Poushkin's Friendship.

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whole nights were passed together in literary discussions; henceforth neither wrote a line without submitting it to the judgment of the other; and when, in 1837, Poúshkin died, it was as though Gógol had lost a part of himself. 'Every month, 'every week,' he writes from Rome, where he was then staying, some fresh loss, and now the cruellest that could befall me. 'All my joy, all the happiness of my life lies buried in Poúsh'kin's grave. I undertook nothing without having first con'sulted him. I never wrote a line without fancying he was by 'my side. What he would say, what would make him laugh, 'what would win his approval, these were the questions I used 'to put to myself. But now, as for the present work,* he was its inspiration, and to him I owed its idea and plan. He is gone and I have no longer strength or interest sufficient for the task. I have over and over again taken up my pen, but 'all in vain ; the pen falls idly from my hand; I can only weep.' A pleasing contrast to the quarrels and jealousies that make up so large a portion of literary biographies, and on which we have dwelt the longer, since the rest of the story of Gogol's life may be told in a few words. The last seven years of his life were passed, with rare and brief intervals of health, in a state of melancholy madness. In one of these intervals he paid a second visit to Italy, but, after a few months' sojourn at Rome, returned home and fixed his residence at Moscow. It was there he died, in the forty-second year of his age, his latest act being to burn the manuscript containing the concluding chapters of 'The Dead Souls.'

It may be well, before proceeding to notice in detail the principal works of Gógol, to point out what seem to be the leading characteristics of his genius.

Admirers of the modern sensational novel, in whose eyes tragedy is inseparably connected with 'ermine-tippets, adul'tery, and murder,' must look upon the tales of Gógol as insipidly commonplace, and exhibiting a sad poverty of imagination. Nothing can exceed their simplicity of plot. In most of them there is an entire absence of intrigue. What is the subject of his Old-fashioned Farmers?' Two country boors, living in a dull round of thoughtless content, spend their sixty or seventy years in drinking and eating, eating and drinking; and when they have eaten and drunk their fill, die off. Utterly incapable of the slightest intellectual effort, ignorant of all the higher impulses or nobler aspirations that dignify our nature, unconscious of any pleasure beyond the satisfaction of those instincts

He alludes to the Dead Souls.'

which man shares in common with the beast of the field,-what interest can there be in the record of a life like theirs? All the emptiness, poverty, and bare nakedness of their existence is exposed; not a single detail in their petty, monotonous career, each to-morrow, the deadening counterpart of yesterday is forgotten or passed over; and yet, such is the power of art, when exercised on even the most trivial of themes, that what in unskilled hands would have sunk into a revolting burlesque, becomes with Gógol the source of truest poetry and kindliest humour. So it is that we sympathise with poor Pulcheria, when in the return of her strayed cat she thinks she sees an omen of coming death; laugh, but without resentment, at Athanasius Ivanovitch's greed and gluttony; forget in our pity his coarse sensuality when, the omen verified, he made his way roughly through the crowd of mourners who stood by the newly-dug grave, looked perplexedly first at one and then at another of his neighbours, as he asked in a dull, hoarse voice, 'And so, you 'have buried her; but why?' Not till this moment have we really known the man, as we should have done in real life; so while reading the story we have all along misjudged him; and we were wrong to say that his nature was altogether brutal and boorish. His better feelings were so deadened by the dreary routine of a sluggish life, that we could not divine their existence; but it is affliction that discovers the secret character of us all; and this heavy sorrow first reveals to us the subtler qualities of his soul.

Combined with, and a natural consequence of this simplicity of plot, we observe in Gógol a rare fidelity to human nature in the delineation of his characters. They are not heroic, gifted with superhuman virtues or superhuman vices. It requires no great genius to sketch incarnations of wild devilry or embodiments of perfection. They are not extraordinary people, still less fancy portraits, but living realities; to many of whom we feel that we could give their true name. It is this which arouses our interest in the humblest and the meanest among them; we perceive that they are no painted puppets put into certain postures at the whim and caprice of the showman, but through every change of circumstance they are allowed to develope themselves naturally, and without the author's controlling intervention. Whether it be Tárass Búlba, with his savage love of war, who cared for nothing in heaven or hell, so long as he had his favourite sword in hand or his no less favourite pipe in mouth; or the accurate plodding Schiller, who did everything by calculation-kissed his wife twice a day; got drunk once a week on the Sunday; always put a teaspoonful of pepper into his soup at

Gogol's Simplicity and Humour.

333

dinner; and when only twenty years of age had sworn that before he was thirty he would amass a capital of 20,000 roubles; never having the slightest doubt that it was fated so to be, since a tchinórnik* would sooner forget to bow to his superior's schweitzer than a German break his oath; or the honest weaver's wife, one of those treasures which are often found in this good world of ours, who was scarcely ever at home, but went all day fawning among wealthy, gossiping old women, paid them no end of compliments, ate their donations with a rare appetite, and never beat her husband except in the morning, because it was the only time she was at home; or the slave Petróushka, who read every book he could get hold of, little caring whether it was a novel, an A B C, or a manual of prayers, since what pleased him was not the subject-matter, but the mere act of reading and getting out of the letters a series of words, as to the sense of which he was perfectly indifferent :—whether it be one of these or any other of the characters that fill up Gógol's broad picture of humanity, we seem to have known them one and all in real life. Let their story be told however briefly, we feel able to supply some trait in their history which the author has failed to give, relate some additional anecdote about them which the writer has forgotten or passed over.

The next feature in the writings of Gógol of which we would speak is one which, on a first perusal, we are apt to imagine constitutes their sole, or at least chief, recommendation. We refer to their humour. And when we speak of Gógol's humour, we wish the word to be understood in its widest and most comprehensive sense. For though in its source it is one springing from a deep conviction of the vanity of all that is human, it is most varied in its manifestations. At times he will surrender himself to some wild fancy so extravagantly absurd, that no writer less daring than himself would ever have used it to move our laughter, and hold us spell-bound as he describes Vakóola's ride on the devil's back to St. Petersburg-Vakóola, the adventurous blacksmith, who had promised the black-eyed, coquettish Oxána the tiny shoes which the Empress herself was wont to wear. 'At first Vakóola could not help feeling afraid at rising to such a height that he could distinguish nothing upon the earth, and at coming so near the moon, that if he had not bent down he 'would certainly have caught one of its horns in his cap. Yet, after a time, he recovered his presence of mind, and began to laugh at the devil. All was bright in the sky. A light, silvery mist covered the transparent air. Everything was distinctly

Government clerk.

'visible, and the blacksmith even noticed how a wizard flew past him, sitting in a pot; how some stars, gathered in a group, 'played at blind-man's-buff; how a devil, who was dancing in a moonbeam, when he saw him riding, took off his cap and 'made him a low bow.' There is in such passages as this an abandonment to the humour of the moment which it is impossible to resist; and we can easily credit Poúshkin's assertion that the very compositors, whilst setting up the type of this same story-Christmas Eve'- would frequently leave off their work to laugh. In general, however, Gógol's humour is quieter and more subdued in its tone. It is this forced absence of passion which gives such strength to Gógol's satire, and makes his irony so biting. By a single word or trifling phrase, which would seem to have fallen accidentally from his pen, he will plant the blow, aimed at the social folly or administrative abuse he is attacking, with a vigour and a certainty that renders it fatal. Thus, in the description of a general's daughter, which he puts into the mouth of a poor tchinóvnik, who is infatuated with her beauty, after having made him expatiate on the charms of her person, with what exquisite banter does he sum up the cringing subserviency natural to his position in the one expressive sentence, 'Her very handkerchief breathes the essence of a general's rank!' Ör, to select but one example from 'The Revisor,' a comedy, every scene of which abounds with similar touches of dry humour. The prefect of a small provincial town is alarmed at the intelligence that his superior may be expected on any day or at any hour, and begs the postmaster to open all the letters that may pass through his office. That worthy official informed him that such had always been his custom, 'not from any state 'reasons,' as he takes care to explain, but from curiosity;' some of the letters he had opened proving so entertaining, that he really could not find the heart to send them on, but had kept them in his desk at home. When reminded by a more cautious colleague that this may get him into trouble with the public, the prefect cuts short his remonstrance by crying out, Ah, bátoushka,* don't you see this is a private affair?'

It will not be necessary to dwell long on the last of the characteristics of Gógol's genius that we have space to noticehis nationality. In his humour, in his irony, in his language, in his thoughts, in his lyrical outbursts of passionate eloquence, and in his pathos, Gógol is thoroughly Russian. And thoroughly Russian, too, are all his personages; and it were

Father; a term of familiarity constantly used in ordinary conversation, corresponding to our 'good fellow.'

difficult to cite one trait in the national character that has not been seized upon by Gógol. His nationality, to use his own words, does not consist in describing the saraphan, but is 'inspired by the very spirit of the people.' And yet, as a true artist, he did not neglect external peculiarities. Nothing can be more remarkable than the pains which he took to render his portraits true to the minutest detail. Many of the letters, which during the first years of his residence at St. Petersburg he wrote to his mother, are filled with questions as to the dresses worn by the peasantry in Little Russia, the names given by the country people to their different articles of costume, the customs that obtained among them at the different festivals of the year, the superstitions and fairy tales which still found credence in the provinces. Nor is he less true in his unsparing exposure of those vices which, if they were not peculiar to his country, at least once flourished there, more abundantly than elsewhere. So true and so outspoken is he, that he was not seldom met with the charge of being unpatriotic : as if, forsooth, patriotism consisted in a blind admiration of whatever is, and an equally blind belief that it therefore must be right. It is a charge which honest writers in every land and in every age have had to bear. But,' to quote Gógol's manly reply to such reproaches, the accusation is not founded on any 'sentiment so pure or so noble as patriotism. It proceeds from 'those who do not care to remedy an evil, but are only anxious that none should speak of the ill they do. A cowardly fear is ' its sole foundation, however grandly it may mask itself under 'the holy name of patriotism. This mask it is the mission of ' every honest writer to tear away, to trample beneath his feet. 'Writers have but one sacred duty, and that is to tell the truth, 'the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'

Gógol may be said to have commenced his literary career by the publication of his 'Evenings in a Farm House.' His earlier efforts must be regarded as mere tentative essays, written in order to prove his genius and to discover its true province. We have already spoken of the impression which these stories produced on Poúshkin's mind. Nor was their reception by a public already satiated with the gloomy horrors which abound so liberally in the novels of Zagóskin less enthusiastic. There are a freshness, a simplicity, and a gaiety in Gógol's descriptions of Little Russian life, which bring home to us a conviction of their unexaggerated truthfulness, even though we have never visited the country, and are ignorant of its habits, faith, and language. They are filled with those happy touches which of themselves reveal the whole character of the people with a certainty and a precision not to be attained in pages of ordinary