as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is
indivisible. To say 'Speaking as an artist, I feel this; and speaking as
a voter, I feel t!lat' is always false; and immoral and dishonest too.
Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality.
It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce
beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they
happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as
novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their
dancing.
This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the
romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been
exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were
peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated
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B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN I NT E L L I G ENTSIA
to the worship of some transcendent reality, to betray which is mortal
sin. They conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as
inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their
divine Maker in whatever they did; but in the first place they were
composers who wrote works to order and strove to make them as
melodious as possible. By the nineteenth century, the notion of the
artist as a sacred vessel, set apart, with a unique soul and unique status,
was exceedingly widespread. It was born, I suppose, mainly among
the Germans, and is connected with the belief that it is the duty of
every man to give himself to a cause; that upon the artist and poet
this duty is binding in a special degree, for he is a wholly dedicated
being; and that his fate is peculiarly sublime and tragic, for his form
of
himself totally to his ideal. What this
ideal is, is comparatively unimportant. The essential thing is to offer
oneself without calculation, to give all one has for the sake of the light
within (whatever it may illuminate) from pure motives. For only
motives count.
Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public
stage, testifying; so that the smallest lapse on his part, a lie, a deception,
an act of self-indulgence, lack of zeal for the truth, was a heinous
crime. If you were principally engaged in making money, then,
perhaps, you were not quite so strictly accountable to society. But if
you spoke in public at all, be it as poet or novelist or historian or
in whatever public capacity, then you accepted full responsibility for
guiding and leading the people. If this was your calling then you were
bound by a Hippocratic oath to tell the truth and never to betray it,
and to dedicate yourself selflessly to your goal.
. There are certain clear cases-Tolstoy is one of them-where this
principle was accepted literally and followed to its extreme consequences. But this tendency in Russia was far wider than Tolstoy's peculiar case would indicate. Turgenev, for example, who is commonly thought of as the most western among Russian writers, a man who believed in the pure and independent nature of art more
than, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who consciously and deliberately
avoided moralising in his novels, and was, indeed, sternly called to
order by other Russian authors for an excessive-and, it was indicated.
regrettably western-preoccupation with aesthetic principles, for
devoting too much time and attention to the mere form and style of
his works, for insufficient probing into the deep moral and spiritual
essence of his characters-even the 'aesthetic' Turgenev is wholly
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committed to the belief that social and moral problems are the central
issues of life and of art, and that they are intelligible only in their own
specific historical and ideological context.
I was once astonished to see it stated, in a review by an eminent
literary critic in a Sunday newspaper, that, of all authors, Turgenev
was not particularly conscious of the historical forces of his time.
This is the very opposite of the truth. Every novel of Turgenev deals
explicitly with social and moral problems within a specific historical
setting; it describes human beings in particular social conditions at
an identifiable date. The mere fact that Turgeaev was an artist to
his marrow-bones, and understood the universal aspects of human
character or predicament, need not blind us to the fact that he fully
accepted his duty as a writer to speak the objective truth-social no
less than psychological-in public, and not to betray it.
If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the
French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations
on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends,
but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating
from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian
writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had
been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant
whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer. I can
think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the
alibi that he was one kind of person as a writer, to be judged, let us
say, solely i n terms of his novels, and quite another as a private
individual. That is the gulf between the characteristically 'Russian'
and 'French' conceptions of life and art, as I have christened them.
I do not mean that every western writer would accept the ideal which
I have attributed to the French, nor that every Russian would subscribe to what I have called the 'Russian' conception. But, broadly speaking, I think it is a correct division, and holds good even when
you come to the aesthetic writers- for instance, the Russian symbolist
poets at the turn of the last century, who despised every form of
utilitarian or didactic or 'impure' art, took not the slightest interest
in social analysis or psychological novels, and accepted and exaggerated
the aestheticism of the west to an outre degree. Even these Russian
symbolists did not think that they had no moral obligation. They
saw themselves, indeed, as Pythian priestesses upon some mystical
tripod, as seers of a reality of which this world was merely a dark
symbol and occult expression, and, remote though they were from social
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idealism, believed with moral and spiritual fervour in their own sacred
vows. They were witnesses to a mystery; that was the ideal which
they were morally not permitted, by the rules of their art, to betray.
This attitude is utterly different from anything that Flaubert laid
down about the fidelity of the artist to his art, which to hin\ is identical
with the proper function of the artist, or the best method of becoming