He lived in Rome, isolated from the world; he became consumed with religious zeal; he preached to his friends and acquaintances the Christian virtues of humility, resignation and charity; he urged them not to resist authority, but to become contrite Christians. And in order that the world should hear him, in 1847 he published passages from a correspondence with friends. In these letters Gogol insisted on the paramount necessity of spiritual life; but instead of attacking the Church he defended it, and preached submission both to it and to the Government.
The book created a sensation, and raised a storm of abuse. Some of the prominent Liberals were displeased. It was, of course, easy for them to attack Gogol; for here, they said, was the man who had, more than any other, satirised and discredited the Russian Government and Russian administration, coming forward as an apostle of orthodoxy and officialdom. The intellectual world scorned him as a mystic, and considered the matter settled; but if the word “mystic” had the significance which these people seem to have attached to it, then Gogol was not a mystic. There was nothing extravagant or uncommon in his religion. He gave up writing, and devoted himself to religion and good works; but this does not constitute what the intellectuals seem to have meant by mysticism. Mysticism with them was equivalent to madness. If, on the other hand, we mean by mysticism the transcendent common sense which recognises a Divine order of things, and the reality of an invisible world, then Gogol was a mystic. Therefore, when Gogol ceased to write stories, he no more became a mystic than did Pascal when he ceased going into society, or than Racine did when he ceased to write plays. In the other sense of the word he was a mystic all his life; so was Racine.
At the age of thirty-three his creative faculties had dried up, and at the age of forty-three, in February 1852, he died of typhoid fever. The place of Gogol in Russian literature is a very high one. Prosper Mérimée places him among the best English humorists. Gogol’s European reputation is less great than it should be, because his subject-matter is more remote. But of all the Russian prose writers of the last century, Gogol is perhaps the most national. His work smells of the soil of Russia; there is nothing imitative or foreign about it. When he published The Inspector, the motto which he appended to it was: “If your mouth is crooked, don’t blame the looking-glass.” He was a great humorist. He was also a great satirist. He was a penetrating but not a pitiless observer; in his fun and his humour, there is often a note of sadness, an accent of pathos, and a tinge of wistful melancholy. His pathos and his laughter are closely allied one to another, but in his sadness there is neither bitterness nor gloom; there is no shadow of the powers of darkness, no breath of the icy terror which blows through the works of Tolstoy; there is no hint of the emptiness and the void, or of a fear of them. There is nothing akin to despair. For his whole outlook on life is based on faith in Providence, and the whole of his morality consists in Christian charity, and in submission to the Divine.
In one of his lectures, Gogol, speaking of Pushkin, singles out, as one of the qualities of Russian literature, the pity for all who are unfortunate. This, he says, is a truly Russian characteristic.
“Think,” he writes, “of that touching spectacle which our people afford when they visit the exiles who are starting for Siberia, when every man brings something, either food or money, or a kind word. There is here no hatred of the criminal; no quixotic wish to make him a hero, or to ask for his autograph or his portrait, or to regard him as an object of morbid curiosity, as often happens in more civilised Europe. Here there is something more: it is not the desire to whitewash him, or to deliver him from the hands of the law, but to comfort his broken spirit, and to console him as a brother comforts a brother, or as Christ ordered us to console each other.”
This sense of pity is the greatest gift that the Russian nation possesses: it is likewise the cardinal factor of Russian literature, as well as its most precious asset; the inestimable legacy and contribution which Russian authors have made to the literature of the world. It is a thing which the Russians and no other people have given us. There is no better way of judging of this quality and of estimating its results, than to study the works of Russia’s greatest humorist, satirist, and realist. For if realism can be so vivid without being cruel, if satire can be so cruel without being bitter, and a sense of the ridiculous so broad and so strong without being ill-natured, the soil of goodness out of which these things all grow must indeed be rich and deep, and the streams of pity with which it is watered must indeed be plentiful.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I met a Russian doctor in Manchuria, who knew pages of a Russian translation of Three Men in a Boat by heart.
[6] The highly educated professional middle class.