The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin—a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction—a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.
In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.
Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance—the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance “the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth,” is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us Ruth.
This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.
And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians “disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels”—because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.
The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves—namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.
Llewellyn Jones.
A Drama of the Two Generations
Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in Nowadays. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life—and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations—the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.