were slices of his own life and observation, choses vues; he never created a single character that was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag.