None of us who keep an eye on the heavens of European literature can
forget the emotion that we felt when, but a few years since, the red
star of Kolniyatsch swam into our ken. As nobody can prove that I
wasn't, I claim now that I was the first to gauge the magnitude of
this star and to predict the ascendant course which it has in fact
triumphantly taken. That was in the days when Kolniyatsch was still
alive. His recent death gives the cue for the boom. Out of that boom
I, for one, will not be left. I rush to scrawl my name, large, on the
tombstone of Kolniyatsch.
These foreign fellows always are especially to be commended. By the
mere mention of their names you evoke in reader or hearer a vague
sense of your superiority and his. Thank heaven, we are no longer
insular. I don't say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it,
pyramids of it, all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would
England be but for her good fortune in being able to draw on a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of anguished souls from the Continent--
infantile wide-eyed Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted
Scandinavians, all of them different, but all of them raving in one
common darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals
for exportation? There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this
commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used
to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We have learnt to be vibrant.
Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it
is true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he
was. But the quality of his genius, albeit nothing if not national and
also universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot
afford to close our eyes on his life--a life happily not void of those
sensational details which are what we all really care about.
`If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.' Kolniyatsch was born,
last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. At the age of nine he had
already acquired that passionate alcoholism which was to have so great
an influence in the moulding of his character and on the trend of his
thought. Otherwise he does not seem to have shown in childhood any
exceptional promise. It was not before his eighteenth birthday that he
murdered his grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his earlier manner.
In 1907 he escaped from his sanctum, or chuzketc (cell) as he
sardonically called it, and, having acquired some money by an act of
violence, gave, by sailing for America, early proof that his genius
was of the kind that crosses frontiers and seas. Unfortunately, it was
not of the kind that passes Ellis Island. America, to her lasting
shame, turned him back. Early in 1908 we find him once more in his old
quarters, working at those novels and confessions on which, in the
opinion of some, his fame will ultimately rest. Alas, we don't find
him there now. It will be a fortnight ago to-morrow that Luntic
Kolniyatsch passed peacefully away, in the twenty-eighth year of his
age. He would have been the last to wish us to indulge in any sickly
sentimentality. `Nothing is here for tears, nothing but well and fair,
and what may quiet us in a death so noble.'
Was Kolniyatsch mad? It depends on what we mean by that word. If we
mean, as the bureaucrats of Ellis Island and, to their lasting shame,
his friends and relations presumably meant, that he did not share our
own smug and timid philosophy of life, then indeed was Kolniyatsch not
sane. Granting for sake of argument that he was mad in a wider sense
than that, we do but oppose an insuperable stumbling-block to the
Eugenists . Imagine what Europe would be to-day, had Kolniyatsch not
been! As one of the critics avers, `It is hardly too much to say that
a time may be not far distant, and may indeed be nearer than many of
us suppose, when Luntic Kolniyatsch will, rightly or wrongly, be
reckoned by some of us as not the least of those writers who are
especially symptomatic of the early twentieth century and are possibly
"for all time" or for a more or less certainly not inconsiderable
period of time.' That is finely said. But I myself go somewhat
further. I say that Kolniyatsch's message has drowned all previous
messages and will drown any that may be uttered in the remotest
future. You ask me what, precisely, that message was? Well, it is too
elemental, too near to the very heart of naked Nature, for exact
definition. Can you describe the message of an angry python more
satisfactorily than as S-s-s-s? Or that of an infuriated bull better
than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies somewhere between these two.
Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we find him hard to fit into
any single category. Was he a realist or a romantic? He was neither,
and he was both. By more than one critic he has been called a
pessimist, and it is true that a part of his achievement may be gauged
by the lengths to which he carried pessimism--railing and raging, not,
in the manner of his tame forerunners, merely at things in general, or
at women, or at himself, but lavishing an equally fierce scorn and
hatred on children, on trees and flowers and the moon, and indeed on
everything that the sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into
favour. On the other hand, his burning faith in a personal Devil, his
frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that
every one but himself will be brought back to life in time to be
frozen to death in the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as
an optimist. By birth and training a man of the people, he was yet an
aristocrat to the finger-tips, and Byron would have called him
brother, though one trembles to think what he would have called Byron.
First and last, he was an artist, and it is by reason of his technical
mastery that he most of all outstands. Whether in prose or in verse,
he compasses a broken rhythm that is as the very rhythm of life
itself, and a cadence that catches you by the throat, as a terrier
catches a rat, and wrings from you the last drop of pity and awe. His
skill in avoiding `the inevitable word' is simply miraculous. He is
the despair of the translator. Far be it from me to belittle the
devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway, whose monumental translation
of the Master's complete works is now drawing to its splendid close.
Their promised biography of the murdered grandmother is awaited
eagerly by all who take--and which of us does not take?--a breathless
interest in Kolniyatschiana. But Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway would be the
first to admit that their renderings of the prose and verse they love
so well are a wretched substitute for the real thing. I wanted to get
the job myself, but they nipped in and got it before me. Thank heaven,
they cannot deprive me of the power to read Kolniyatsch in the
original Gibrisch and to crow over you who can't.
Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege and
the permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories.
His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was
beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving
lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a
touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse
to spring at one's throat. The voice had notes that recalled M.
Mounet-Sully's in the later and more important passages of Oedipe Roi.
I remember that he always spoke with the greatest contempt of Mr. and
Mrs. Pegaway's translations. He likened them to--but enough! His boom
is not yet at the full. A few weeks hence I shall be able to command
an even higher price than I could now for my `Talks with Kolniyatsch.'
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-THE END-
Max Beerbohm essay: Kolniyatsch (1913)
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