artistic nature, though it was deeply, if I may make the distinction,
the poetic. But during the last twelve years of his life he lived much
with artists and men of letters, and he was eminently capable of
kindling in the glow of discussion. He cared for questions of form,
though not in the degree in which Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt cared
for them, and he had very lively sympathies. He had a great regard for
Madame George Sand, the head and front of the old romantic tradition;
but this was on general grounds, quite independent of her novels, which
he never read, and which she never expected him, or apparently any one
else, to read. He thought her character remarkably noble and sincere. He
had, as I have said, a great affection for Gustave Flaubert, who
returned it; and he was much interested in Flaubert’s extraordinary
attempts at bravery of form and of matter, knowing perfectly well when
they failed. During those months which it was Flaubert’s habit to spend
in Paris, Turgénieff went almost regularly to see him on Sunday
afternoon, and was so good as to introduce me to the author of _Madame
Bovary_, in whom I saw many reasons for Turgénieff’s regard. It was on
these Sundays, in Flaubert’s little salon, which, at the top of a house
at the end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, looked rather bare and
provisional, that, in the company of the other familiars of the spot,
more than one of whom[6] have commemorated these occasions, Turgénieff’s
beautiful faculty of talk showed at its best. He was easy, natural,
abundant, more than I can describe, and everything that he said was
touched with the exquisite quality of his imagination. What was
discussed in that little smoke-clouded room was chiefly questions of
taste, questions of art and form; and the speakers, for the most part,
were in æsthetic matters, radicals of the deepest dye. It would have
been late in the day to propose among them any discussion of the
relation of art to morality, any question as to the degree in which a
novel might or might not concern itself with the teaching of a lesson.
They had settled these preliminaries long ago, and it would have been
primitive and incongruous to recur to them. The conviction that held
them together was the conviction that art and morality are two perfectly
different things, and that the former has no more to do with the latter
than it has with astronomy or embryology. The only duty of a novel was
to be well written; that merit included every other of which it was
capable. This state of mind was never more apparent than one afternoon
when _ces messieurs_ delivered themselves on the subject of an incident
which had just befallen one of them. _L’Assommoir_ of Emile Zola had
been discontinued in the journal through which it was running as a
serial, in consequence of repeated protests from the subscribers. The
subscriber, as a type of human imbecility, received a wonderful
dressing, and the Philistine in general was roughly handled. There were
gulfs of difference between Turgénieff and Zola, but Turgénieff, who, as
I say, understood everything, understood Zola too, and rendered perfect
justice to the high solidity of much of his work. His attitude, at such
times, was admirable, and I could imagine nothing more genial or more
fitted to give an idea of light, easy, human intelligence. No one could
desire more than he that art should be art; always, ever, incorruptibly,
art. To him this proposition would have seemed as little in need of
proof, or susceptible of refutation, as the axiom that law should always
be law or medicine always medicine. As much as any one he was prepared
to take note of the fact that the demand for abdications and concessions
never comes from artists themselves, but always from purchasers,
editors, subscribers. I am pretty sure that his word about all this
would have been that he could not quite see what was meant by the talk
about novels being moral or the reverse; that a novel could no more
propose to itself to be moral than a painting or a symphony, and that it
was arbitrary to lay down a distinction between the numerous forms of
art. He was the last man to be blind to their unity. I suspect that he
would have said, in short, that distinctions were demanded in the
interest of the moralists, and that the demand was indelicate, owing to
their want of jurisdiction. Yet at the same time that I make this
suggestion as to his state of mind I remember how little he struck me as
bound by mere neatness of formula, how little there was in him of the
partisan or the pleader. What he thought of the relation of art to life
his stories, after all, show better than anything else. The immense
variety of life was ever present to his mind, and he would never have
argued the question I have just hinted at in the interest of particular
liberties--the liberties that were apparently the dearest to his French
_confrères_. It was this air that he carried about with him of feeling
all the variety of life, of knowing strange and far-off things, of
having an horizon in which the Parisian horizon--so familiar, so wanting
in mystery, so perpetually _exploité_--easily lost itself, that
distinguished him from these companions. He was not all there, as the
phrase is; he had something behind, in reserve. It was Russia, of
course, in a large measure; and, especially before the spectacle of what
is going on there to-day, that was a large quantity. But so far as he
was on the spot, he was an element of pure sociability.
I did not intend to go into these details immediately, for I had only
begun to say what an impression of magnificent manhood he made upon me
when I first knew him. That impression, indeed, always remained with me,
even after it had been brought home to me how much there was in him of
the quality of genius. He was a beautiful intellect, of course, but
above all he was a delightful, mild, masculine figure. The combination
of his deep, soft, lovable spirit, in which one felt all the tender
parts of genius, with his immense, fair Russian physique, was one of the
most attractive things conceivable. He had a frame which would have made
it perfectly lawful, and even becoming, for him to be brutal; but there
was not a grain of brutality in his composition. He had always been a
passionate sportsman; to wander in the woods or the steppes, with his
dog and gun, was the pleasure of his heart. Late in life he continued to
shoot, and he had a friend in Cambridgeshire for the sake of whose
partridges, which were famous, he used sometimes to cross the Channel.
It would have been impossible to imagine a better representation of a
Nimrod of the north. He was exceedingly tall, and broad and robust in
proportion. His head was one of the finest, and though the line of his
features was irregular, there was a great deal of beauty in his face. It
was eminently of the Russian type--almost everything in it was wide. His
expression had a singular sweetness, with a touch of Slav languor, and
his eye, the kindest of eyes, was deep and melancholy. His hair,
abundant and straight, was as white as silver, and his beard, which he
wore trimmed rather short, was of the colour of his hair. In all his
tall person, which was very striking wherever it appeared, there was an
air of neglected strength, as if it had been a part of his modesty never
to remind himself that he was strong. He used sometimes to blush like a
boy of sixteen. He had very few forms and ceremonies, and almost as
little manner as was possible to a man of his natural _prestance_. His
noble appearance was in itself a manner; but whatever he did he did very
simply, and he had not the slightest pretension to not being subject to
rectification. I never saw any one receive it with less irritation.
Friendly, candid, unaffectedly benignant, the impression that he
produced most strongly and most generally was, I think, simply that of
goodness.
When I made his acquaintance he had been living, since his removal from
Baden-Baden, which took place in consequence of the Franco-Prussian war,
in a large detached house on the hill of Montmartre, with his friends of
many years, Madame Pauline Viardot and her husband, as his
fellow-tenants. He occupied the upper floor, and I like to recall, for
the sake of certain delightful talks, the aspect of his little green
sitting-room, which has, in memory, the consecration of irrecoverable
hours. It was almost entirely green, and the walls were not covered with
paper, but draped in stuff. The _portières_ were green, and there was
one of those immense divans, so indispensable to Russians, which had
apparently been fashioned for the great person of the master, so that
smaller folk had to lie upon it rather than sit. I remember the white
light of the Paris street, which came in through windows more or less
blinded in their lower part, like those of a studio. It rested, during
the first years that I went to see Turgénieff, upon several choice
pictures of the modern French school, especially upon a very fine
specimen of Théodore Rousseau, which he valued exceedingly. He had a
great love of painting, and was an excellent critic of a picture. The
last time I saw him--it was at his house in the country--he showed me
half a dozen large copies of Italian works, made by a young Russian in
whom he was interested, which he had, with characteristic kindness,
taken into his own apartments in order that he might bring them to the
knowledge of his friends. He thought them, as copies, remarkable; and
they were so, indeed, especially when one perceived that the original
work of the artist had little value. Turgénieff warmed to the work of
praising them, as he was very apt to do; like all men of imagination he
had frequent and zealous admirations. As a matter of course there was
almost always some young Russian in whom he was interested, and refugees
and pilgrims of both sexes were his natural clients. I have heard it
said by persons who had known him long and well that these enthusiasms
sometimes led him into error, that he was apt to _se monter la tête_ on
behalf of his protégés. He was prone to believe that he had discovered
the coming Russian genius; he talked about his discovery for a month,
and then suddenly one heard no more of it. I remember his once telling
me of a young woman who had come to see him on her return from America,
where she had been studying obstetrics at some medical college, and who,
without means and without friends, was in want of help and of work. He
accidentally learned that she had written something, and asked her to
let him see it. She sent it to him, and it proved to be a tale in which
certain phases of rural life were described with striking truthfulness.
He perceived in the young lady a great natural talent; he sent her
story off to Russia to be printed, with the conviction that it would
make a great impression, and he expressed the hope of being able to
introduce her to French readers. When I mentioned this to an old friend
of Turgénieff he smiled, and said that we should not hear of her again,
that Ivan Serguéitch had already discovered a great many surprising
talents, which, as a general thing, had not borne the test. There was
apparently some truth in this, and Turgénieff’s liability to be deceived
was too generous a weakness for me to hesitate to allude to it, even
after I have insisted on the usual certainty of his taste. He was deeply
interested in his young Russians; they were what interested him most in
the world. They were almost always unhappy, in want and in rebellion
against an order of things which he himself detested. The study of the
Russian character absorbed and fascinated him, as all readers of his
stories know. Rich, unformed, undeveloped, with all sorts of
adumbrations, of qualities in a state of fusion, it stretched itself out
as a mysterious expanse in which it was impossible as yet to perceive
the relation between gifts and weaknesses. Of its weaknesses he was
keenly conscious, and I once heard him express himself with an energy
that did him honour and a frankness that even surprised me (considering
that it was of his countrymen that he spoke), in regard to a weakness
which he deemed the greatest of all--a weakness for which a man whose
love of veracity was his strongest feeling would have least toleration.
His young compatriots, seeking their fortune in foreign lands, touched
his imagination and his pity, and it is easy to conceive that under the
circumstances the impression they often made upon him may have had great
intensity. The Parisian background, with its brilliant sameness, its
absence of surprises (for those who have known it long), threw them into
relief and made him see them as he saw the figures in his tales, in
relations, in situations which brought them out. There passed before him
in the course of time many wonderful Russian types. He told me once of
his having been visited by a religious sect. The sect consisted of but
two persons, one of whom was the object of worship and the other the
worshipper. The divinity apparently was travelling about Europe in
company with his prophet. They were intensely serious but it was very
handy, as the term is, for each. The god had always his altar and the
altar had (unlike some altars) always its god.
In his little green salon nothing was out of place; there were none of
the odds and ends of the usual man of letters, which indeed Turgénieff
was not; and the case was the same in his library at Bougival, of which
I shall presently speak. Few books even were visible; it was as if
everything had been put away. The traces of work had been carefully
removed. An air of great comfort, an immeasurable divan and several
valuable pictures--that was the effect of the place. I know not exactly
at what hours Turgénieff did his work; I think he had no regular times
and seasons, being in this respect as different as possible from Anthony
Trollope, whose autobiography, with its candid revelation of
intellectual economies, is so curious. It is my impression that in Paris
Turgénieff wrote little; his times of production being rather those
weeks of the summer that he spent at Bougival, and the period of that
visit to Russia which he supposed himself to make every year. I say
“supposed himself,” because it was impossible to see much of him without
discovering that he was a man of delays. As on the part of some other
Russians whom I have known, there was something Asiatic in his faculty
of procrastination. But even if one suffered from it a little one
thought of it with kindness, as a part of his general mildness and want
of rigidity. He went to Russia, at any rate, at intervals not
infrequent, and he spoke of these visits as his best time for
production. He had an estate far in the interior, and here, amid the
stillness of the country and the scenes and figures which give such a
charm to the _Memoirs of a Sportsman_, he drove his pen without
interruption.
It is not out of place to allude to the fact that he possessed
considerable fortune; this is too important in the life of a man of
letters. It had been of great value to Turgénieff, and I think that much
of the fine quality of his work is owing to it. He could write according
to his taste and his mood; he was never pressed nor checked (putting
the Russian censorship aside) by considerations foreign to his plan, and
never was in danger of becoming a hack. Indeed, taking into
consideration the absence of a pecuniary spur and that complicated
indolence from which he was not exempt, his industry is surprising, for
his tales are a long list. In Paris, at all events, he was always open
to proposals for the midday breakfast. He liked to breakfast _au
cabaret_, and freely consented to an appointment. It is not unkind to
add that, at first, he never kept it. I may mention without reserve this
idiosyncrasy of Turgénieff’s, because in the first place it was so
inveterate as to be very amusing--it amused not only his friends but
himself; and in the second, he was as sure to come in the end as he was
sure not to come in the beginning. After the appointment had been made
or the invitation accepted, when the occasion was at hand, there arrived
a note or a telegram in which Ivan Serguéitch excused himself, and
begged that the meeting might be deferred to another date, which he
usually himself proposed. For this second date still another was
sometimes substituted; but if I remember no appointment that he exactly
kept, I remember none that he completely missed. His friends waited for
him frequently, but they never lost him. He was very fond of that
wonderful Parisian _déjeûner_--fond of it I mean as a feast of reason.
He was extremely temperate, and often ate no breakfast at all; but he
found it a good hour for talk, and little, on general grounds, as one
might be prepared to agree with him, if he was at the table one was
speedily convinced. I call it wonderful, the _déjeûner_ of Paris, on
account of the assurance with which it plants itself in the very middle
of the morning. It divides the day between rising and dinner so
unequally, and opposes such barriers of repletion to any prospect of
ulterior labours, that the unacclimated stranger wonders when the
fertile French people do their work. Not the least wonderful part of it
is that the stranger himself likes it, at last, and manages to piece
together his day with the shattered fragments that survive. It was not,
at any rate, when one had the good fortune to breakfast at twelve
o’clock with Turgénieff that one was struck with its being an
inconvenient hour. Any hour was convenient for meeting a human being who
conformed so completely to one’s idea of the best that human nature is
capable of. There are places in Paris which I can think of only in
relation to some occasion on which he was present, and when I pass them
the particular things I heard him say there come back to me. There is a
café in the Avenue de l’Opéra--a new, sumptuous establishment, with very
deep settees, on the right as you leave the Boulevard--where I once had
a talk with him, over an order singularly moderate, which was prolonged
far into the afternoon, and in the course of which he was
extraordinarily suggestive and interesting, so that my memory now
reverts affectionately to all the circumstances. It evokes the grey
damp of a Parisian December, which made the dark interior of the café
look more and more rich and hospitable, while the light faded, the lamps
were lit, the habitués came in to drink absinthe and play their
afternoon game of dominoes, and we still lingered over our morning meal.
Turgénieff talked almost exclusively about Russia, the nihilists, the
remarkable figures that came to light among them, the curious visits he
received, the dark prospects of his native land. When he was in the
vein, no man could speak more to the imagination of his auditor. For
myself, at least, at such times, there was something extraordinarily
vivifying and stimulating in his talk, and I always left him in a state
of “intimate” excitement, with a feeling that all sorts of valuable
things had been suggested to me; the condition in which a man swings his
cane as he walks, leaps lightly over gutters, and then stops, for no
reason at all, to look, with an air of being struck, into a shop window
where he sees nothing. I remember another symposium, at a restaurant on
one of the corners of the little _place_ in front of the Opéra Comique,
where we were four, including Ivan Serguéitch, and the two other guests
were also Russian, one of them uniting to the charm of this nationality
the merit of a sex that makes the combination irresistible. The
establishment had been a discovery of Turgénieff’s--a discovery, at
least, as far as our particular needs were concerned--and I remember
that we hardly congratulated him on it. The dinner, in a low entresol,
was not what it had been intended to be, but the talk was better even
than our expectations. It was not about nihilism but about some more
agreeable features of life, and I have no recollection of Turgénieff in
a mood more spontaneous and charming. One of our friends had, when he
spoke French, a peculiar way of sounding the word _adorable_, which was
frequently on his lips, and I remember well his expressive prolongation
of the _a_ when, in speaking of the occasion afterwards, he applied this
term to Ivan Serguéitch. I scarcely know, however, why I should drop
into the detail of such reminiscences, and my excuse is but the desire
that we all have, when a human relationship is closed, to save a little
of it from the past--to make a mark which may stand for some of the
happy moments of it.
Nothing that Turgénieff had to say could be more interesting than his
talk about his own work, his manner of writing. What I have heard him
tell of these things was worthy of the beautiful results he produced; of
the deep purpose, pervading them all, to show us life itself. The germ
of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot--that was the last
thing he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons. The
first form in which a tale appeared to him was as the figure of an
individual, or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see in
action, being sure that such people must do something very special and
interesting. They stood before him definite, vivid, and he wished to
know, and to show, as much as possible of their nature. The first thing
was to make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with; and to
this end, he wrote out a sort of biography of each of his characters,
and everything that they had done and that had happened to them up to
the opening of the story. He had their _dossier_, as the French say, and
as the police has of that of every conspicuous criminal. With this
material in his hand he was able to proceed; the story all lay in the
question, What shall I make them do? He always made them do things that
showed them completely; but, as he said, the defect of his manner and
the reproach that was made him was his want of “architecture”--in other
words, of composition. The great thing, of course, is to have
architecture as well as precious material, as Walter Scott had them, as
Balzac had them. If one reads Turgénieff’s stories with the knowledge
that they were composed--or rather that they came into being--in this
way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional
sense of the word--a fable constructed, like Wordsworth’s phantom, “to
startle and waylay”--there is as little as possible. The thing consists
of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the
result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of
the actors. Works of art are produced from every possible point of view,
and stories, and very good ones, will continue to be written in which
the evolution is that of a dance--a series of steps the more
complicated and lively the better, of course, determined from without
and forming a figure. This figure will always, probably, find favour
with many readers, because it reminds them enough, without reminding
them too much, of life. On this opposition many young talents in France
are ready to rend each other, for there is a numerous school on either
side. We have not yet in England and America arrived at the point of
treating such questions with passion, for we have not yet arrived at the
point of feeling them intensely, or indeed, for that matter, of
understanding them very well. It is not open to us as yet to discuss
whether a novel had better be an excision from life or a structure built
up of picture-cards, for we have not made up our mind as to whether life
in general may be described. There is evidence of a good deal of shyness
on this point--a tendency rather to put up fences than to jump over
them. Among us, therefore, even a certain ridicule attaches to the
consideration of such alternatives. But individuals may feel their way,
and perhaps even pass unchallenged, if they remark that for them the
manner in which Turgénieff worked will always seem the most fruitful. It
has the immense recommendation that in relation to any human occurrence
it begins, as it were, further back. It lies in its power to tell us the
most about men and women. Of course it will but slenderly satisfy those
numerous readers among whom the answer to this would be, “Hang it, we
don’t care a straw about men and women: we want a good story!”