answering it. You began with Bazaroff; I will begin with him too. You
look for him in real life, and you do not find him. I will tell you why,
at once. The times are changed; Bazaroffs are not needed now. For the
social activity that is before us neither extraordinary talent nor even
extraordinary mental power is needed; nothing great, distinguished, very
individual. Industry and patience are required. Men and women must be
ready to sacrifice themselves without fame or glory, must be able to
conquer, having no fear of petty, obscure, necessary, elementary work.
What, for instance, can be more necessary or elementary than teaching
the peasant to read and write, helping him to get hospitals, etc.? Of
what use are talents, even learning, for such work? One needs only a
heart that can sacrifice its own egotism. You cannot even speak of a
profession in the case (much less of our friend Blank's star). A sense
of duty, the magnificent feeling of patriotism in the true sense of the
word,--that is all that is needed. Bazaroff was the type of "one sent
with a message," a great figure, gifted with a definite charm, not
without a certain aureole. All that is not needed now, and it is
ridiculous to speak of heroes and artists of work. Brilliant figures in
literature will probably not appear. Those who plunge into politics will
only destroy themselves in vain. This is all true; but many cannot
reconcile themselves at first to the fact, to the uncongenial _milieu_,
to this modest resolve, especially such responsive and enthusiastic
women as yourself. They may say what they please, they want to be
charmed, carried away. You yourself say that you wish to bow in
reverence; but before _useful_ people one does not bow in reverence. We
are entering an era of _merely useful_ people; and these will be the
best. Of these there will probably be many, of beautiful, charming
workers very few. And in the very search for a Bazaroff--a living
one--is perhaps unconsciously betrayed the thirst for beauty, naturally
of a single peculiar type. All these illusions one must get rid of.
I should not have reproached your acquaintances with a want of talent if
they had not made pretensions. If they were plodding workers, they would
leave nothing to be desired; but when they loom up and claim admiration,
one cannot pass on without reminding them that they have no right to our
admiration.
Ah, A. P.! we shall see no typical characters, none of those new
creations of whom people talk so much. The life of the people is
undergoing a process of development and--throughout the whole mass--of
decomposition and recomposition: it needs helpers, not leaders, and only
at the end of this period will important, original figures appear. I
have just said that you will not see them. You are still young. You will
live to see the day: as for me, that is another thing.
For the present, let us learn our A, B, C, and teach others, do good
gradually, in which you are already making progress. The letter from
your son, which I herewith return, is warm and good. May he, too, enter
the ranks of the useful workers and servants of the people, as we once
had servants of the Czar!
PARIS, January 3, 1876.
TO M. E. SALTIKOFF:[D]--I received your letter yesterday, dear Michael
Jefgrafowitch, and, as you see, I do not delay the answer. Your letter
is by no means "dull and blunt," as you say. On the contrary, it is very
good and sensible. It gave me pleasure. There hovers about it some power
and better health, in sharp contrast with its immediate predecessor,
which was an extremely gloomy production. Besides, I am by no means
cheerful myself at present: this is the third day in bed with gout.
Now a line or two as to "Fathers and Sons," seeing that you have
mentioned the subject. Do you really believe that all that you reproach
me with never entered my own mind? For this reason I wish not to vanish
from the scene before I finish my comprehensive novel, which I think
will clear up many misunderstandings and place me where and as I belong.
However, I do not wonder that Bazaroff has remained a riddle for many
persons: I cannot understand clearly how I conceived him. There was--do
not laugh--something more powerful than the author himself, something
independent of him. I know only this,--there was no preconceived idea in
me then, no "novel with a purpose" in my thought: I wrote naïvely, as if
I myself wondered at what came of it....
Tell me, on your conscience, whether comparison with Bazaroff could be
an affront to any one. Don't you perceive yourself that he is the most
congenial of all my characters? "A certain fine perfume" is an invention
of the reader's; but I am prepared to admit (and have already admitted
in print in my "Recollections") that I had no right to give our
reactionary mob an opportunity to make of a nickname a name. The author
ought to have sacrificed himself to the citizen; and I therefore
recognize as justified the estrangement of our youth from me, and all
possible reproaches. The question of the time was more important than
artistic truth, and I ought to have known this in advance.
I have only to say once more, wait for my novel, and, until then, do not
be indignant that, in order not to grow unaccustomed to the pen, I write
slight insignificant things. Who knows?--perhaps it may yet be given to
me to fire the hearts of men.
An entertaining writer in the sense of G----wa I shall never be. I would
rather be a stupid writer.
But now--_basta_!
I greet you and press your hand most cordially.
IVAN SERGEWITCH TOURGÉNEFF.
Old Songs and Sweet Singers.
I cannot sing the old songs now:
It is not that I deem them low,
But that I have forgotten how
They go,
wrote Calverley in his delightful drollery about the advances of old
age. Nevertheless he made a mistake, for old songs cling tenaciously to
the consciousness; and memory, are retained when everything else in
heart and mind has been blurred over, and of all the magic mirrors which
reflect back our lives for us the most effective is a melody linked to
words which moved us in our youth. When an orchestra stops playing its
waltzes and mazourkas of the latest fashion and takes up the strains of
"Kathleen Mavourneen," "Oft in the Stilly Night," or "Robin Adair," one
may readily observe a change come over the older part of the crowd who
listen. The familiar air is like a shell murmuring in their ears sweet,
far-off, imperishable memories of youth, and that special epoch of youth
best described as "_les heureux jours où l'on était si malheureux!_" It
is an experience worth having to have heard the great singers, but it is
not of the great singers that I wish to speak here. I fancy that it is
with others as with myself, and, in my early days at least, music
wrought its chief enchantments and most perfectly allied itself with
the great world of fantasy and imagination when I heard it in my own
home, or at least quietly and privately, and when its influence was of a
constant and regular kind. Why is it that literature, which enshrines so
much of what is personal and actual and a part of ideal autobiography,
says so little of singers, although the song which moves us, rummaging
among our old memories and, to our surprise and delight, bringing back
clear pictures, is generally linked to the sweet singer who sang it, who
interpreted it for us and made it a part of our imaginative possessions?
Heroines of novels are rarely singers, or, if they sing, abstain from
effective music, and have soft, soothing voices, "as if they only sang
at twilight." Heroines of course have to be heroines and nothing else.
"Soothing, unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood," wrote George Eliot,
"which supersedes all acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never
have asked at any period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life if she sketched or
played the piano. You would perhaps have been rather scandalized if she
had descended from the serene dignity of _being_ to the assiduous unrest
of _doing_." However, when he recalls the female singers he has known,
any man will grant that they have been almost without exception very
charming women. A really good singer must possess in absolute equipoise
ardor and calm. But the first singer I ever heard who made me feel
upborne by the music and floated as by the sweep of wings was a man with
a high, melancholy, piercingly sweet tenor voice. He had a pale,
striking face, with a mobile mouth, intensely brilliant blue eyes, a
lofty forehead, and his fine, scanty brown hair hung low on his neck. As
he sang with lifted head and eyes which gazed steadfastly before him, he
seemed rapt and inspired. Were I to paint an angel I should try to seize
his lineaments and the glory shining on his pale face. The song I loved
best to hear him sing was Schubert's "Erl-King," which thrilled me with
a sense of terror and mystery and made me tremble like a harp-string in
response to his piercingly clear tones. Ever and anon, as I listened to
the child's cry of "Oh, father, my father!" I was clutched by the icy
hand of the awful phantom he had invoked. Does anybody sing Schubert's
songs nowadays, or are they invariably left to the violins, which can
interpret their "eternal passion, eternal pain," so thrillingly? I
never, I regret to say, heard the "Serenade" sung in a way which seemed
to me adequate,--not to compare with the way in which Remenyi plays it.
Those wonderful lyrical instruments the violin, the 'cello, and the
flute have an almost exclusive right nowadays to some of the greatest
songs. Few singers attempt the "Adelaïde" or "Che faro?"
I like to recall the first time I ever heard "Che faro senza Eurydice?"
A musical _matinée_ was given to an elegant elderly woman, Mrs. P----,
who had had a wide social reputation as an accomplished singer. She was
still mistress of all the technique of her art, but her voice was worn
and it was not easily conceded that she was a delightful vocalist. Many
of her songs seemed like the ghosts of the blissful happy songs she had
sung in her youth. There was something half painful in their jocund
gayety and archness. I went far away from the piano and seated myself
with a group of young people, paying little attention to the music.
Presently, however, a strain sought me out, a sweet, passionately
reiterated strain: it seemed to be supplicating, imploring; it filled me
with a restless pain. That cry of "Eurydice!" "Eurydice!" so beseeching,
so passionate, so exhausted by longing, drew me with an irresistible
power. Gluck certainly achieved the effect he attempted, and showed us
what the fabled power of Orpheus was.
Certain songs of indifferent worth often gain charm to us, although it
is only the greatest music which has the supreme power of expressing the
highest thoughts of man and the most ardent longings of his soul. But
there was a time when I found inconceivable sweetness in certain
ballads of Abt, and the like. Sara X----, a lovely youthful creature,
with a frank, beautiful smile, used to sing them, sitting down at the
piano and going on from one song to another, generally beginning with
"The Bells are Hushed," which silenced the room when twenty people were
buzzing flirtation and gossip. One line of that song, as she sang it,
draws the heart out of me still as I remember it:
Sleep well, sleep well,
And let thy lovely eyelids close.
The sentiment such songs arouse is soft but poignant. Some songs--the
"Adelaïde," for example--are songs to make one commit suicide. But this
sort of music stirs and delights while it mocks with the sweetness which
soothes us not. "She kept me awake all night, as a strain of Mozart's
might do," Keats wrote of his Charmian. There was no song this special
songstress sang which she did not make her own by a peculiar and
powerful effort. Her instinct was to rouse, charm, fascinate her little
audience. Not to move her hearers was to her not to sing, and when she
sang as she wished she could sweep away his world of ideas from her
listener and recreate a new one. In one song, an Italian composition
called "The Dream," she always seemed to be carried beyond herself. In
reading Tourgéneff's description of Iakof's singing I could only think
of Sara X----: "Iakof became more and more excited; completely master of
himself, he gave himself up entirely to the inspiration that had taken
possession of him. His voice no longer trembled; it no longer betrayed
anything but the emotion of passion, that emotion that so rapidly
communicates itself to the hearers. One evening I was by the sea when
the tide was coming in; the murmur of the waves was becoming more and
more distinct. I saw a gull motionless on the shore, with its white
breast facing the purplish sea; from time to time it spread its enormous
wings and seemed to greet the incoming waves and the disk of the sun.
This came to my mind at that moment." And as I read these words of
Tourgéneff's, Sara X---- singing "The Dream" came to my mind.
A less dramatic singer, but an incomparable singer of Scotch ballads,
and indeed of all ballads, at the same period of my life made an
imperishable impression upon my mind. Nothing can surpass certain Scotch
ballads for the faculty of quickening into susceptibility the elementary
poetry which underlies human nature. Every man and every woman becomes
again an individual man, an individual woman, who is moved by "John
Anderson, my Jo, John," or "Auld Robin Gray." Never was so sweet a voice
as this singer's, never did woman have a higher gift of rescuing the
soul from every-day use and wont and giving it glimpses from the
mountain-summit and the thrill and inspiration which come from the wider
view and the purer air. She gave her gift, she enriched the world, and
her songs are still incorporate in the hearts and souls of those who
loved her.
We do not hear songs enough in our every-day life; and even from the
singers on the boards the best songs are rarely heard. There are many
songs I should like to repeat the mere name of, so much it means to me;
but it might not carry the same music to others. Dr. Johnson said of a
certain work, "There should come out such a book every thirty years,
dressed in the words of the times." So there should appear at least
twice in every decade of each man's and woman's life an unsurpassed
singer of old songs, who should give us not only the "Adelaïde," but
"Mignon," "The Serenade," the "Adieu," and all the many-colored ballads
on love,--plain, fantastic, descriptive, sad, and sweet,--so that we
might enjoy an epitome of our life-long musical pleasures, and not have
to cry, like Faust, but in vain, "Give me my youth again."
L. M.
A Chess Village.
The all-pervading influence of chess observable in that peculiar region
described in "Through the Looking-Glass" is hardly less perceptible in
the little, antiquated German village of Ströbeck, not far from
Halberstadt. In the eleventh century this village was noted for the
devotion of its people to chess, and they have kept this characteristic
feature down to the present day. All the inhabitants, except the very
small children, are chess-players of more or less skill, and the game is
to them what the world-renowned Passion-play is to the Oberammergauers.
A great many notable men have visited Ströbeck at various times on
account of its reputation as a chess-playing community. The
council-house contains numerous memorials of these visits, which the
villagers take pride in showing to strangers. Among the most highly
prized of these memorials are a board and chessmen which were presented
to the village in 1651 by Kurfürst Frederick William of Brandenburg.
In June, 1885, the chess societies of the Hartz districts held a
"_Schachcongress_," or chess convention, at this appropriate place.
Besides the regularly-appointed delegates, a large number of visitors
came from various parts of Germany, many of whom were players of wide
repute. Among the latter was Herr Schalopp, well known as one of the
best chess-players of Berlin. While at Ströbeck, Schalopp played games
with thirty-seven persons at the same time. He won thirty-four of the
games, and two of the three opponents whom he did not defeat were an old
woman of the village, and her grandson, a boy of thirteen.
The convention lasted several days, and the villagers won a large
proportion of the silver-ware, chess-boards, and other prizes offered
for victory. Every house contains prizes which had been won in such
contests on former occasions. The visitors were very much surprised at
the fine playing of the village children, who, before the convention
adjourned, gave a special exhibition of their skill in the game. The
time characteristically chosen for this juvenile tournament was Sunday
afternoon. Of course the early development of these small chess-players
must have been caused principally by frequent practice and constant
study of the game; but students of psychology might find in it an
instance of transmitted tendency and the inherited effect of a certain
habit of thought.
Such a rustic society as Ströbeck could hardly exist anywhere but in
Germany. The Italian peasants, who give so much of their time to _loto_,
are generally too lazy to make the mental exertion required for chess,
while in most other European countries the rural population of the lower
class entertain themselves chiefly with fights between dogs, cocks, or
men who are but little superior to either. Here in the United States
there are, no doubt, lovers of chess in nearly every village or small
town, as well as in the cities; but in comparison with that of base-ball
or roller-skating its popularity is nowhere great enough to be taken
into account as an indication of mental tendencies or characteristics.
W. W. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[C] A review of which the belles-lettres department is feeble, but which
publishes excellent articles in other departments.
[D] Known in Russian literature as Tschtedrin, one of the ablest
satirists, editor until last year of the leading scientific literary
review, now suppressed on account of its radical tendencies.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY
"The Congo, and the Founding of its Free State: A Story of Work
and Exploration." By Henry M. Stanley. Two Volumes. New York:
Harper & Brothers.
It is not as the geographical discoverer and explorer--except
incidentally and to a limited extent--that Mr. Stanley appears in these
volumes. It is as Bula Matari,--"Breaker of Rocks,"--making roads and
bridges, establishing stations, pushing the outposts of civilization
into the heart of Africa. He no longer fights his way through hostile
tribes or seeks to avoid their notice, anxious only to penetrate an
unknown region, secure his own safety and that of his followers, and
report his achievements, leaving no trace behind except a recollection
as of some fiery meteor that had vanished without its portents being
apprehended. He returns to make the signification clear, a harbinger not
of disasters, but of a wonderful new era of peace and prosperity. He
bestows lavish gifts, negotiates treaties, purchases territorial rights,
and devotes himself to the task of opening avenues to trade and
preparing the way for colonization. The same energy and pluck, the same
spirit of persistence, that triumphed over the obstacles and dangers of
his earlier enterprises are again called into play, combined with the
suavity and patience demanded for the attainment of the present object
and permitted by the ample means at his disposal and the freedom from
any necessity for impetuous haste or hazardous adventures. Experience,
counsel, and the sense of higher responsibilities have brought a calmer
judgment and greater steadiness of action, but the boyish temperament
has not lost its sway, and more than one crisis is brought to a happy
issue by methods in which a love of fun mingles with sagacity and
foresight and renders their measures more effective.
The work undertaken by the Association of which Mr. Stanley was the
agent is of a purely initiatory character. The acquisition of territory
and of certain rights of sovereignty under treaties with local chiefs
constitutes the "founding" of the "Congo Free State," which has obtained
the recognition of the European powers and become one of the contracting
parties to the articles adopted by the recent Conference at Berlin for
regulating the commercial and political status of the river-basins of
Central Africa. Under these articles absolute freedom of trade,
intercourse, and settlement is secured to the people of all nations
throughout a region of vast extent and unsurpassed fertility, rich in
natural products, not so densely peopled as to resist or restrict any
conceivable schemes of colonization, yet offering in its numerous
village populations material sufficiently available for the needs of
industry and commerce and amenable to philanthropic influences. The
preparatory labors, which leave no room for doubt on this point, have
been already accomplished, with the exception of what Mr. Stanley
regards as the sure and indispensable means of opening up the resources
of the country,--viz., the construction of a railway around the rapids
that impede the navigation of the Congo. That this crowning enterprise
would be highly and immediately remunerative he considers easily
demonstrable. "To-day," he writes, "fifty-two thousand pounds are paid
per annum for porterage between Stanley Pool and the coast, by native
traders, the International Association, and three missions, which is
equal to five and one-half per cent. on the nine hundred and forty
thousand pounds said to be needed to construct the railway to the Pool.
But let the Vivi and Stanley Pool railroad be constructed, and it would
require an army of grenadiers to prevent the traders from moving on to
secure the favorite places in the commercial El Dorado of Africa." It
is, of course, to European capitalists that Mr. Stanley addresses his
appeal; and when it is remembered that their least profitable
investments have not been those which aided in the development of
barbarous countries, it seems not improbable that at no remote period a
sufficient portion of the riches that so continually make themselves
wings and fly away to distant quarters of the globe may seek the banks
of the Congo in preference to those of the Hudson or the Wabash.
While holding out this tempting bait to merchants, manufacturers, and
the moneyed classes generally, Mr. Stanley declines to dilate upon the
advantages of the Congo basin as a field for immigration. That portion
of it which in his view "is blessed with a temperature under which
Europeans may thrive and multiply" is at present inaccessible to
settlers. It is "the cautious trader, who advances, not without the
means of retreat," who is to act as the pioneer and the missionary of
civilization, stimulating and directing the industry of the natives. The
suppression of the internal slave-trade is another object to be aimed
at,--one which Mr. Stanley, in an address recently delivered in London,
held up as capable of accomplishment by an outlay of five thousand
pounds a year. What rebate should be made, on this point and on others,
from the anticipations which a sanguine temperament, that has enabled
its possessor to struggle with so many difficulties and to achieve so
many enterprises, would naturally tend to heighten and render glowing,
is a question that may be reserved for those whom it directly concerns.
Equatorial Africa is not likely ever to become the home of a white
population, but it need not for that reason be left to "stew in its own
juice." On the contrary, it offers on that very account a fit subject
for the experiment, which has nowhere yet been adequately tried, of
developing latent capacities for progress in races that have raised
themselves above the level of absolute savagery without attaining to
those ideals which, never wholly realized, are essential to continuous
improvement. It has been found easy to enslave, to debase, to
exterminate races in this condition, while the ill success of efforts to
enlighten and elevate them has led to the inference that this is
impracticable. The trial, however, will not have been made till the
counteracting influences have ceased to act, or at least to predominate,
and time has been allowed for hidden forces that may possibly exist to
be called into play. As Mr. Stanley observes, "It is out of the
fragments of warring myriads that the present polished nations of Europe
have sprung. Had a few of those waves of races flowing and eddying over
Northern Africa succeeded in leaping the barrier of the equator, we
should have found the black aboriginal races of Southern Africa very
different from the savages we meet to-day."