SOURCE: “The Eclipse of the Golden Age,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, April, 1976, pp. 176-88.

[In the following essay, Harvie compares Baratynsky's poetry written in protest of industrialization with that of English poet William Wordsworth, concluding that Wordsworth was the more didactic in his approach.]

The contemporary crusade against the excesses of science and technology should be viewed, not simply as a reaction to modern social conditions, but also as part of the continuing romantic protest against industrialisation, which goes back at least 200 years. It began with Rousseau in France, soon to be followed by Schiller and Novalis in Germany, whence the protest spread to England and finally to Russia. Here I wish to explore the similarities in the thinking of two protesting romantic poets, the one English and the other Russian.

While there can be no question of influence, Wordsworth and Baratynsky share an obvious aversion to industrialisation, as well as a profound fear of modern science and technology.¹ In other respects, the two writers seem very different: there is little in common between Wordsworth's ultimately optimistic nature-pantheism, later overlaid with a veneer of Christianity, and Baratynsky's cosmic pessimism. Both men were, however, deeply indebted to Rousseau, though neither would have been very willing to admit the fact. Moreover, this aversion to industrialisation is of the essence of their thinking; it is by no means an aberration which contradicts the general trend of their poetic development.² While similar ideas were all in the air all over Europe, there are some advantages in narrowing down the focus to these two poets, in whom the romantic protest was perhaps most fully exemplified.

By these first-generation romantics the new Iron Age was apprehended much less as an actual experience familiar to them, than as a threatened change in the fundamental relationship between man, nature and supernature. While Wordsworth had some first-hand acquaintance with industrial horrors, in Russia industrialisation had barely scratched the surface of the country when Baratynsky died in 1844. Nevertheless, the Russian poet anticipates Dostoevsky in his uncanny ability to chart the future from the configuration of the present. It is, incidentally, rather surprising that the contemporary Anglo-Saxon detractors of science and technology have made so little of Wordsworth; in Russia the influence of Baratynsky is clearly visible in Andrey Voznesensky's dystopian poem “Oza” 1964. It is arguable that the protesters might be more successful if they showed greater awareness of their historical antecedents.

For the romantic poet, the standard against which the emergent industrial society was measured and found wanting was the Golden Age—a myth, if it is but that, which has proved remarkably impervious to all attempts at rational demolition. On the Christian view, the Fall of Man meant disobedience to God's command and expulsion from Eden; romantic neopaganism saw it, rather, as a fall out of blissful harmony with nature into the pain of separative self-consciousness; a disharmony intensified by the development of science, technology and trade. In Wordsworth's “Vernal Ode” (1817) the Golden Age is a period of peace where evil is as yet unknown; no gap exists between nature and supernature, nor between appearance and reality:

The golden years maintained a course
Not undiversified though smooth and even;
We were not mocked with glimpse and shadow then,
Bright Seraphs mixed familiarly with men;
And earth and stars comprised a universal heaven.

In “Descriptive Sketches” (1793) the poet, having provided a glowing account of the traditions of the Golden Age which survive in the Alps, sums up with a statement even more in the spirit of Rousseau:

Once Man, entirely free, alone and wild,
Was bless'd as free—for he was Nature's child.
He, all-superior but his God disdain'd,
Walked none restraining, and by none restrain'd,
Confess'd no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wish'd, and wish'd but what he ought.

There are further glimpses of the Golden Age in “Peter Bell” and other poems. In this context Wordsworth's deity is Pan rather than the Christian God.

The landscape of the Golden Age is depicted by Baratynsky in a few poems, most notably “Poslednyaya smert'” (“The Final Death”) and “Posledny poet” (“The Last Poet”); what might be called its soulscape is exposed in “Primety” (“Omens”). It is significant that in the first two of these poems the Golden Age appears not directly, but in the form of an industrial counterfeit. In “The Final Death” the poet with rapturous irony—if the expression may be permitted—describes the temporary flowering of the arts and the apparent rejuvenation of nature which precede the collapse of mass industrial society:

Snachala mir yavil mne divny sad;
Vezde iskusstv, obiliya primety;
Bliz vesi ves', i podle grada grad,
Vezde dvortsy, teatry, vodomety.

(At first I saw the world as a wondrous garden, with art and affluence visible everywhere; villages and towns crowding each other and palaces, theatres, fountains everywhere.)

Somewhat similarly in “The Last Poet,” when against all probability a new poet arises in liberated Greece, Baratynsky's paradigm for contemporary European society:

No zeleny v otechestve Omira
Kholmy, lesa, brega lazurnykh rek.
Tsvetet Parnas! pred nim, kak v ony gody
Kastal'sky klyuch zhivoy strueyu b'et.

(But green are the hills, forests and shores of azure rivers in Homer's land. Parnassus flourishes! before which, as in bygone years, surge the living waters of the Castalian spring.)

Again, this is a false dawn: the seeming re-creation of the Golden Age is but a prelude to disaster; since the last poet, who incarnates its spirit, is hounded to his death. In “Omens” the pristine relationship of trust and sympathy between man and nature is expressed in the natural language of omens. As a result and a condition of this ideal state: “V pustyne bezlyudnoy on ne byl odnim, Nechuzhdaya zhizn' v ney dyshala” (In the uninhabited wilderness man was not alone, a life akin to his own existed there); but now sympathy has been replaced by hostility and mutual incomprehension, so that the heart of nature is closed to man and prophecy has vanished from the earth. Although both poets agree about the conditions of the Golden Age, Baratynsky is much more preoccupied than Wordsworth, for reasons that will appear later, with the role of poetry. He is also more impressed with the tragic, indeed apocalyptic, consequences of man's fall.

Another aspect of the mythology of romanticism was the idea that the development of the individual repeated that of the race; thus the personal “golden age” of childhood is followed by a fall into adult self-consciousness and lack of empathy with one's environment. Baratynsky expresses this thought in his early article “O zabluzhdeniyakh i istine” (“Concerning Illusions and Truth”), where he contrasts the nonchalant felicity of youthful dreams with the enlightened miseries of maturity, thus foreshadowing one of his most important themes: that happiness and truth are incompatible. In “Byvalo, otrok, zvonkim klikom …” (“When I was a youth my shouts …”), a poem which has had less notice than it deserves, he says:

Byvalo, otrok, zvonkim kilkom
Lesnoe ekho ya budil,
I verny otklik v lese dikom
Menya smyatenno veselil.

(When I was a youth my shouts would awaken the forest echo, and in the forest wilds a faithful response rejoiced my anguished soul.)

Later, the enchantment of harmony with nature is replaced by the enchantment of poetry, but finally both are lost:

No vse prokhodit. Ostyvayu
Ya i k garmonii stikhov—
I kak dubrov ne otklikayu
Tak ne ischu sozvuchnykh slov.

(But everything passes. I grow cold even to the harmony of poetry, and neither call to the forest groves nor seek harmonious words.)

Wordsworth expresses a similar idea in his famous ode on the “Intimations of Immortality,” too well known for quotation to be necessary. There, the radiant childish intuitions of harmony with nature are partially eclipsed by the dull maturity of adult life. For Wordsworth, however, the eclipse is never complete; something of the youthful vision remains, and the decline of early rapture is compensated by moral and intellectual growth—though we, and probably the poet himself, are more impressed by the losses than the gains.

The romantic version of the Fall of Man is readily convertible to the Christian if one simply substitute God for Nature. For both, the cardinal sin is pride: in attempting to usurp an ontological status which is not and cannot be his, man threatens by his insubordination the whole economy of the universe. This, arguably, is the logic of the Industrial Revolution. In Baratynsky's “Omens” the poet provides three examples: in the second, man, heeding the raven's harsh call, submits to fate and renounces his insolent design. Later, however, he enslaves nature with the Iron Age weapons of science and technology. “The Final Death” begins with an analysis of the structure of consciousness; the poet then prefaces his account of the future of civilisation with the question whether his visions are “the creation of a morbid dream” or “the construct of an insolent intellect”. Actually the technological paradise of the first vision is based on intellectual conquests, and what appears to be the universal drug culture of the second is a product of degenerate imagination. There are Wordsworthian analogies: in his attack on the intellectual hubris of the modern age, which he contrasts unfavourably with that of St Bega, he says in “Stanzas suggested in a steamboat off St. Bees' Head” (1833):

To Prowess guided by her insight keen
Matter and Spirit are as one Machine;
Boastful Idolatress of formal skill
She in her own would merge eternal will.

And three poems later in the same sequence the poet compares the conquering and self-glorifying Reason of the present with the Imaginative Faith of the past, equating the former directly with “the thirst that wrought man's fall”.

It was not for nothing that Berdyaev called the Industrial Revolution the Second Fall of Man. Ultimately, it seems to have issued from the refusal to accept the traditional restraints placed on human reason.³ For pagan Greek philosophy man was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and the universe was seen in animate terms; for Christianity man was a limited and finite creature who owed his being to God, to Whom he must ultimately render an account of his stewardship. In both traditions, value was not merely or mainly conferred on the external world by man, but was enshrined in the objective structure of the universe. Fact depended on faith, not vice-versa, as is summed up in St Augustine's famous words Credo ut intellegam (I believe in order that I may understand). What could be perceived and known depended, until the Industrial Revolution, on the moral and spiritual character of the knower. In his Alpine poems Wordsworth prays that, wherever we roam, “Whate'er we look on, at our side Be Charity—to bid us think and feel, if we would know”. In Baratynsky's “Omens” the relationship of spontaneous sympathy between man and nature is epitomised in the lines “Pokuda prirodu lyubil on, ona Lyubov'yu emu otvechala” (While he loved nature, nature responded to him with love). In “The Last Poet” the ideal relationship between man and nature is described in glowing terms with the use of emotive words like “zharky” (fervent), “sladky” (sweet), “rebyachesky” (childlike), “otradny” (joyous)—creating an atmosphere which radiates simplicity and confidence. The heavens themselves are said to be “sostradatel'ny” (sympathetic). For the new Iron Age this empathy no longer holds: according to the dogmas of natural science moral character has nothing to do with perception or knowledge. Consequently, quality can be quantified without remainder; and the achievements of the present, however ephemeral, become the measure of the past. Neither poet accepts this; each is well aware that the possibilities of yesterday may have become the impossibilities of today. This is why man can no longer respond to the language of omens. In the third canto of the “Prelude,” describing his residence at Cambridge, Wordsworth suggests that in these latter days what was once visible can no longer be glimpsed with undisordered sight.

Knowledge, we are often told, means power; in fact the relation between them is probably rather complex. At first the aim of the new science, as practised by men as diverse as Galileo, Descartes and Newton, was not so much to dominate nature as to understand the universe in more impersonal terms. But the deanimation of the universe meant that what had previously been forbidden as sacrilege now became perfectly legitimate. As someone has pointed out, railway trains are unlikely to be invented by people who believe in devils. Soon the environment came to be seen as raw material to be manipulated at will—matter and spirit as one machine—in Baratynsky's idiom, man attacked nature with crucibles, weights and measures (“Omens”), the paraphernalia equally of the Industrial Revolution and the experimental science on which it depended. In canto four of the “Excursion” Wordsworth's wanderer describes the man of the new scientific age as one “Viewing all objects unremittingly In disconnection dead and spiritless”; and in his “Memorials of a Tour in Italy” (1837) he characterises modern enlightenment as “a chilled age”, marked by the petty accumulation of lifeless facts in a process from which insight is excluded. In “The Tables Turned” he sums up the new experimental science in the striking phrase “We murder to dissect”, while in canto 11 of the “Prelude” he says that the demand for formal proof in everything leads to personal disorientation.

The results and the application of this new way of thinking and behaving are pernicious, not merely for the environment, but even for man himself. Wordsworth speaks sarcastically of the philosopher (that is, the scientist) who would peep and botanise on his mother's grave.⁴ As set out in the fourth canto of that greatly underrated poem the “Excursion,” the consequences of the scientific assault on nature are the spiritual diminution of man the human individual. Was it ever meant, asks the poet, that we should pry far off in our unregenerate state, that we should pore and dwindle as we pore (emphasis added). …

And still dividing, and dividing still,
Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
With the perverse attempt … waging thus
An impious warfare with the very life
Of our own souls.

Modern man's impiety has closed the heart of nature against him, as in “Omens”:

No, chuvstvo prezrev, on doveril umu;
Vdalsya v suetu izyskany …
I serdtse prirody zakrylos' emu,
I net na zemle proritsany.

(But, despising his feelings, he trusted intellect, and became engrossed in vain researches … and the heart of nature closed against him, and prophecy ceased on earth.)

This is a clear loss of vital power.

However, Wordsworth goes even further than Baratynsky in suggesting that the vaunted objectivity of science may be quite arbitrary, a projection from the mind of the scientist himself. In canto two of the “Prelude” he speaks of “that false secondary power”

By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made.

Later Nietzsche was to attack modern natural science on the ground that its distinctions are simply an attempt to impose order on the chaos of the external world. One of the most formidable recent challenges to the legitimacy of science is now coming from the same direction: it is maintained that the scientist creates the world to which his theories refer, and that scientific fact is merely a by-product of this imaginative and intellectual exercise. He spins his theories and then forces the facts into the web, or alternately manufactures them from the web.⁵ However this may be, for Baratynsky the legitimacy of passions and dreams does not, unfortunately, loosen the stranglehold of natural law (“K chemy nevol'niku”—“Why Should a Slave”); worse still, perhaps, in “Feya” (“The Fairy”) even the domain of the poetic imagination falls under the sway of scientific rationality. Despite the appeal of the last poet in the poem of that name, it seems that man cannot return to his prefallen condition; he is even losing the power to envisage it, and this is basically why the last poet's contemporaries are unable to respond to him. Mircea Eliade, describing the plight of modern secular man, puts this idea in a Christian context, and what he says is rather relevant to the present discussion. According to Eliade,

From the Christian point of view, it could also be said that non-religion is equivalent to a new fall of man—in other words, that non-religious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously and hence to understand and assume it, but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as after his first fall, his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world. After the first ‘fall’, the religious sense descended to the level of the ‘divided consciousness’; now after the second it has been forgotten.⁶

In Baratynsky's view, even the impression of man's prefallen condition is being lost by the vast majority of men; if the poet by virtue of his human condition has fallen once, they have, in Eliade's terminology, fallen twice. What constitutes the peculiar anguish of the poet's situation is the flickering intuition of pristine felicity, set against the bleakness of the present and future in which heaven, even if it exists, is for ever out of bounds (“Nedonosok”—“Stillborn”). Not much wonder, then, that the poet of “Istina” (“Truth”) asks why disenchantment cannot be made complete.

Both Baratynsky and Wordsworth see poetry as somehow expressive of the same fundamental force which bound man and nature in the hypostatic harmony of the Golden Age. Thus in canto five of the “Prelude” the English poet speaks of knowledge and increase of enduring joy

From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. Visionary power
Attends the motions of the viewless winds,
Embodied in the mystery of words.

If this is true, it would follow that the poet might in a measure recreate the Golden Age, for himself at least, by his art; which seems to be Baratynsky's aspiration in “V dni bezgranichnykh uvlecheny” (“In Days of Boundless Excitement”):

I poeticheskovo mira
Ogromny ocherk ya uzrel,
I zhizni darovat', o lira!
Tvoe soglas'e zakhotel.

(And I beheld the vast outline of the world of poetry and aspired, o lyre, to confer thy harmony on life.)

Much more than Wordsworth, Baratynsky was preoccupied with the decline of poetry. The triumph of the Iron Age, the alienation of man from nature and the development of science inevitably meant for him, as we have seen, the extinction of poetry. So at the end of “Omens” prophecy, which there means poetry, has been banished from the earth; the last poet is driven to suicide; and in “Rifma” (“Rhyme”) the modern poet, evoking no response from his contemporaries, is incapable of assessing the quality of his art. Then there is the tragedy of “Besenok” (“The Imp”), “Feya” (“The Fairy”), “Chudny grad” (“A Wondrous City”) and “Chto za zvuki” (“What Strains are These”) which, on one interpretation, appear to suggest that poetry is never more than a pleasing illusion. Wordsworth is much less concerned with the validation of his art; in this respect Baratynsky is closer to Keats in the Fall of Hyperion. There were several reasons for this. While never a popular poet in the sense that Scott and Byron had been, Wordsworth had a reputation and was widely respected. On the other hand, Baratynsky's work was markedly depreciated by the decline in the vogue of poetry after the failure of the Decembrists' Revolt; and, paradoxically, by the time he wrote his best verse he had become an anachronism for the reading public. Some of his later work had a social outreach, at least in a negative sense, that had been lacking in most of the elegies that had made his reputation as a poet. Of course, Wordsworth did not flatter himself that his poetry was likely to change the course of history; but in his “Memorials of a Tour in Italy,” which includes an attack on the principles and procedures of natural science, he expresses the modest hope that his meditations may influence at least “a scattered few To soberness of mind and peace of heart”.

When the new poet arises in Baratynsky's liberated Greece, he immediately begins to sing of love and beauty:

Vospevaet, prostodushny
On lyubov' i krasotu,
I nauki, im osluchnoy
Pustotu i suetu.

(Simple-hearted, he sings of love and beauty, and of the emptiness and vanity of the science which opposes them.—emphasis added.)

He challenges the devotees of Urania, the frigid muse of science, to respond to the “blagodat' strastey” (the divine gift of passion), and continues with the advice

Ver'te sladkim ubezhden'yam
Vas laskayuschikh oches
I otradnym otkroven'yam
Sostradatel'nykh nebes.

(Trust the sweet persuasion of the eyes that smile on you, and the radiant revelations of the sympathetic skies.)

But “surov i bleden chelovek” (man is stern and pale): the scientists and their technological henchmen of the first three verses of the “Last Poet” are proof against the enchantments of the poet's art; unable or unwilling to respond to the demands of their own emotions, the charms of nature or the revelations of religion. It is important to notice that the science which is at variance with love and beauty is not only that which is condemned in “Omens,” but also figures among those “nauki” (sciences) that spangle the sea with ships in the first verse of the “Last Poet.” However, there is no place for this or any poet in the Slave New World of science and technology; he belongs firmly to the Naive Old World of the preindustrial past. Though written seven years earlier, “The Final Death” may be thought of as a sequel to the “Last Poet”; in it Baratynsky describes the destruction of modern civilisation.⁷ The poem “Na chto vy, dni” (“What Use are you, Days”) is up to a point the psychological equivalent of the collectivist visions of “Poslednyaya smert'” (“The Final Death”), though the analogy should not be pressed too far. One of the main reasons why Baratynsky suffered much more than Wordsworth from the decline of poetry was that it had become for him in far greater degree a substitute religion.

Neither Baratynsky nor Wordsworth looked with favour on the development of capitalism, already well entrenched in England and beginning to replace feudalism in Russia. The nexus between capitalism and the new science on which it flourished is of course calculation. Baratynsky thus describes the emergent social order in the opening lines of the “Last Poet”:

Vek shestvuet putem svoim zheleznym,
V serdtsakh koryst', i obschaya mechta
Chas ot chasu nasuschnym i poleznym
Otchetlivey, besstydney zanyata.

(The age follows its iron path; hearts are covetous, and the common obsession with everyday utility becomes hourly more pronounced and shameless.)

The flourishing of science, the development of industry and trade, provide not the substance but the mirage of freedom. Similarly for Wordsworth: in his sonnets directed against the encroaching railways, he sees the solitudes of his native North being desecrated by “the thirst for gold that rules in Britain”. Significantly, in the poem “At Furness Abbey” (1845) the “Profane Despoilers” are not the simple-hearted construction workers, who are still capable of reverencing the ruined abbey, but the capitalists and the developers whom the railway will profit. In canto eight of the Excursion, the wanderer maintains that the factory has replaced the cathedral, and that God has been dethroned in favour of Mammon. Within the new temple, perpetual sacrifice is offered up ‘to Gain, the master idol of the realm’. And in his “Memorials of a Tour in Italy” the English poet, after condemning a science “unguided by godlike insight”, denounces equally the pragmatism of his contemporaries, whom he sees as enslaved by “gross Utilities”.

It cannot, however, be maintained that either Baratynsky or Wordsworth was entirely consistent in his opposition to science and industrialisation. The most noted inconsistency in Baratynsky's work is the poem “Piroskaf” (“The Steamboat”), in which he speaks in almost rhapsodic accents of the steamer that is carrying him to Italy, the Promised Land of his dreams. Indeed, man and nature are here so to speak reunited by technology—something that the poet's art had failed to achieve:

                              Bratstvuya s parom,
Vetru nash parus razdalsya nedarom:
Penyas' gluboko vzdokhnul okean.

(Acting together with steampower, our sail purposefully filled with wind; the foaming ocean deeply sighed—There is no English equivalent for the Russian “bratstvuya”, gerund of a verb from the noun “brat”=brother.)

Wind, wave and machine power act in concert. Even if the new technology is bringing the poet nearer to his earthly paradise, the inconsistency had better be admitted. It is difficult to know what to make of the poet's allusion to the delights of railway travel in a letter to his brother-in-law Putyata;⁸ he was probably being either naive or sarcastic. It is doubtful, too, whether there is any inconsistency—given Baratynsky's views on the Iron Age—in his concurrently promoting industrial enterprises of sorts on his own estate.⁹

There are several Wordsworth poems which provide a curious parallel with “Steamboat.” In a poem already mentioned, “Stanzas in a Steamboat off St Bee's Head,” the writer unreservedly condemns the new technology, which he holds to be destructive of human courage and even a form of idolatry: the Genius of the age is called a “Boastful Idolatress of formal skill”. This debasement is contrasted most unfavourably with the saintly ignorance and Christian charity displayed by St Bega in the foundation of the monastery. Yet in the piece “Desire we past illusions to recall,” only three poems later in the same sequence, Wordsworth categorically denies that he would hide the truths that science has unveiled; though he obviously holds no brief for the “self-glorified reason” by which they have been attained. Still in the same collection and appropriately entitled Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways, another poem is worth quoting for what appears a reversal of Wordsworth's earlier attitude. Even if the new technological triumphs mar the beauties of nature, yet

                              Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time
Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

—an expansion, one might say, of the hints contained in Baratynsky's poem “Steamboat.”

There is an extended treatment of the Industrial Revolution in cantos eight and nine of the Excursion; in which the poet, the wanderer, the solitary and the parson all participate. This fairly numerous cast makes it rather difficult to decide with whom Wordsworth himself identifies; probably the discussion reflects his own conflicting views. While bitterly lamenting the miseries of the factory system with its reconstituted slavery and perpetual sacrifice to Mammon, the wanderer nevertheless commends the new technology, which has flung roads across the mountain fastnesses, transforming hamlets into cities and putting the wilderness under the plough. The lyrical tone of some of his remarks suggests a second Golden Age, somewhat similar to Baratynsky's scientific utopia of the first vision of the “Final Death”; with the difference that for the wanderer there is no implication that the new way of life is inherently evil. Quite the contrary; he rejoices in man's triumph over nature:

                              yet do I exult … to see
An intellectual mastery exercised
O'er the blind elements; a purpose given,
A perseverance fed; almost a soul
Imparted—to brute matter.

The thinking mind, he continues, has compelled the brute elements to serve the will of feeble-bodied man; and he can applaud the prospect. For his part, the solitary reminds the company that cruelty, poverty and ignorance were not exactly novelties imported by the Industrial Revolution; they are still rife in regions where it has not yet penetrated—he has a particularly vivid description of the beggar children of Buxton. The poet himself, or at least the first person speaker, chiefly regrets the decline in morals under the pressure of industrialisation. The wanderer agrees that the homely virtues are indeed fled, the brook is converted into “an instrument of deadly bane”, and the countryside is denuded of population. Unlike Wordsworth, Baratynsky has no direct accounts of industrial horrors, probably because he had no first-hand experience of them.

There is not, nor would one expect, in Wordsworth anything to correspond to Baratynsky's apocalyptic “Final Death,” in which the poet sees the Industrial Revolution leading to the extinction of the entire human race. It is characteristic of the English poet that when he does briefly contemplate, in canto five of the Prelude, such a prospect, he thinks that life would survive the holocaust:

Should the whole frame of earth by inward throes
Be wrenched, or fire come down from far to scorch
Her pleasant habitations, and dry up
Old Ocean, in his bed left singed and bare,
Yet would the living Presence still subsist
Victorious, and composure would ensue,
And kindlings like the morning—presage sure
Of day returning and life revived.

Compare this with Baratynsky's final vision:

Velichestven i grusten byl pozor
Pustynnykh vod, lesov, dolin i gor.
Po-prezhnemu zhivotvorya prirodu,
Na nebosklon svetilo dnya vzoshlo,
No na zemle nichto evo voskhodu
Proiznesti priveta ne moglo.
Odin tuman nad ney, sineya, vilsya,
I zhertvoyu chistitel'noy dymilsya.

(Sad and majestic was the spectacle of the desolate waters, forests, dales and mountains. As before endowing nature with life, the luminary of day climbed the horizon, but there was nothing on earth that could welcome him. Over it only the mist swirled and smoked up in a purifying sacrifice.)

To sum up. Both Baratynsky and Wordsworth were profoundly antipathetic to modern science and technology and the industrial society which they were everywhere creating. Natural science meant the reduction of quality to quantity, the replacement of life by death, of personality by impersonality—“We murder to dissect”. The new Iron Age was essentially destructive of that necessary harmony between man and nature on which the human future depended; a harmony that had existed in fact or in myth during the Golden Age and was still, maybe, recoverable in art. Baratynsky thought that modern industrial conditions meant the death of poetry; Wordsworth, more sanguine, believed that in the end the poet's protests would be heard, if only by a few. The English poet is the more didactic of the two: his work may be viewed as a training in sensibility, the attempt to inculcate a certain openness towards all the phenomena of nature, which are somehow seen as aesthetically and morally edifying. Baratynsky is more of a sacramentalist, a priest at the shrine of art; but his appeal to his contemporaries fails, and he succumbs to a despair only occasionally mitigated by flashes of optimism. Despite Wordsworth's considerable body of Christian poetry, ultimately he is perhaps a deist like Baratynsky, for whom God is a rather remote Providence with little concern for the human individual. Yet this Wordsworthian Providence is finally benevolent, and acts as a source of strength and confidence in troublous times. Although not in so many words, Baratynsky regards the governance of the universe as evil, and of such a nature as inevitably to frustrate man's best aspirations. Wordsworth, it may be thought, never really comes to grips with the evil which dominates the poetry of Baratynsky. The element of genuine transcendence in both poets is weak.

For Wordsworth, human felicity is possible on earth, provided that Reason and Passion congrue with Imaginative Faith, by which he seems to mean the brand of nature-mysticism which it has been his business to promote. For Baratynsky, as has already been pointed out, truth and happiness are incompatible—though a few flickerings of joy, based on illusion, may be vouchsafed to the young; apart from this, suffering is the manifest destiny of all the earthly descendants of Prometheus. While well aware of the ravages of Iron Age technology and its necessary antecedent natural science, Wordsworth believed—or at least hoped, as the wanderer implies in canto eight of the Excursion—that they could be put under the control of virtue, and used to satisfy man's need rather than his greed. For Wordsworth, man unregenerate was not morally fit to wield the new powers conferred on him by science, but there was hope that one day he would be. Baratynsky had no such illusions, with the single exception of the poem “Steamboat.” The evidence of the past 130 years strongly suggests that the Russian was right and that the Englishman was wrong.¹⁰

Notes

1. The reader is referred to my article “Russia's Doomsday Poet”, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, April 1973, for a discussion of this side of Baratynsky's work. A few of Baratynsky's poems have been translated in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse, though none which really bears on this theme.

2. As Douglas Bush says: “While Wordsworth's mature experience was a natural sequel to that of his childhood and youth, it was not simply a spontaneous growth; it was a strong and conscious revolt against the scientific view of the world and man”—Douglas Bush, “A Minority Report” (in Wordsworth Centenary Studies, Princeton U.P., 1951, p. 8).

3. In this respect Wordsworth was a mediaevalist. Discussing the purpose of the Excursion, Lyon says: “Wordsworth saw that science, like philosophy, had fixed its eye too firmly on the facts of experience, to the neglect or outright denial of the values of experience … he wanted to delimit the area in which the unassisted reason is operative”—J. S. Lyon, The Excursion A Study, Yale U.P., New Haven 1950, p. 66.

4. No doubt the ambiguity of the word “science” in modern English counts for something, but it is simply not true to say as is done in a tendentious recent study, that “When Wordsworth condemns ‘science’ he almost always refers primarily to the moral science of the age … Wordsworth's quarrel, in short, is not with science and scientists, but with those persons of limited intellect who rely on the analytical process exclusively”—Geoffrey Durrant, Wordsworth and the Great System, Cambridge U.P., 1970, p. 3 and p. 5. On the contrary, Wordsworth's examples of the scientists' activities frequently leave no doubt that he is concerned with the theories and practices of modern natural science, not with their excesses or perversions.

5. See Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968.

6. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. tr. W. R. Trask. Harcourt Brace & World, New York 1959, p. 213.

7. This poem is universally considered to be a fragment of a longer work. Yet it is complete in itself, and I believe that critics have been misled by a contemporary comment in the Moskovsky vestnik (Moscow Mercury), which explains its obscurity as due to its alleged incompleteness. As is well known, Byron conveniently called a number of his Eastern poems fragments; and in my view some Russian poets also found the device a useful one. In his book Tvorchesky put' Pushkina, 1826-1830 (Pushkin's Line of Development 1826-1830), Moscow, 1967, p. 457, D. D. Blagoy suggests that, despite its subtitle “Otryvok” (“A Fragment”), Pushkin's “Osen'” (“Autumn”) is substantially complete. The same is probably true of other Pushkin “Nezavershennye proizvedeniya” (Unfinished Works), such as Rusalka (The Mermaid).

8. “Railways are a wonderful idea, they are the apotheosis of diversion. When they cover the whole world, melancholy will disappear from the earth”, Russky arkhiv (Russian Archives), No. 2, 1867, p. 285.

9. For a discussion of the alleged inconsistency, see G. R. Barratt, Selected Letters of Evgenij Baratynsky, Mouton, The Hague & Paris, 1973, pp. 117-118.

10. At the time of writing (August 1974), there is no satisfactory account of Baratynsky's work available in English. Mouton's are shortly to publish Dr Barratt's book Baratynsky An Introduction Study—see note 9. In Russian, much the best brief introduction to the poet is I. M. Semenko's chapter on him in her book Poety pushkinskoy pory (Poets of the Pushkin Period), Moscow, 1970. For the specialist there is Geir Kjetsaa's monumental work in Russian, Evgeny Baratynsky Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Evgeny Baratynsky Life and Work), Oslo University Press, 1973.