Sanine | Page 2

keen stimulus, at worst a drugging pleasure? Is the dead weight of society altogether to crush their delight in life? What is society? What is it but the accumulated emanations of the fear and timidity and shyness that beset human beings whenever they are gathered together? And to this accumulation are those who are not artists to bring nothing but fear and shyness and timidity to make the shadow over life grow denser and darker? Is there to be no reaction? How can there be individuals worthy of being alive except through reaction? And how can there be good government unless there are good individuals to be governed--individuals in fine, worthy of being governed?
In the matters of being fed, clothed, and housed few men and women feel the hindrance of society. Indeed it is for those purposes that they are gathered together. Being so, it is then that their fear and shyness and timidity make them disguise their real natures and suppress their other desires and aspirations. It is in the matter of love that men and women feel society's oppression, submit to it and; set up their subjection as the rule which must be obeyed. Very rarely is it obeyed except by a few virtuous women who go through life coldly and destructively, driving the men with whom they come in contact into the arms of their more generous sisters. Women have fewer defences against the tyranny of society, which makes all but a very few either prostitutes or prigs, exploiting their womanhood in emotional and physical excitement, their motherhood to defend themselves and their self-respect from the consequences of that indulgence. Men are of harder stuff. Some of them can escape into the intellectual life; many preserve only their practical cunning and, for the rest, are insensible and stupid and fill their lives with small pleasures and trifling discontents, and feed their conceit with success or failure as they happen.
In Vladimir Saline Artzibashef has imagined, postulated, a man who has escaped the tyranny of society, is content to take his living where he finds it, and determined to accept whatever life has to offer of joy or sorrow. Returning to his home, he observes and amuses himself with all that is going on in the little provincial garrison town, where men and women--except his mother, who is frozen to the point of living altogether by formula--are tormented by the exasperation of unsatisfied desires. He sees Novikoff absurdly and hopelessly in love with his sister, Lida; he sees Lida caught up in an intrigue with an expert soldier love-maker, and bound, both by her own weakness and by her dependence upon society for any opinion of her own actions, to continue in that hateful excitement; he sees men and women all round him letting their love and their desire trickle through their fingers; he sees Semenoff die, and death also in that atmosphere is blurred and meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of passion and propinquity. Love is rare; physical necessity is common to all men and women; it is absurd to expect the growth of the one and the satisfaction of the other often to coincide. Nature is apparently indifferent and does not demand love of human beings but only mutual attraction, and of that are most children born. They grow up to dwell in the heated confusion which passes for life. Of that mutual attraction and in that heated confusion two children are born in this book, Lida's and Sarudine's, Sanine's and Karsavina's. Lida yields to Society's view of such affairs and is near broken by it; Sanine sustains Karsavina and brings her to the idea, cherished by Thomas Hardy among others, as a way out of confusion, of a woman's right to have a child without suffering from impertinent curiosity as to who the father may be if he be such that she thinks herself better rid of him. This does not necessarily mean that women would at once become as loose and casual as men. On the contrary, it would probably make many of them realize their responsibility and fewer of them would capture men as Arabella captured Jude the Obscure. In any case there is no excuse for the cruelty which regards a child born out of wedlock as nothing but evidence of wickedness. A child born in wedlock may be as lustfully and lovelessly begotten. Marriage does not necessarily provide relief from physical necessity and often aggravates it; and when a child, as often happens, is nothing to its father and mother but a sordid tie, a constant reminder of a connexion which both would be happier to forget, then, for its