Avowals, Chapter 5

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 137-148, 4,079 words

Avowals is a nonlinear volume of sixteen chapters. Chapters 12 and 15 are essays in worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the GMi Kindle edition of Avowals.

CHAP. V.

One morning, while thinking of Tourguéneff, my thoughts were interrupted by the galloping of a horse. A runaway, I cried; and, for no traceable reason, fell to wondering if the cab were bringing me a Russian visitor. Sir, a gentle­man wishes to see you. What is his name? I can't pronounce it, sir; it's a foreign name; but it ends in oft. And while my visitor was taking off his hat and coat in the ante-room I waited, asking myself who this friend of Tourguéneff's might be. I'm afraid my servant's pronunciation of Russian names is defective; I did not catch -­– He mentioned his name, and I knew him to be one of Tolstoy's critics, and one of Tourguéneff"s translators. I've come, he said, to ask if you will give me an interview, and if you will tell me what you think of — Tourguéneff? I interrupted. No; to ask you to tell me what you think of Tolstoy's latest declaration regarding art and the objects of art, he replied. Would your purpose not be equally well suited if I were to tell you what I thought of Tourguéneffs article on Don Quixote and Hamlet? All you say would be interesting, no doubt, he answered, on that or any other subject, but you see I am collecting the opinions of writers, painters and musicians regarding Tolstoy's latest declaration. You have read the book, What is Art?

Of the book I knew nothing but the name, but I continued to talk about Tolstoy, hoping all the while that the conversation would turn on Tourguéneff. For it could not be else. Of this I felt sure, that my visitor, having known Tourguéneff, could doubtless tell me about the packet of love letters that had been discovered lately — love letters addressed to Madame Viardot. But it was hard to lead him away from Tolstoy. He began again and again:

Tolstoy's argument is, that if a man infects another with a feeling that he has experienced, he has produced a work of art. And he concludes, no doubt, I chimed in, that the best art is the art that communicates the best ideas, the best ideas being, of course, Tolstoy's ideas. My visitor protested, but I would not hear any further explanation. If you'll allow me, I'd prefer to speak of Tolstoy's novels. Do you admire them? he asked, and on my telling him that I did, he begged me to tell him why I admired Tolstoy's novels, and within three minutes my conversation was indistinguishable from what one reads in the newspapers. I'm afraid you've heard all I'm saying before? And his manner signified that he had. I daresay you have, I continued, for I'm not saying what I really think. I admire Tolstoy; but if I only dared — I beg of you, he interrupted. Well, I continued, Gautier used to boast that the visible world was visible to him, but to no one was it ever so visible as it is to Tolstoy. His eyesight exceeds all eyesight before or since. At this point I paused, and my visitor and I sat looking at each other, myself very much abashed. Pray go on, said he; for I am wondering if your conclusion will be the same as Tourguéneff's. He once spoke to me in much the same way. Now you frighten me, and I can say no more until you tell me what Tourguéneff said. I will not tell you what Tourguéneff said until you conclude. What is your conclusion? That Tolstoy is not a great psychologist, I answered tremblingly, for when he comes to speak of the soul he is no longer certain; he doesn't know. But I'm saying something that no one will agree with, that no one has ever said. You're repeating what Tourguéneff said to me, said my visitor. He used nearly the same words in speaking of Tolstoy. Is that so? Is that really so? You've no idea what a pleasure it is to me to hear that on the subject of Tolstoy's genius Tourguéneff and I — Would you mind repeating what you have just said? Is it really true that — ?

He assured me that it was really true, and in the course of conversation the interviewer told me about the love letters and the suppressions that were made in them, that a passage was deleted in which Tourguéneff expressed a wish he were the carpet under her feet, for Madame Viardot feared that it might lead readers to think she had been Tourguéneff's mistress. But of course she was, and to her very great honour, I cried. Why else should we be talking about her? Tell me more, my visitor, and my visitor told me he had made all the suppressions she asked, but had deposited the complete manuscript in La Bibliothèque Nationale. I only obtained her consent to the publication by assuring her that if she did not give it the story of her friendship with Tourguéneff would be lost for ever — her grandchildren would certainly oppose the publication. She wished for the honour of his bed, but would like the i's to remain undotted. Just so, my visitor answered, and the conflict in her mind was plain in her face. I could have gone on talking for hours about her, but my interviewer pressed me for information regarding Tolstoy's popularity in England, and it seemed shameful that my part of the conversation should be limited to such matters as that it was the late Mr Vizetelly who had introduced Tolstoy to the English public, and that the translation he had issued was a revised version of an American translation. We talked of the difficulties of the translation, and I learnt that Tourguéneff had always been fortunate in the matter of translation. His Liza had been excellently well done into English by Mr R. S. Ralston, and from a copy that Tourguéneff had specially revised for the purpose, and then, catching enthusiasm from the theme, I told him that it was not the poverty of the translation that stood between Tourguéneff and popular appreciation in England but the noble simplicity of his stories, However deep the water may be, I said, the public cries: it is but a shallow if the water be clear. We must stir up the mud to deceive the public. I told him that Mr Vizetelly also published Crime and Punishment, and we fell to criticising the critics. The critics were awed by the length of the Russian novel. Crime and Punishment is longer than any modern English novel, and War and Peace is the longest novel ever written if we except Les Misérables. But the larger part of Les Misérables is history. True that there is some history in War and Peace, but Napoleon's battles are not so plainly extraneous, so independent of the characters in the novel, as Victor Hugo's rhetorical descriptions of Waterloo.

The conversation paused, and, fearing that my visitor would leave me, I began to argue that Tolstoy's realism and ethics were the cause of his popularity. A popular novel is a compound of amusement and admonition, and the most popular are those in which c!owning is sandwiched with preaching; a sudden somersault or a crude exhortation will draw a cloud. But few care to listen to the poet. Verlaine and Tourguéneff only gathered fw disciples during the term of their natural lives, but henceforth they will find disciples in every generation; in a hundred years many more will have listened to them than ever listened to  the clown or the preacher. In time the greater writer is read by the greater number. Beautiful rhythms acquire more subtle enchantments as the years go by, whereas the courser rhythms of the preacher and clown interest only a single generation — not always even so long; the preacher and the clown often live to see their followers leave them, attracted by new doctrines and new somersaults. So did I talk. In the presence of an interviewer we remember all our aphorisms and serve them up again to convince him of our great wit and wisdom; and an answer I once made the late Mr Henley was brought in cleverly as a sort of Parhian shaft. Mr Henley had once said to me: Tolstoy could wear Tourguéneff on his watch-chain, and I answered: the trinket on the watch-chain is often more valuable than the chain. But my visitor was not brought to bay as I expected he would be, and I allowed him to leave, promising, however, to meet him in Paris. Meanwhile I would read What is Art? He would not be sending his copy to the printer before the end of the month, etc. etc.; and immediately after I heard the sound of galloping hooves and began to think that perhaps my visitor had come in a droshky; and so real was the belief that I did not dare to look out of the window lest I should be disappointed.

The fire was burning brightly, and there were many things to think about: the delicious flattery that my thoughts had once moved along the same plane as Tourguéneff’s, the love letters, and then Tolstoy himself, who , after all, was worth thinking about. And now or never was the time come to say real, vital things about Tolstoy, things worthy of myself, things surpassing anything Henley could have said, and so I fell to thinking, saying to myself: in the nineties we were all cowed by the spell of realism, external realism, myself less than Henley, for there had always been misgivings, even Tourguéneff's praise of Tolstoy failing to convince me. And I pondered that, however deep the spell he casts upon us, the sensation he communicates is a harsh one, even ugly. His breath is a blast from the north, but Tourguéneff breathes like the south wind always; even on his death-bed he could write to Tolstoy:

Dearest Lyof Nikolaievich, — It is long since I wrote to you. I have been in bed, and it is my death-bed. I cannot get well; that is no longer to be thought of. I write to you expressly to assure you how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to present to you a last, a most urgent request. Dear friend, come back to literary work! This gift came to you whence all gifts come to us. Ah! how happy should I be if I could think that you would listen to my request. My friend, great writer of our land of Russia, grant me this request.

The letter is extraordinary — even in this somewhat frigid, somewhat partial translation — the French translation contains more lines than this one, but I cannot lay hands on it at this moment, but I remember that Tourguéneff says, in a last sentence, that he can write no more. The letter was unfinished, but it betrayed, it is true, a hope that in health he would not have indulged in, that Tolstoy might change his destiny, which, notwithstanding many marvellous gifts, was clearly set in the direction of morals and doctrinal inquiry. For knowing human life to be a sordid story, he knocked at a Jewish door; or shall I say, at a Syrian Greek door, whereas Tourguéneff's more sensuous temperament allowed him to see life beautiful: and whosoever would do this must stint himself of everything but exhibition, for though the artist may teach, it must be indirectly: with beautiful images and ideas he may draw men's minds from baser things. Man is made of many needs and one of these is beauty, I murmured to myself, as I bent over the fire. But Tolstoy looks upon art as a means whereby we communicate our ideas. My visitor admitted that Tolstoy repudiated beauty. But is it impossible to write the simplest sentence without some rudimentary sense of rhythm? Rhythm is beauty. His ugly temperament intervenes between him and his intelligence. That is it, I said, throwing myself back in my arm-chair in my low-ceiled room so that I might meditate better. The beauty, I said, that I recognise in War and Peace is the vast architecture, the number of characters all going hither and thither, each on an errand big or little, the multiplicity of events, all perfectly controlled by one central purpose. War and Peace may be compared to the canvases of Tintoretto and Veronese, I muttered, and a moment after, the accidental phrase — his temperament is an ugly one — led me to consider War and Peace from a different point of view, and I said to myself: no comparison between Tolstoy and the great pagans of the sixteenth century is valid, for their temperaments were not as ugly as their palettes tell us, but if we forget the design of War and Peace, and consider Tolstoy's palette, we find upon it very little else but black and white. It is true that Rembrandt's portrait of his wife, the one that hangs in the Louvre, is but bitumen and white faintly tinted with bitumen, a little rose madder showing in the cheeks. But no comparison between Rembrandt's palette and Tolstoy's is possible. There is nothing on the Russian's but a thin grey, and it might be truer to compare his designs to Kaulbach's than to Tintoretto's. But to be just we will admit without equivocation that his drawing is far in advance of Kaul­bach's; it is that, but, all the same, it lacks what is known in the studios as quality; the quality of the original should transpire in the translation to some extent, and if we have to think of him as a painter I must think of him as a designer of vast cartoons moral as Kaulbach's, with, say, here and there such a well-observed piece of drawing as we meet with in Sir John Millais in his Pre-Raphaelite days. In these early days Millais was always beautiful. I am afraid these comparisons are not very happy, and yet —

However, the first two volumes are filled with pictures — that is to say, scenes taken from life, if I may be permitted to use an expressive colloquialism; and in reading them the reader must be a very casual reader indeed if he does not ask himself if it was Tolstoy's intention to transcribe the whole of life. His intention seems certainly to have been to include all the different scenes that come to pass in civilised life, and no doubt he ran them over in his mind: a scene of ladies in a drawing-room, taking tea, is followed by a scene in a ballroom with ladies dancing, and this is followed by a scene in a barrack-room with a quarrel among the officers. The first volume of War and Peace reminds one of a picture gallery of second-rate Dutch pictures, for there are sledging, skating and hunting scenes, and every scene is described by an eye that sees clearly, and after some twenty or thirty scenes executed in the dry and angular manner of Meissonier we begin to weary and to long for chapters in which there are no pictures, for beauty, for charm, for meditation. We turn the pages; but alas, there are more pictures, and curiosity taking the place of sensible pleasure, we ask ourself if Tolstoy has omitted some description of a yacht race, for instance.

The book is long, but even if it were twice as long, if it were three times as long, there would always be scenes that have been omitted, and these Tolstoy, waking up in the middle of the night, must have regretted, There must have been a night in which "it occurred to him that he had not included a yacht race, and another night when he awoke, screaming: I forgot High Mass, and sinking back on his pillow he tried to find consolation in the thought that he had described many religious ceremonies, with the same minuteness as a traveller would the religious rites of a newly discovered people. No writer ever tried harder to compete with Nature than Tolstoy.Yet he was a clever man, and must have known that he would be beaten in the end; but he is one of those men to whom everything is plain and explicit except the obvious, and War and Peace is so plainly the work of a man with a bee in his bonnet that, despite the talent manifested in every description, we cannot help comparing him to a swimmer in a canal challenging a train going by to a race. The reader is at first interested and then amused, but before the end of the second volume he wearies of the absurd competition and lays down the book, and will never take it up again unless mayhap somebody tells him the scene in which Prince Andrei lies wounded on the battle-field, looking at the stars. If that comes to pass he will pick up the book, and while seeking out the scene of Prince Andrei's death he will read the whole of the battle of Borodino, marvelling greatly at the ceaseless invention with which Tolstoy takes Pierre from one regiment to another, from tent to tent, showing us what is doing at every part of the immense battle, explaining the different plans of the Russian generals. And he will find the battle of Borodino as interesting as a newspaper, as casual life is, but Prince Andrei's death is eternal life, and he will not come upon life again in any eternal aspect until Pierre is taken prisoner and forced to follow the French army from Moscow. Pierre meets a peasant philosopher on the way who has a little pink puppy (the puppy generally runs on three legs), and it is during the retreat from Moscow that the reader begins to understand that the hero of the book is Destiny; everyone in the book sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he set out to do; and the reader will marvel how Tolstoy could describe all the things he describes in the first volume without once communicating the idea that must have been at the back of his mind. And the gathering up of the threads in the fourth volume will delight him: Natasha abandons her sensuous, frivolous girlhood, and becomes extraordinarily interested in her babies, even in their disgusting little ailments; we assist at the sinking into old age of the generation we knew in middle age in the first volume; we catch sight of the young people whom we knew in the first volume sinking into middle age, and though some years have gone by since I read the book, I still remember Natasha's brother standing on the balcony watching the small rain that the thirsting oats are drinking up greedily, thinking that he must be, after all, no more than a commonplace man who married an ugly princess.

Pierre too has lost some of his illusions, but not all: he still goes up to St Petersburg to attend spiritualistic seances, but now he is only faintly interested in spiritual things, and for this knowledge of himself and that life will know no further change for him, we must look upon Pierre as Tolstoy's one creation, if he be a creation. But what do we mean by a creation? Let the word pass; for what we have to decide is if Pierre be an entity in the sense that Bazaroff, or lnsarov, or the would-be Nihilist in Virgin Soil are entities; if his foolish humanity can be compared with Bazaroff's pessimism; and if Natasha's interest in her children's ailments expresses life as intensely as Rudin's in the story that bears his name, or Helen's courage in On the Eve.

When we see the volumes of War and Peace on the table, they seem to us as long as life itself, and we go on reading them as we go on living, and we remember them only as little, notwithstanding the time we spent with them. As soon as we lay the books aside Tolstoy's characters begin to recede, and distance reveals the barrenness of the ways that we walked in; but the very contrary might be said about Tourguéneff. It is true that the very size of his books prevents us from believing them to be great books; they seem merely pretty stories, some­what slight, and it is not until long afterwards that their beauty appears, distance lifting Liza, Lavretsky and Helen out of the circumstances in which Tourguéneff places them. It is not for many years after that we begin to recognise them as typical of all that the heart ponders and remembers; the difference between the men is immense. Tolstoy is lord over what is actual and passing; he can tell better than anybody how the snipe rise out of the marsh, and the feelings of a young man as he looks at a young girl and desires her, but his mind rarely reaches a clear conception of a human soul as a distinct entity; his knowledge of the soul, except in the case of Pierre, is relative and episodic. And the house he built reminds one somewhat of a palatial hotel where everything is supplied except beauty. All kinds of different people are met within the passages. There is a central hall with dinner-parties going up the staircase; the building is lit with electric light; there are bands and winter gardens. Tolstoy's book is terribly nineteenth century, but Tourguéneff's House of Gentlefolk is much older; as soon as it comes into view we feel that it is part of the landscape, so long has it stood there. It seems as if it had always been inhabited by the same people; generations of the same family must have lived in it, and these have given the house its character. It contains but a dozen or fifteen rooms, twenty at most, but every room bears the trace of him or her who lived in it. A water-colour drawing of an old-time mill tells the story of somebody gone; a collection of shells tells another story; the furniture was not all brought together at one time; the house breathes the story of the four or five people who sit in its rooms and walk in its gardens. There is no sense of home in Tolstoy; he is mainly engaged in telling the stories of the visitors who go up and down the staircase and gather to hear the band in the winter gardens. The country house has its own story; the hotel furnishes no commanding story, only episodes.

Helen, in On the Eve, goes out to life with both hands open to grasp it; but what she grasps are the hands of a consumptive man. I do not know, and no one will ever know, if Tourguéneff intended to contrast Liza, who shrinks from life, daring hardly a glance, with Helen, who catches at it so eagerly and passionately that it dies in her grasp. A writer is not conscious of the whole of his idea, some part of it exists only in his sub­consciousness; but Tourguéneff was a subtle thinker, and though the idea is only indicated, and will not be perceived by the casual reader, yet it is difficult to feel sure he was not aware of it. If he were not aware of it, Insarov was consumptive merely because Tourguéneff wished a tragic end to his love story — an unpinning of plot that few will deem consistent with Tourguéneffs genius; and if the alternative be accepted it will be allowed that no writer has woven so delicate a thread into his woof of story, not since the Greeks certainly. And our thoughts striking at random we are tempted to think that On the Eve is a last effort of Greek genius risen after centuries in the Crimea. Did not a whisper once reach me that Tourguéneff came from the Crimea, once a Greek colony?