She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.
Quietly the Brother Officer went out...
He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried
To get sent home; and how at last he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.
What Mr Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experiences in the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of the war has achieved. As these jaunty matter-of-fact statements succeed each other such loathing, such hatred accumulates behind them that we say to ourselves yes, this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it’, with a new shock of surprise, with an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience, which is a tribute to Mr Sassoon’s power as a realist. It is realism of the right, of the poetic kind. The real things are put in not merely because they are real, but because at a certain moment of emotion the poet happened to be struck by them and is not afraid of spoiling his effect by calling them by their right names. The wounded soldier looking out of the train window sees the English country again —
There shines the blue serene, the prosperous land, Trees, cows, and hedges; skipping these, he scanned Large friendly names that change not with the year, Lung Tonic, Mustard, Liver Pills, and Beer.
To call back any moment of emotion is to call back with it the strangest odds and ends that have become somehow part of it, and it is the weeds pulled up by mistake with the flowers that bring back the extraordinary moment as a whole. With this straight, courageous method Mr Sassoon can produce such a solid and in its way beautiful catalogue of facts as that of the train leaving the station - The Morning Express’.
But we might hazard the guess that the war broke in and called out this vein of realism before its season; for side by side with these pieces there are others very different, not so effective perhaps, not particularly accomplished, but full of a rarer kind of interest, full of promise for the future. For the beauty in them, though fitful, is of the individual, indefinable kind which comes, we know not how, to make lines such as we read over each time with a renewed delight that after one comes the other.
Where have you been, South Wind, this May-day morning,
With larks aloft, or skimming with the swallow,
Or with blackbirds in a green, sun-glinted thicket?
Oh, I heard you like a tyrant in the valley;
Your ruffian haste shook the young, blossoming orchards;
You clapped rude hands, hallooing round the chimney,
And white your pennons streamed along the river.
You have robbed the bee, South Wind, in your adventure,
Blustering with gentle flowers; but I forgave you
When you stole to me shyly with scent of hawthorn.
Here we have evidence not of accomplishment, indeed, but of a gift much more valuable than that, the gift of being a poet, we must call it; and we shall look with interest to see what Mr Sassoon does with his gift.
Counter-Attack It is natural to feel an impulse of charity towards the poems written by young men who have fought or are still fighting; but in the case of Mr Sassoon there is no temptation to indulge in this form of leniency, because he is so evidently able-bodied in his poetic capacity and requires no excuses to be made for him. At the same time, it is difficult to judge him dispassionately as a poet, because it is impossible to overlook the fact that he writes as a soldier. It is a fact, indeed, that he forces upon you, as if it were a matter of indifference to him whether you called him a poet or not. We know no other writer who has shown us as effectually as Mr Sassoon the terrible pictures which lie behind the colourless phrases of the newspapers. From the thousand horrors which in their sum compose one day of warfare he selects, as if by chance, now this of the counter-attack, now that of mending the front-line wires, or this again of suicide in the trenches. The General’ is as good an example of his method as another:
‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack,
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
The vision of that ‘hell where youth and laughter go’ has been branded upon him too deeply to allow him to tolerate consolation or explanation. He can only state a little of what he has seen, a very little one guesses, and turn away with a stoical shrug as if a superficial cynicism were the best mask to wear in the face of such incredible experiences. His farewell to the dead is spoken in this fashion:
Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,
And tell him that our politicians swear
They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod
Under the heel of England... Are you there?...
Yes... and the war won’t end for at least two years; But we’ve got stacks of men... I’m blind with tears,
Staring into the dark. Cheero!
I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.
There is a stage of suffering, so these poems seem to show us, where any expression save the barest is intolerable; where beauty and art have something too universal about them to meet our particular case. Mr Sassoon sums up that point of view in his ‘Dead Musicians’. Not Bach or Beethoven or Mozart brings back the memory of his friends, but the gramophone does it bawling out ‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm’. Mr Sassoon’s poems are too much in the key of the gramophone at present, too fiercely suspicious of any comfort or compromise, to be read as poetry; but his contempt for palliative or subterfuge gives us the raw stuff of poetry.
A Russian Schoolboy.
The previous volumes of this chronicle, Tears of Childhood’ and ‘A Russian Gentleman’, left us with a feeling of personal friendship for Serge Aksakoff; we had come to know him and his family as we know people with whom we have stayed easily for weeks at a time in the country. The figure of Aksakoff himself has taken a place in our minds which is more like that of a real person than a person whom we have merely known in a book. Since reading the first volume of Mr Duff’s translation we have read many new books; many clear, sharp characters have passed before our eyes, but in most cases they have left nothing behind them but a sense of more or less brilliant activity. But Aksakoff has remained - a man of extraordinary freshness and substance, a man with a rich nature, moving in the sun and shadow of real life so that it is possible, as we have found during the past year or two, to settle down placidly and involuntarily to think about him. Such words as these would not apply truthfully perhaps to some very great works of art; but nothing that produces this impression of fullness and intimacy can be without some of the rarest qualities and, in our opinion, some of the most delightful. We have spoken of Aksakoff as a man, but unfortunately we have no right to do that for we have known him only as a boy, and the last volume of the three leaves him when he has but reached the age of fifteen. With this volume, Mr Duff tells us, the chronicle is finished; and our regret and desire to read another three, at least, is the best thanks we can offer him for his labour of translation. When we consider the rare merit of these books we can scarcely thank the translator sufficiently. We can only hope that he will look round and find another treasure of the same importance.
Ignorant as we are of the works of Aksakoff, it would be rash to say that this autobiography is the most characteristic of them, and yet one feels certain that there was something especially congenial to him in the recollection of childhood. When he was still a small boy he could plunge into ‘the inexhaustible treasury of recollection’. He is not,
we think, quite so happy in the present volume because he passes a little beyond the scope of childhood. It deals less with the country; and the magic, which consists so much in being very small among people of immeasurable size so that one’s parents are far more romantic than one’s brothers and sisters, was departing. When he was at school the boys were on an equality with him; the figures were contracting and becoming more like the people whom we see when we are grown up. Aksakoff’s peculiar gift lay in his power of living back into the childish soul. He can give to perfection the sense of the nearness, the largeness, the absolute dominance of the detail before the prospect has arranged itself so that details are only part of a well-known order. He makes us consider that for unreflecting passion and for amazement the life of a grown person cannot compare with the life of a child. He makes us remember, and this is perhaps more difficult, how curiously the child’s mind is taken up with what we call childish things together with premonitions of another kind of life, and with moments of extreme insight into its surroundings. He is thus able to give us a very clear notion of his father and mother, although we see them always as they appeared to a child. The effect of truth and vividness which is so remarkable in each of his volumes is the result of writing not from the man’s point of view, but by becoming a child again, for it is impossible that the most tenacious memory should have been able to store the millions of details from which these books are fashioned. We have to suppose that Aksakoff kept to the end of his life a power of changing back into a different stage of growth at the touch of recollection, so that the process is more one of living over again than of remembering. From a psychological point of view this is a curious condition - to view the pond or the tree as it is now without emotion, but to receive intense emotion from the same sight by remembering the emotion which it roused fifty years ago. It is clear that Aksakoff, with his abundant and impressionable nature, was precisely the man to feel his childhood to the full, and to keep the joy of reviving it fresh to the end.
The happiness of childhood, he writes, is the Golden Age, and the recollection of it has power to move the old man’s heart with pleasure and with pain. Happy is the man who once possessed it and is able to recall the memory of it in later years! With many the time passes by unnoticed or unenjoyed; and all that remains in the ripeness of age is the recollection of the coldness or even cruelty of men.
He was no doubt peculiar in the strength of his feelings, and singular compared with English boys in the absence of discipline at school and at college. As Mr Duff says, ‘His university studies are remarkable; he learnt no Greek, no Latin, no mathematics, and very little science - hardly anything but Russian and French.’ For this reason, perhaps, he remained conscious of all those little impressions which in most cases fade and are forgotten before the power of expressing them is full grown. Who is there, for example, who will not feel his early memories of coming back to a home in the country wonderfully renewed by the description of the return to Aksakovo:
As before I took to bed with me my cat, which was so attached that she followed me everywhere like a dog; and I snared small birds or trapped them and kept them in a small room which was practically converted into a spacious coop. I admired my pigeons with double tufts and feathered legs... which had been kept warm in my absence under the stoves or in the houses of the outdoor servants... To the island I ran several times a day, hardly knowing myself why I went; and there I stood motionless as if under a spell, while my heart beat hard, and my breath came unevenly.
Nor is it possible to read his account of butterfly collecting without recalling some such period of fanatical excitement. Indeed, we have read no description to compare with this one for its exact, prosaic, and yet most stirring reproduction of the succeeding stages of a child’s passion. It begins almost by accident; it becomes in a moment the only thing in the world; of a sudden it dies down and is over for no perceptible reason. One can verify, as if from an old diary, every step that he takes with his butterfly net in his hand down that grassy valley in the burning heat until he sees* within two yards of him ‘fluttering from flower to flower a splendid swallowtail’ And then follows the journey home, where the small sister has begun collecting on her brother’s account, and has turned all the jugs and tumblers in her room upside down, and even opened the lid of the piano and put butterflies alive inside of it. Nevertheless, in a few months the passion is over, and ‘we devoted all our leisure to literature, producing a manuscript magazine... I became deeply interested in acting also’.
All childhood is passionate, but if we compare the childhood of Aksakoff with our memories and observations of English childhood we shall be struck with the number and the violence of his enthusiasms. When his mother left him at school he sat on his bed with his eyes staring wildly, unable to think or to cry, and had to be put to bed, rubbed with flannels, and restored to consciousness by a violent fit of shivering. His sensitiveness to any recollection of childhood was such, even as a child, that the sound of a voice, a patch of sunlight on the wall, a fly buzzing on the pane, which reminded him of his past, threw him into a fit. His health became so bad that he had to be taken home. These fits and ecstasies in which his mother often joined him will hardly fail to remind the reader of many similar scenes which are charged against Dostoevsky as a fault. The fault, if it is a fault, appears to be more in the Russian nature than in the novelist’s version of it. From the evidence supplied by Aksakoff we realize how little discipline enters into their education; and we also realize, what we do not gather from Dostoevsky, how sane, natural and happy such a life can be.
Partly because of his love of nature, that unconscious perception of beauty which lay at the back of his shooting and fishing and butterfly catching, partly because of the largeness and generosity of his character, the impression produced by these volumes is an impression of abundance and of happiness. As Aksakoff says in a beautiful description of an uncle and aunt of his. The atmosphere seemed to have something calming and life-giving in it, something suited to beast and plant.’ At the same time we have only to compare him, as he has been compared, with Gilbert White to realize the Russian element in him, the element of self-consciousness and introspection. No one is very simple who realizes so fully what is happening to him, or who can trace, as he traces it, the moment when ‘the radiance’ fades and the ‘peculiar feeling of sadness’ begins. His power of registering these changes shows that he was qualified to write also an incomparable account of maturity.
He gives in this book a description of the process of letting water out of a pond. A crowd of peasants collected upon the banks. ‘All Russians love to watch moving water... The people saluted with shouts of joy the element they loved, as it tore its way to freedom from its winter prison.’ The shouts of joy and the love of watching both seem the peculiar property of the Russian people. From such a combination one would expect to find one of these days that they have produced the greatest of autobiographies, as they have produced perhaps the greatest of novels. But Aksakoff is more than a prelude; his work in its individuality and its beauty stands by itself.
A Glance at Turgenev.
If this were not the sixteenth volume of a classic - if it were the first volume by an unknown writer - what should we find to say? To begin with we should say that M. Turgenev is an observant young man, who, if he can restrain his faculty for observing detail, may in time have something to offer us. ‘She had the habit of turning her head to the right while she lifted a morsel to her mouth with the left hand, as if she were playing with it.”... They pacified the infuriated curs, but a maidservant was obliged to drag one of them... into a bedroom, getting bitten on her right hand in the process.’ In themselves both those facts are admirably noted; but we should not fail to point out that it is dangerous to observe like that - dangerous to stress little facts because one happens to have a store of them in readiness. All round us are strewn the melancholy relics of those who have insisted upon telling us that she was bitten on the right hand, but rais
ed her fork with the left. And then, even as we are making this observation, the details dissolve and disappear. There is nothing left but the scene itself. It lives unsupported, unvouched for. The father and mother; the two girls; the visitors; the very sheep dogs and the food on the table are all contributing spontaneously to the final impression which makes us positive, when the door shuts and the two young men drive off, that nothing will induce Boris Andreyitch to marry Emerentsiya. That is the principal thing we know; but we also know, as the house recedes in the distance, that in the drawing-room Emerentsiya is simpering over her conquest; while the plain sister Polinka has run upstairs and is crying to the maid that she hates visitors; they will talk to her about music; and then her mother scolds her.
That scene is not the work of a prentice hand. It is not the result of keen eyesight and notebooks crammed with facts. But it would be impossible if we had only that scene before us to say that we detect a master’s hand and are already certain that this unknown Russian writer is the famous novelist Turgenev. The story goes on, however. Greatly to the surprise of his friend, Boris marries a simple country girl. They settle down; life is perfect, but perhaps a trifle dull. Boris travels. He goes to Paris, and there drifting vaguely into an affair with a young woman he is challenged by her lover and killed. Far away in Russia his widow mourns for him sincerely. But after all Boris did not ‘belong to the number of people who are irreplaceable. (And indeed are there such people?)’ Nor was his widow ‘capable of devoting herself for ever to one feeling. (And indeed are there such feelings?)’ So she marries her husband’s old friend, and they live peacefully in the country, and have children and are happy, ‘for there is no other happiness on earth’. Thus, that first scene which was so lively and suggestive has led to other scenes; they add themselves to it; they bring in contrast, distance, solidity. In the end everything seems to be there. Here is a world able to exist by itself. Now perhaps we can talk with some certainty of a master; for now we have not a single brilliant episode which is gone the moment after, but a succession of scenes attached one to another by the feelings which are common to humanity. Space forbids us to inquire more minutely by what means this is achieved. Besides, there are other books by Turgenev which illustrate his powers more clearly. The stories in this volume are not equal to his best work. But they have this characteristic of greatness - they exist by themselves. We can judge from them what sort of world Turgenev created. We can see in what respects his vision was different from other people’s.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 506