Turgueneff

Fortnightly Review, 1 February 1888, pages 237-251, 7,513 words

The first and last time I saw Turgueneff was at the Elysée Montmartre. ‘The Elysée Montmartre is a students’ ball. It consists of a large room, used in wet weather; of a garden, with circles of white lamps set in the hanging foliage, used in fine weather. It was raining, every one was in the ball-room, the band was clanging, the crowd was forming into quadrilles. Some one said to me, "That is Turgueneff, the great Russian novelist.” I turned, and saw one immense man walking as if through a crowd of pigmies. A great, grey face, sad, and weary alike of the world’s folly and wisdom; a man about sixty; a man in whose face you read Russian in the first glance; enfin, l’homme de ses oeuvres. All this is as clear and certain in my mind as if it were a memory of yesterday, why I cannot say, for at the time I do not think I was much impressed. We sat down at one of the beer-tables. Knowing I was English, and as I had been introduced as a poet — a much-abused word in the quartier — Turgueneff spoke of Rossetti and Swinburne. He spoke of the former as a décadent, and he deprecated that labouring after old forms of speech, that harkening after old ideals of beauty; “In Rossetti I note the first signs of decadence in the English tongue. Swinburne, notwithstanding some imitation of Victor Hugo, is a genius; he is —“ What further criticism would have been pronounced on Mr. Swinburne must remain unrecorded, for at that moment I caught sight of the girl to whom I was engaged for the dance, and regardless of the dignity of the person I was sitting with I said, “Vous m’excuserez, je suis engagé pour cette dance.” Turgueneff smiled, bowed; he was evidently a little amused, but the author of Les Eaux Printanières was not a man to be angry because a very young man preferred dancing a quadrille to discussing English poetry at the Elysée Montmartre. When I returned he said, as he may be easily imagined saying, “Eh bien, vous vous êtes bien amusé?” “Very much indeed,” I replied. “You were speaking of Swinburne — ” But the conversation was now firmly fixed in French fiction and the naturalistic method — the "Assommoir" was then appearing in La République des Lettres. "For the first time Zola has created a human being; Gervaise is a woman; I feel her, I know her, she is true. Still the same vicious method pervades the book — the desire to tell us what she felt rather than what she thought. ‘Je me demande qu’est-ce que cela peut me faire si elle sue au milieu du dos ou sous les bras.’ It is difficult to conceive the vexed and difficult question of how far a writer should proceed in physical description better put than Turgueneff put it in this pithy sentence: What does it matter? The most specious sophistry would fail to convince the veriest dullard that it mattered much; and any one gifted with a ray of artistic understanding will see that as everything cannot be related, if for no other reason, for want of space, a selection is inevitable. Shall we tell how people perspire or how people think? It will not do to venture out on the treacherous ice of theory and attempt definitions of what is worthiest of selection; far better say, let perspiration be admitted into the domain of art, but let perspiration take the place in art that it does in nature. So think the physiological school, but the school of adventure are of a different opinion: never mind how she thinks; give us the spot of perspiration; tell us how So-and-So killed the negro. As there is no difference (thought being abstracted) between a spot of perspiration and the killing of a negro, it will be seen that Mr. Rider Haggard is a disciple of M. Zola, when M. Zola is at his worst, both being then recorders of mere facts. For it is thought, and thought only, that divides right from wrong; it is thought, and thought only, that elevates or degrades human deeds and desires; therefore turgid accounts of massacred negroes and turgid accounts of fornicating peasants are in like measure distasteful to the true artist. Whether the writer should intrude his idea on the reader, or hide it away and leave it latent in the work, is a question of method; and all methods are good. What I wish to establish here is that it is a vain and fruitless task to narrate any fact unless it has been tempered and purified in thought and stamped by thought with a specific value. This seems to me a suggestive comment on Turgueneff’s happy remark, and hereby we arrive at a more comprehensible classification of novelists than has hitherto been attempted — the thought school, and the fact school: this identification is surely less liable to misinterpretation than Romantiques and Naturalists, Realists and Idealists.

To the thought school Turgueneff belonged from the first, and he was true to it, just as much when he sought after a plain and passionless narration of physical phenomena, as in the volume entitled Etranges Histoires, as when he stepped to the edge of the gulf of didacticism in Terres Vierges. His desire was always to give utterance to a thought, to awake consciousness of that thought in the reader. His idea of things, and not the things themselves, was all to Turgueneff; his idea of things, not the things themselves, was what he longed and laboured to express; and this love of the idea was so constitutional and so inveterate in him that, had he not been the marvellous artist he was, his pursuit of his idea would have lured him into all disaster, and he would have been overwhelmed and lost in the shoaling waters and quicksands of instruction and purpose. But although he steered his bark perilously near those dangerous shores he always was able to put the helm up in time and get off into the deep water of human emotion without a started plank or loss of a single spar. The most skilful yachtsman that ever lived was not more completely master of his craft than he of his art. His artistry is unfailing; it is invincible; and so delicate and subtle was his power over his material that he leads the reader at will; the reader follows helplessly; go he must, although he may feel certain that the path leads nowhere, that there is no fruit nor even haws to gather. But there is always a suggestion in the end which is equivalent to fruit. In Les Recits d’un Chasseur the slightest events are fashioned into marvellous stories. The wheel of a carriage becomes loose, the sportsman has to spend a night at an inn; there he meets — no, not a young girl, but a dwarf, who is supposed to be an adept in sortilege. The dwarf begs to be allowed to accompany the sportsman out shooting; they find no birds, and, lying on the grass, the sportsman questions the dwarf on his mode of life. A long dialogue ensues: a little girl appears; she is strangely like the dwarf. That is all; but that told by Turgueneff is a chef-d'oeuvre, and is as superior to our ordinary magazine short stories as a ballad by Villon is to a ballad by me. This excessive delicacy and certainty of touch has caused some eminent writers to speak of him as une plante un peu grêle. This is not surprising; it is certain that these qualities forbid him the fire and explosion of Balzac, and in reading him we are conscious of a thinness, of an irritating reserve. He has often seemed to us to have left much unsaid, to have, as it were, only drawn the skin from his subject. Magnificently well is the task performed; but we should like to have seen the carcass disembowelled and hung up. Balzac would have done this no doubt; but we do not propose to compare one with the other. Balzac was greater than Hugo, and equal to Shakespeare; he was lyrical, analytical, and metaphysical at will, and he blended and made all three styles his own, and carried you away in the tempest of his genius. Turgueneff could not do this, but he is nevertheless a leading light in the school of thought, and he stands beside George Eliot and Flaubert. He wisely refrained from attempting to measure his strength with Balzac; he loved his country; he felt her to the ends of his finger-tips; he watched her face from near and from afar; he strove to reproduce each line and lineament; Russian thought was in his brain, and you find it in his pages unadulterated. An idea has been improvised from a knowledge of his long residence in France that he is more western in form than his illustrious compeers Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky; but it would be hard to point to a trace of this denaturalisation in his works. Tolstoi I have not read, but he is only Gaboriau with psychological sauce, and that of an inferior kind. For the origin of Turgueneff’s literary finish we must look farther back than his  residence in France. His taste for scholarship was from the first, pronounced, and in this natural taste and the opportunities fortune gave him for developing it, we find the seeds of the qualities which enabled him to pioneer Tolstoi and Gogol, and prepare the western mind for the immense bumpers or vats of admittedly real Russian home-brew which are being now consumed in every civilised country. I once heard Henry James say, speaking of a well-known novelist, "He gives me the idea of a man who had never spoken to a lady in his life.” I cannot say that the reverse of this is true of Turguenef, that would mean that he only cared for those who are in society, Turgueneff knew the serf as the gentleman knows the serf, he knew the gentleman as the gentleman knows the gentleman, and he looked on and judged both as a scholar and a philosopher, without small-beer cynicism or that air of which Thackeray could never divest himself, of having been in society after the success of one of his books. While reading him we are always conscious of being in the company of a gentleman and a scholar, a scholar who has chosen to work in the novel, and who is putting into it the highest and best thought. We also know, and very well too, that we are with one who has suffered, who is sad at heart, a pessimist who believes little in regeneration, who is convinced that we turn and tum in a circle, uttering little cries until overtaken in the great oblivion. But he is not the ferocious cynic who, having drunk and found gall, would spit gall into every cup within reach, but a man who, having learned the lesson thoroughly well, knowing that we must live, since nature has so willed it, is inclined towards kindness and pity, who would say, “Obey nature’s laws, be simple and obey; it is the best that you can do.” In various forms this philosophy finds expression in his books. His advice to young people was always to marry, only in the calm and naturalness of home is happiness found. For an exemplification of this theme let us look into the charming novel, Fumée.

Fumée begins amid the babel of the Baden of old days. Idleness and sunlight, bands in the open spaces, chairs under the trees, the odour of restaurants, the glitter of gold, a town of generals from all countries, of strange costumes, of ephemeral passions, above all, a town of Russians — Russians talking of the future of Russia, l‘oeuvre nationale et spontanée, Russians declaring that Russia had invented nothing, that her most important productions, the samovar, bark shoes, and the knout, were not even invented by her. There we find Litvinof, a young man of eight-and-twenty, waiting for his fiancée. One day, on entering his hotel, he found a letter on the table. “It is from Tanea!”’ he cried. But as he was about to break the seal his attention was stayed by a penetrating and agreeable odour that was not unknown to him. He looked up and saw a bouquet of heliotrope in a glass. It reminded him of something far away, of something he had almost forgotten, and could not quite recall to mind. He rang the bell, and asked the servant who had brought the flowers. The servant said a lady had brought them. The lady refused to give her name; but he thought she must be a Russian countess. “Why do you think she is a Russian countess?” “Because she gave me two florins.” Litvinof then read his letter; it was not from his fiancée, but from her father; it came from the steppes, and it reminded him of the hard, rude life there, and it seemed to him especially opportune to read this letter at Baden. He went to bed, but he could not sleep; the odour of the heliotrope pursued him. Remembering that the odour of flowers is unhealthy in a room at night, he placed the bouquet in an adjoining room; but still the fatiguing and enervating perfume followed him; it swept over his pillow, it slipped under the sheets. Then came thin and shallow sleep, and suddenly starting up he exclaimed, “Is it she? It is not possible!” For, some years ago, Litvinof was engaged to be married to a beautiful girl; she jilted him. Irene is now the wife of a general officer; she is now in Baden, and she seeks out her former lover. She cannot deceive a second time, and, full of remorse, fear, and anguish, he is drawn into the temptation and overpowered by it. One day Irene comes and throws herself into his arms. Then he exists but for her; he writes a cruel letter to his fiancée, breaking off his engagement; he tells Irene that they must go to the ends of the earth and live for one another; he has sacrificed all for her. She consents; but when the time comes to go she writes to say she cannot. “I cannot; I am yours for ever; but to fly with you, to leave everything. ... No, no, no! ... Ah, how delicious it would be! but how impossible! Oh, my friend, treat me as a feeble, worthless woman, but do not abandon me. ... We are returning at once to St. Petersburg; come there; nous t’y trouverons de l’occupation.” “Nous t’y trouverons de l’occupation!”’ cries Litvinof. “Voudrait-on faire de moi un gentilhomme de la chambre, par hasard? Qu’est-ce nous?” It would be difficult to praise too highly, and it would be impossible to give sufficient idea of the intense charm of the scenes in which the young man is led, as if by a silken thread, into destruction — scenes for the most part in dialogue, where no one phrase is remarkable or striking when read separately, but when taken with the context continues the picture — a picture tense with emotion, a fabulous and yet unimagined photograph of the mind. Painters speak of indications; some are peculiarly happy in indications, and an object skilfully indicated has a charm that the complete painting cannot have. Turgueneff was peculiarly skilful in his indications. He had, when he showed us Irene in girlhood, to indicate the writer of the letter that was latent in the girl. This is how he does it: “Once he ran from the university to see her in a worn and seedy frock-coat, his hands covered with ink. She came towards him with her usual impulsiveness. Suddenly she stopped. ‘You have no gloves,’ she said, insisting on each word; and then she added, ‘Fie, you are only a — student.’ ‘You are too impressionable,’ replied Litvinof. ‘Oh, you are only a student, vous n'êtes pas distingué,’ and turning her back upon him she left the room. It is true that an hour after she begged of him to forgive her.” Turgueneff is full of these subtle and soul-revealing touches.

Les Eaux Printanières treats of the same subject, the theme is the same, the variation consists in working it out through simple and honest middle classes instead of the effete elegant and corrupt society of Baden, in choosing the spring time rather than the summer of life. As the title indicates everything is fresh, innocent, and impulsive in Les Eaux Printanières. In 1840, Sasine, a young Parisian, was walking through the street of Frankfort on his way home after a pleasant and instructive journey in Italy. Suddenly he was surprised to see a young girl of the most astonishing beauty rush out of a confectioner’s shop, her shoulders and arms bare, her hair undone. She seized him, he being the nearest person to her, and begged of him to succour her brother who was dying. He was dragged through the shop, and in a back room he found a boy about fourteen in an apoplectic fit; he loosed his collar, sprinkled his face with water, and the boy was restored to consciousness. One word succeeded another, the people in whose house he was were half Italians, he spoke of Italy, they asked him to call in on the following day. Then he was introduced to the young girl, fiancée. She was called Gemma, and her fiancé was a young shopman of elegant appearance. He professed himself very grateful for the assistance Sasine had so kindly lent in a moment of extreme difficulty, and he invited him to lunch in the country on the following Sunday. A glance from Gemma made him accept the invitation. But at the restaurant a most unfortunate accident occurred. There were some officers lunching at an adjoining table, and one who had lunched a little too well came to their table, drank Gemma’s health insolently, and took away a rose she had laid on the table. The fiancé contented himself with abusing the military, and refusing to tip the waiter, but Sasine, who had already fallen in love with Gemma, went over to where the officers were sitting and in very plain language told them what he thought of them. A duel — the most delightful in literature, was the immediate result; then Gemma broke off her engagement with the shopman and engaged herself to Sasine. But before the young people can marry, Sasine will have to return home and sell his property, for it has been arranged that they shall live at Frankfort. While considering how the sale may be well and speedily effected he sees an enormously fat man walking in front of him whom he recognises as an old schoolfellow. He accosts him, and presently he learns that the fat man is the husband of a very wealthy woman, and it also transpires that she is buying property in the neighbourhood in which Sasine’s land is situated. The husband says he never interferes in his wife’s business, but his wife is now staying some dozen versts from Dresden, if Sasine wishes he will drive him over, and he can negotiate the affair at his leisure. Sasine is received by many servants, and is shown through great staircases and graceful saloons. The fat man’s wife is a beautiful woman, but she is evidently of common origin, there is in her beauty, the French would put it, quelque chose de populacier, and her vicious, animal-like sensuality is indicated by the frequent dilation of the thin nostril and the clenching of the little teeth. She will not tell Sasine at once if she will buy his property. She cannot tell him before three or four days. The game of seduction is played out at the theatre and in a riding excursion in the mountains. Sasine writes to Gemma imploring forgiveness and leaves Frankfort for Paris with this almost vulgar siren. The husband interferes in nothing. She married him as she hires her lackeys, and he is content so long as he eats and drinks his fill. His gluttony is beautifully indicated in the drive from Dresden: “Polozoff, as if stupefied, swayed slightly, a cigar between his lips; he spoke but little, and did not look out of the window once. The different views of the country did not interest him; he even declared that scenery bored him to death. Nor did Sasine talk much, nor did he admire the landscape; his mind was too full of other things. He was absorbed in thought. At every stage Polozoff added up his bills, he calculated the time, and rewarded the postillions little or much according to the zeal they had displayed. When they had accomplished half the journey he took two oranges from the provision-basket, chose the better, and gave the other to Sasine.” The reader has followed the story? The fat man is the pander to his wife’s caprices; he is bringing a very young and a very handsome man to her. See how full of imagination and delicacy is the first scene, and imagine what it would have been in less dexterous hands! Sasine has washed and dressed himself, and has come down to the prince’s apartments, for Polozoff is a prince. “He found that prince seated in the most luxurious velvet arm-chair in the middle of a splendid saloon. Sasine’s phlegmatic friend had found time to take a bath, and to return attired in a sumptuous satin dressing-gown; a red fez cap covered his head. Sasine approached, and examined him for some time. Polozoff remained immovable, like an idol; he did not even turn his face to look at him; he did not frown, he did not hear a sound: he was a spectacle really full of solemnity. After having admired him for nearly two minutes, Sasine was about to break this irritating silence, when suddenly the door of the adjoining room opened, and on the threshold there appeared a young and beautiful woman, in a white silk dress trimmed with black lace, diamonds on her arms and throat. It was Marie Nicolaievna herself. Her thick brown hair fell on both sides, plaited but not pinned up.

“XXXIV.

“‘Ah!’ said she, with a half confused, half-mocking smile, seizing quickly the end of the tresses, and fixing Sasine with her grey, luminous eyes, ‘Pardon me, I did not know you were already here.’

“‘Sasine, Dmitri Pavlovich, a school-friend,’ said Polozoff, without rising, and not even looking at Sasine, whom he was satisfied to indicate with his finger.

“‘Yes, I know; you have spoken to me about Monsieur. Charmed to make your acquaintance; but listen, Hippolyte Sidorovich (Polozoft); I wanted to ask you — my lady’s maid is so clumsy — ’“

“‘You want me to do your hair?’”

“‘Yes, yes, I beg of you. Pardon me,’ she said again, with the same smile, and addressing Sasine with a slight inclination of the head.

“She turned quickly on her heel and disappeared, leaving behind her an harmonious and fugitive impression of a charming neck, admirable shoulders, and a ravishing waist.”

Now I say I cannot conceive of anything better done than this; a difficulty is mastered absolutely, triumphantly; a physical and mental impression is given equally; and so well are they contrasted that each enforces the other, and both blend and are but one picture.

These are things that the artist sees better than the public, des questions de métier, but very interesting to those who would look behind the scenes and understand a little of the art of fiction. It is by such little touches that we judge our confrères; our approbation is won not by the big drum parts, or the violin solo which captivates the public, but by a little bit of — shall I call it instrumentation? that is to say, the sound of a certain sentiment at a certain moment; the introduction of physical phenomena, used either in alternate or combined effect with the theme of suffering or joy which the characters are uttering. Flaubert’s work is full of these devices, but they are too apparent; they are forced down our throats as if with a steel fork. In Turgueneff they are so subtle that they do not weary, and they keep their place in the picture. Flaubert reminds me of Mr. Holman Hunt, that is to say, his faults remind me of those so religiously and so implacably perpetrated by Mr. Hunt.

Pères et Enfants is considered by many to be Turgueneff’s best book, but although fully alive to the fact that it contains Bazaroff, his most thorough and most vital creation, I must profess myself adverse to this opinion. The book is wanting in those simple lines which are the characteristics of the best fiction — So-and-so did so-and-so; such a thing happened, therefore the result was... It will be urged that notably Vanity Fair is not composed in accordance with this theory of composition. Without in the least professing to have invented a definition that will include all good stories, I will say that although Vanity Fair is not composed on one set of simple lines, it is composed on sets of simple lines — the Crawley, the Sedley, the Osborne, and the Sharp; and these sets of lines are placed in such juxtaposition with each other that the picture balances just as the parts of an elaborate decoration balance and unite. This is what the different parts of Pères et Enfants do not do, and we remember little of the book except Bazaroff. But he is a real creation, not a modernisation of some Shakespearean or classical conception, but an absolutely new and absolutely distinct addition made to our knowledge of life. There are moments when we are not sure that we have not seen Bazaroff, that he was not once one of our intimate friends. Very often we think of him as we might of some tutor, some adviser; and we dream of him as a possible character for a novel or play. Who among the many who have thought of turning the troubles of Ireland to literary account has not thought of an Irish Bazaroff; looking over a photograph album we say he is like Bazaroff; in a word, Bazaroff is the concrete image of a section of human thought. To evoke a soul so vital and so knowable is the ultimate result of genius. None but the greatest have achieved this, even they only rarely; Turgueneff never before, never afterwards.

I have been at some pains to show that this writer’s special power seems to be in his skill in instantly laying bare not the body but rather the nerve of an emotion or passion, in indicating that which is most individual and constitutional in a character. Of this there is a very admirable instance in the novel under notice, so admirable that I cannot refrain from giving it. Bazaroff, this savage, cynical, and hard-minded student who scorns the romance of love and believes in nothing but the natural sciences, falls in love with Madame Odentsoff. He is attracted by her elegance and refinement, and she by his savagery and rudeness. It is necessary to show why she will not marry Bazaroff should he propose to her. After a couple of pages of abstract analysis, Turgueneff thus crystallises the analysis and gives it in the form of an image. “Often in the morning as she came warm and weak from her perfumed bath it came upon her to muse on the vanities of life, on its sadnesses, its troubles, its labours. ... A sudden daring then animated her heart; she was conscious that noble aspirations were awakening in her, but an open window allowed a cold breeze to flow into the room, and, trembling, Madame Odentsoff complained; it was with difficulty she suppressed a movement of anger, and at that moment she cared for nothing but that that horrid wind should cease.” Turgueneff continues the analysis, but when employing this method it is his habit to conclude with a second image, and over the page we find the following suggestive passage: “What a strange man the doctor (Bazaroff) is, she repeated to herself as she thought of him. She stretched herself in bed, smiled, and passed her arms over her head; then allowing her eyes to wander over a page or two of a stupid French novel, she let the book fall and fell asleep, white, pure, and cold, in her perfumed bed.”

But Turgueneff’s most complete work, the best synthesis of his talents, is after all Terres Vierges. You find there the same subtleties, and the story is clear, precise, and absolute. The theme is at once eternal and modern, and is instinct with all the choral music of fate. For it is certain that in all complex civilisations there will come a time when a reaction more or less violent will make itself felt, and man — man who has ceased to believe in a future life — will long for amore simple state, will cry out against the nerve suffering of his life, will strive to go back to the original stock. For the illustration of this theme Turgueneff takes a young man, a sort of Russian Hamlet, who although he is mortally ashamed of his weakness cannot refrain from writing verses. We are shown this young man, Nejdanof, for a moment amid the Nihilists, then he is offered employment as a tutor to a little boy in the house of a rich man. There he meets two people who decide the way of his life. A young girl and a poor landed proprietor who believe in the regeneration of the masses. In indicating the magnetism of idea Turgueneff is, as may be surmised, at his best, and it is impossible to imagine anything better in its way than the manner in which he shows us how Nejdanof is drawn toward Marianne and afterwards towards Markelof, and although in both idea is the primary cause of the effect, yet we are made to feel in one the fibrous affinities of sex, and how they determine that the first call shall be passed from man to woman, and then it is repeated and passed on from man to man. And what makes it still more subtle is that the young people do not really love each other, there is no bond of flesh between them. They are watched and harassed by a jealous woman, and this makes it necessary that they should play at lovers. They fly together. The subtlety of their relations to each other in the factory where they have taken refuge is beyond all praise, and the conclusion is as perfect as if Balzac or Shakespeare had conceived it. It is this Markelof who believes that the time has arrived for action; he preaches revolution to his beloved peasants, and he is bound hand and foot and delivered up to the enemy by them. Nejdanof strives to continue the propagation of the faith by distributing pamphlets among the peasants. His account of the reception his efforts meet with is pitiful enough; one peasant cannot read, another won’t listen, another threatens; another asks stupid and sottish questions; he is out of touch with them, he cannot make them understand, and he returns defeated, overcome with a hideous sensation of his own uselessness and the futility of all human effort. He has ceased to believe; he confesses his loss of faith to the woman he has run away with who has united her destiny with his. She is an heroic soul; there is more stuff in her than him; she does not flinch; she will marry him if he wishes it; she believes in the ultimate success of the cause. but he cannot marry her, he does not desire her, nor even life; as he puts it, “Je n’ai pas su me simplifier.”

Terres Vierges will hold its own in any selection of novels that deal with human thought that may be made, but it is not until we come to the contes, the short stories, that we find Turgueneff standing quite alone, towering above all competitors. The analytical novel is distinctly a product of Western invention, but the conte is Eastern in its origin, and has never been handled by us as forcibly as by its inventors; and it is therefore natural in dealing with Russian literature to expect him who is most thoroughly Tartar to write the best contes. This is my answer to those who assert that Turgueneff was a Frenchified Russian, and that you must go to Tolstoi or Gogol for the real genius of the Slav. What have we, or what has France, that can be for one moment compared with Les Récits d’un Chasseur or the volume entitled Etranges Histoires? In these stories the genius of Turgueneff is seen in its original splendour. They sometimes consist of no more than three or four pages, sometimes they extend to sixty or seventy; and in reading them the litterateur is conscious of something absolutely new, they are absolutely new in form as in matter, nor can they be traced back to any root; and if an analogy must be drawn to convey some idea of their character, I will say that they remind me of The Thousand and One Nights, so very Oriental are they in their abruptness and freedom of psychology. I would select Le Gentilhomme de la Steppe as being especially representative of this quality; Le Roi Lear de la Steppe is another, Toc Toc another. From the first line the narrative rushes forth; there is no hesitation, there is no stop, nor is the reader warned of what is going to happen. This is not necessary, for so perfectly are the events chosen that they follow without jostling or discord, and as each comes into the reader’s mind he is surprised at once by its naturalness and unexpectedness. The illusion is complete; it is just, as the phrase goes, like life itself. And what is still more marvellous perhaps is that a mere narrative, I will say a bare narrative, should possess the same intellectual charms as the psychological novel. Flaubert attempted and achieved this in Un Coeur Simple, but the execution is wire-drawn, it is too much like a painting by Mr. Holman Hunt, and the artist’s intention is unpleasantly obvious from the first; but Turgueneff’s execution is light, facile, and yet certain, even as that of a landscape by Corot.

After praising, it is usual for a critic to execute a change of front as adroitly as he can and covertly attack; this is done with the best intentions, the pretext being that the reader must be shown both sides of the picture. What is unfortunate in this method is, that it presupposes that the writer under discussion would have been a greater writer if his temperament and instincts were altered so as to conform more closely to the critic’s ideal. It is easy to see that this is nonsense, but at the same time it is impossible to admit that perfection has been attained. This dilemma seems to me to arise solely from a misinterpretation of the word fault, which is popularly supposed to be a moral stain that a little goodwill will remove as turpentine will grease from a cloth coat. This is not so. What are critically known as the faults of great artists are the absence of certain qualities occasioned by the abnormal presence of other qualities. If the statement of an artist’s merit was sufficiently precise it should not be wholly impossible to arrive à priori at a very fair opinion of what must be wanting in him; so if the critic makes it manifest that an author is infinitely subtle, it is reasonable to presume that he is never grossly vigorous or highly coloured; if his style is quaint and rococo, it is certain that he is often vague, wordy, and affected. Let the critic not inveigh against excess; let him remember rather that anything carried to excess is genius; Rabelais and Swift are supremely gross, Shelley is supremely spiritual, Turgueneff is supremely subtle — subtle even to the exclusion of almost every other quality. Never, except in the case of Bazaroff, did he create broadly and boldly. His characters speak and act with absolute naturalness, but they are natural rather as a photograph is natural than as Rembrandt and Balzac are natural. So careful is he never to intrude his personality, to warm his work with the light and fire of his soul, that it often seems thin, sometimes even meagre. It is not life plus the artist, it is merely life; you look in vain for any sudden lights and personal shadows, for any richness of colour. He is neither Titian nor Turner, and yet his characters are real — they are so real that they teach you only as life teaches; they puzzle you as life puzzles; they perplex you as a photograph perplexes. He would show you a face, and he would not stoop to impress you by the exaggeration of a single feature; a little, a very little, human passion, seen carefully, seen at a curious, but not too curious, an angle, will do. A married woman who intervenes and destroys the happiness of a young couple is a favourite theme. Not having married himself, and not having found life all happiness, the only possible conclusion is that he bungled his life by not marrying. A strain of the interference of the married woman runs through all his books. You cannot say if he regrets the society of the time of Alexander I., or prefers that of Alexander II., but he must tell of his own suffering soul. The impersonality of the artist is the vainest of delusions; Flaubert dreamed of it all his life, but Madame Bovary, with the little pessimistic flip at the end of every paragraph, is the most personal of books. Turgueneff attained absolute impersonality of diction; but that which had influenced his life he put forward prominently in his books, and had Turgueneff’s talent been less subtle, he would surely have drifted on the commonplace in dealing with such a time-worn theme, for he attempted no rearrangement of the dry bones — his imagination clothed them merely with new and splendid raiment. I have no personal knowledge on this point, but I should say, judging from certain internal indications, that he borrowed his stories, and that, so far as their structure was concerned, that he left them very much as he found them. Fumée, I should say, was based upon the author’s personal reminiscence; Les Eaux Printanières, upon a story that was told to him; three stories out of the four in the volume entitled Etranges Histoires, viz. Une Etrange Histoire, Le Roi Lear de la Steppe, and Toc Toc, were, I should say, certainly written from information arrived at either through conversation or the public press. I will add to this list the greater part of Les Récits d'un Chasseur, notably Un Gentilhomme de la Steppe. A footnote tells us that the second part of this story was composed several years after the first. Now the first part I feel sure was a personal experience, the second an anecdote that was related to him, and in which he saw instantly the completion of what he had left as a fragment. I also believe in the impotency of Turgueneff to evolve a human soul out of his inner consciousness, and that for the same reasons as obliged him to have recourse to adventitious assistance in the composition of his stories. He was obliged in his drawing of character to confine himself to the direct and absolute delineation of his friends and acquaintances. Nor do I feel sure that he always even understood his model. Bazaroff’s characteristics were so strongly marked that he could not fail to perceive what was eternal in him. And Bazaroff, who should have belonged to Balzac, embarrassed Turgueneff, for he was obliged to fit him into an original story, and this is how I account for the fact that Pères et Enfants alone among Turgueneft’s novels is a series of scenes held together by the personality of the leading character. I fail to perceive any difference between Litvinof and Sasine, the two young men in Fumée and Les Eaux Printanières; they might be passed from one novel to the other without the plot being affected or the reader’s psychological sense being disturbed. And this last book will serve for excellent illustration of what was said of Turgueneff’s illuminative rather than creative imagination. For, unlike Fumée, which consists solely of the hero’s love of the married woman, Les Eaur Printanières is made up equally of Sasine’s passion for the two women. Nothing can be more finely imagined than the cajoleries of Marie. The scene in the box at the theatre is as fine as it could be — I at least can conceive nothing better. It is at once eternal and modern, it is the final achievement of the nineteenth-century analytical photographic method. I like the scene on horseback less. When the story had to be moved forward Turgueneff had to fall back upon the well-known paths, he could not strike out a way for himself; he was supreme only in mental analysis; he did not even grasp the situation the characters suggested. A more powerful imagination — let us say Balzac — would have said the point here is first to differentiate between the young man’s love of the married woman and the young girl; secondly, to show how even love is not exempt from the law that nothing is lost in nature, and therefore the second passion must have an accumulative force that the first has not. Shakespeare does not fail to do this in Romeo and Juliet, nor is Rosalind a married woman. The Elizabethan poet’s imagination told him easily that the man who is led away by the charms of a young girl is somewhat callous to the seductions of a married woman.

But to whom shall we compare Turgueneff? It would be vain to speak of Miss Austen; her charm is too special, too peculiar to herself. Balzac’s genius lies in his universality, Miss Austen’s in her parochialism: the former was infinitely daring in attempting almost everything, the latter is infinitely daring in attempting almost nothing. She seems to have formulated her poetic system as follows: I know nothing of the natural sciences, of politics, of metaphysics, nor have I attempted to plumb the depths of the human soul; I am a maiden lady, interested in the few people with whom my lot is cast. If you care to hear how So-and-so married So-and-so I will tell you, and the simple tale I will relieve by an elderly gentleman whose faith is in gruel, and who strives to obtain converts to his favourite nourishment; but if you want to be astonished or instructed go elsewhere, I can do neither, nor will I pretend to. Now if the reader can imagine a beautifully cultivated islet lying somewhere between the philosophic realism of Balzac and the maiden lady realism of Miss Austen, he will have gone far to see Turgueneff as I see him. Or shall I refer him to Mr. Henry James who may be said to be allied to the Russian novelist more than any other writer. The obvious aim of both is subtlety, and both are reserved. On many occasions both have no doubt said, “I shall gain more by not saying the word than by saying it. Is not nature very often vague? People come and go we know not where or how.” But Turgueneff had a more intellectual audience than Mr. Henry James, and no matter how strong the artistic temperament may be, sooner or later the audience has its way with the artist; and reservation with Mr. Henry James often drifts merely into good breeding; he is often merely social, and, notwithstanding his great qualities, too often like a fashion-plate.

Our author’s verbal execution is all that now remains to us to consider, and here I can only speak from hearsay. Turgueneff is considered by Russians as one of their greatest, if not their greatest, prose writer. I only know him through a French translation; those published by Hertzel et Cie. strike me as almost brilliant, certainly adequate.

His anonymous translator did not, it is true, do for him what Hugo did for Shakespeare, what Baudelaire did for Poe; the style does not precisely attract attention; it is straightforward and in no way deformed; it bears, I should think, the same relation to the original as a pleasant-faced housemaid does to a refined and beautiful mistress.

George Moore.