Soil_ are good stories. Reading over lately several of Turgénieff’s
novels and tales, I was struck afresh with their combination of beauty
and reality. One must never forget, in speaking of him, that he was both
an observer and a poet. The poetic element was constant, and it had
great strangeness and power. It inspired most of the short things that
he wrote during the last few years of his life, since the publication of
_Virgin Soil_, things that are in the highest degree fanciful and
exotic. It pervades the frequent little reveries, visions, epigrams of
the _Senilia_. It was no part of my intention, here, to criticise his
writings, having said my say about them, so far as possible, some years
ago. But I may mention that in re-reading them I find in them all that I
formerly found of two other elements--their richness and their sadness.
They give one the impression of life itself, and not of an arrangement,
a _réchauffé_ of life. I remember Turgénieff’s once saying in regard to
Homais, the little Norman country apothecary, with his pedantry of
“enlightened opinions,” in _Madame Bovary_, that the great strength of
such a portrait consisted in its being at once an individual, of the
most concrete sort, and a type. This is the great strength of his own
representations of character; they are so strangely, fascinatingly
particular, and yet they are so recognisably general. Such a remark as
that about Homais makes me wonder why it was that Turgénieff should have
rated Dickens so high, the weakness of Dickens being in regard to just
that point. If Dickens fail to live long, it will be because his figures
are particular without being general; because they are individuals
without being types; because we do not feel their continuity with the
rest of humanity--see the matching of the pattern with the piece out of
which all the creations of the novelist and the dramatist are cut. I
often meant, but accidentally neglected, to put Turgénieff on the
subject of Dickens again, and ask him to explain his opinion. I suspect
that his opinion was in a large measure merely that Dickens diverted
him, as well he might. That complexity of the pattern was in itself
fascinating. I have mentioned Flaubert, and I will return to him simply
to say that there was something very touching in the nature of the
friendship that united these two men. It is much to the honour of
Flaubert, to my sense, that he appreciated Ivan Turgénieff. There was a
partial similarity between them. Both were large, massive men, though
the Russian reached to a greater height than the Norman; both were
completely honest and sincere, and both had the pessimistic element in
their composition. Each had a tender regard for the other, and I think
that I am neither incorrect nor indiscreet in saying that on
Turgénieff’s part this regard had in it a strain of compassion. There
was something in Gustave Flaubert that appealed to such a feeling. He
had failed, on the whole, more than he had succeeded, and the great
machinery of erudition,--the great polishing process,--which he brought
to bear upon his productions, was not accompanied with proportionate
results. He had talent without having cleverness, and imagination
without having fancy. His effort was heroic, but except in the case of
_Madame Bovary_, a masterpiece, he imparted something to his works (it
was as if he had covered them with metallic plates) which made them sink
rather than sail. He had a passion for perfection of form and for a
certain splendid suggestiveness of style. He wished to produce perfect
phrases, perfectly interrelated, and as closely woven together as a suit
of chain-mail. He looked at life altogether as an artist, and took his
work with a seriousness that never belied itself. To write an admirable
page--and his idea of what constituted an admirable page was
transcendent--seemed to him something to live for. He tried it again and
again, and he came very near it; more than once he touched it, for
_Madame Bovary_ surely will live. But there was something ungenerous in
his genius. He was cold, and he would have given everything he had to be
able to glow. There is nothing in his novels like the passion of Elena
for Inssaroff, like the purity of Lisa, like the anguish of the parents
of Bazaroff, like the hidden wound of Tatiana; and yet Flaubert yearned,
with all the accumulations of his vocabulary, to touch the chord of
pathos. There were some parts of his mind that did not “give,” that did
not render a sound. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and
not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, as I may call
it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was
powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even
rather august in a strong man who has not been able completely to
express himself.
After the first year of my acquaintance with Turgénieff I saw him much
less often. I was seldom in Paris, and sometimes when I was there he was
absent. But I neglected no opportunity of seeing him, and fortune
frequently assisted me. He came two or three times to London, for visits
provokingly brief. He went to shoot in Cambridgeshire, and he passed
through town in arriving and departing. He liked the English, but I am
not sure that he liked London, where he had passed a lugubrious winter
in 1870-71. I remember some of his impressions of that period,
especially a visit that he had paid to a “bishopess” surrounded by her
daughters, and a description of the cookery at the lodgings which he
occupied. After 1876 I frequently saw him as an invalid. He was
tormented by gout, and sometimes terribly besieged; but his account of
what he suffered was as charming--I can apply no other word to it--as
his description of everything else. He had so the habit of observation,
that he perceived in excruciating sensations all sorts of curious images
and analogies, and analysed them to an extraordinary fineness. Several
times I found him at Bougival, above the Seine, in a very spacious and
handsome chalet--a little unsunned, it is true--which he had built
alongside of the villa occupied by the family to which, for years, his
life had been devoted. The place is delightful; the two houses are
midway up a long slope, which descends, with the softest inclination, to
the river, and behind them the hill rises to a wooded crest. On the
left, in the distance, high up and above an horizon of woods, stretches
the romantic aqueduct of Marly. It is a very pretty domain. The last
time I saw him, in November 1882, it was at Bougival. He had been very
ill, with strange, intolerable symptoms, but he was better, and he had
good hopes. They were not justified by the event. He got worse again,
and the months that followed were cruel. His beautiful serene mind
should not have been darkened and made acquainted with violence; it
should have been able to the last to take part, as it had always done,
in the decrees and mysteries of fate. At the moment I saw him, however,
he was, as they say in London, in very good form, and my last impression
of him was almost bright. He was to drive into Paris, not being able to
bear the railway, and he gave me a seat in the carriage. For an hour and
a half he constantly talked, and never better. When we got into the city
I alighted on the boulevard extérieur, as we were to go in different
directions. I bade him good-bye at the carriage window, and never saw
him again. There was a kind of fair going on, near by, in the chill
November air, beneath the denuded little trees of the Boulevard, and a
Punch and Judy show, from which nasal sounds proceeded. I almost regret
having accidentally to mix up so much of Paris with this perhaps too
complacent enumeration of occasions, for the effect of it may be to
suggest that Ivan Turgénieff had been Gallicised. But this was not the
case; the French capital was an accident for him, not a necessity. It
touched him at many points, but it let him alone at many others, and he
had, with that great tradition of ventilation of the Russian mind,
windows open into distances which stretched far beyond the _banlieue_. I
have spoken of him from the limited point of view of my own acquaintance
with him, and unfortunately left myself little space to allude to a
matter which filled his existence a good deal more than the
consideration of how a story should be written--his hopes and fears on
behalf of his native land. He wrote fictions and dramas, but the great
drama of his life was the struggle for a better state of things in
Russia. In this drama he played a distinguished part, and the splendid
obsequies that, simple and modest as he was, have unfolded themselves
over his grave, sufficiently attest the recognition of it by his
countrymen. His funeral, restricted and officialised, was none the less
a magnificent “manifestation.” I have read the accounts of it, however,
with a kind of chill, a feeling in which assent to the honours paid him
bore less part than it ought. All this pomp and ceremony seemed to lift
him out of the range of familiar recollection, of valued reciprocity,
into the majestic position of a national glory. And yet it is in the
presence of this obstacle to social contact that those who knew and
loved him must address their farewell to him now. After all, it is
difficult to see how the obstacle can be removed. He was the most
generous, the most tender, the most delightful, of men; his large nature
overflowed with the love of justice: but he also was of the stuff of
which glories are made.
1884.
X
GEORGE DU MAURIER
Many years ago a small American child, who lived in New York and played
in Union Square, which was then inclosed by a high railing and governed
by a solitary policeman--a strange, superannuated, dilapidated
functionary, carrying a little cane and wearing, with a very copious and
very dirty shirt-front, the costume of a man of the world--a small
American child was a silent devotee of _Punch_. Half an hour spent
to-day in turning over the early numbers transports him quite as much to
old New York as to the London of the first Crystal Palace and the years
that immediately followed it. From about 1850 to 1855 he lived, in
imagination, no small part of his time, in the world represented by the
pencil of Leech. He pored over the pictures of the people riding in the
Row, of the cabmen and the costermongers, of the little pages in
buttons, of the bathing-machines at the sea-side, of the small boys in
tall hats and Eton jackets, of the gentlemen hunting the fox, of the
pretty girls in striped petticoats and coiffures of the shape of the
mushroom. These things were the features of a world which he longed so
to behold, that the familiar woodcuts (they were not so good in those
days as they have become since) grew at last as real to him as the
furniture of his home; and when he at present looks at the _Punch_ of
thirty years ago he finds in it an odd association of mediæval New York.
He remembers that it was in such a locality, in that city, that he first
saw such a picture: he recalls the fading light of the winter dusk, with
the red fire and the red curtains in the background, in which more than
once he was bidden to put down the last numbers of the humorous sheet
and come to his tea. _Punch_ was England; _Punch_ was London; and
England and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion to
this small American child. He liked much more to think of the British
Empire than to indulge in the sports natural to his tender age, and many
of his hours were spent in making mental pictures of the society of
which the recurrent woodcuts offered him specimens and revelations. He
had from year to year the prospect of really beholding this society (he
heard every spring, from the earliest period, that his parents would go
to Europe, and then he heard that they would not), and he had measured
the value of the prospect with a keenness possibly premature. He knew
the names of the London streets, of the theatres, of many of the shops:
the dream of his young life was to take a walk in Kensington Gardens and
go to Drury Lane to see a pantomime. There was a great deal in the old
_Punch_ about the pantomimes, and harlequins and columbines peopled the
secret visions of this perverted young New Yorker. It was a mystic
satisfaction to him that he had lived in Piccadilly when he was a baby;
he remembered neither the period nor the place, but the name of the
latter had a strange delight for him. It had been promised him that he
should behold once more that romantic thoroughfare, and he did so by the
time he was twelve years old. Then he found that if _Punch_ had been
London (as he lay on the hearth-rug inhaling the exotic fragrance of the
freshly-arrived journal), London was _Punch_ and something more. He
remembers to-day vividly his impression of the London streets in the
summer of 1855; they had an extraordinary look of familiarity, and every
figure, every object he encountered, appeared to have been drawn by
Leech. He has learned to know these things better since then; but his
childish impression is subject to extraordinary revivals. The expansive
back of an old lady getting into an omnibus, the attitude of a little
girl bending from her pony in the park, the demureness of a maid-servant
opening a street-door in Brompton, the top-heavy attitude of the small
“Ameliar-Ann,” as she stands planted with the baby in her arms on the
corner of a Westminster slum, the coal-heavers, the cabmen, the
publicans, the butcher-boys, the flunkeys, the guardsmen, the policemen
(in spite of their change of uniform), are liable at this hour, in
certain moods, to look more like sketchy tail-pieces than natural
things. (There are moments indeed--not identical with those we speak
of--in which certain figures, certain episodes, in the London streets,
strike an even stranger, deeper note of reminiscence. They remind the
American traveller of Hogarth: he may take a walk in Oxford Street--on
some dirty winter afternoon--and find everything he sees Hogarthian.)
We know not whether the form of infantine nostalgia of which we speak is
common, or was then common, among small Americans; but we are sure that,
when fortune happens to favour it, it is a very delightful pain. In
those days, in America, the manufacture of children’s picture-books was
an undeveloped industry; the best things came from London, and brought
with them the aroma of a richer civilisation. The covers were so
beautiful and shining, the paper and print so fine, the coloured
illustrations so magnificent, that it was easy to see that over there
the arts were at a very high point. The very name of the publisher on
the title-page (the small boy we speak of always looked at that) had a
thrilling and mystifying effect. But, above all, the contents were so
romantic and delectable! There were things in the English story-books
that one read as a child, just as there were things in _Punch_, that one
couldn’t have seen in New York, even if one had been fifty years old.
The age had nothing to do with it; one had a conviction that they were
not there to be seen--we can hardly say why. It is, perhaps, because
the plates in the picture-books were almost always coloured; but it was
evident that there was a great deal more colour in that other world. We
remember well the dazzling tone of a little Christmas book by Leech,
which was quite in the spirit of _Punch_, only more splendid, for the
plates were plastered with blue and pink. It was called _Young
Troublesome; or, Master Jacky’s Holidays_, and it has probably become
scarce to-day. It related the mischievous pranks of an Eton school-boy
while at home for his Christmas vacation, and the exploit we chiefly
recollect was his blacking with a burnt stick the immaculate calves of
the footman who is carrying up some savoury dish to the banquet from
which (in consequence of his age and his habits), Master Jacky is
excluded. Master Jacky was so handsome, so brilliant, so heroic, so
regardless of dangers and penalties, so fertile in resources; and those
charming young ladies, his sisters, his cousins--the innocent victims of
his high spirits--had such golden ringlets, such rosy cheeks, such
pretty shoulders, such delicate blue sashes over such fresh muslin
gowns. Master Jacky seemed to lead a life all illumined with rosy
Christmas fire. A little later came Richard Doyle’s delightful volume,
giving the history of _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_, and it would be
difficult to exaggerate the action of these remarkable designs in
forming the taste of our fantastic little amateur. They told him,
indeed, much less about England than about the cities of the continent;
but that was not a drawback, for he could take in the continent too.
Moreover, he felt that these three travellers were intensely British;
they looked at everything from the London point of view, and it gave him
an immense feeling of initiation to be able to share their
susceptibilities. Was there not also a delightful little picture at the
end, which represented them as restored to British ground, each holding
up a tankard of foaming ale, with the boots, behind them, rolling their
battered portmanteaux into the inn? This seemed somehow to commemorate
one’s own possible arrival in old England, even though it was not likely
that overflowing beer would be a feature of so modest an event; just as
all the rest of it was a foretaste of Switzerland, of the Rhine, of
North Italy, which after this would find one quite prepared. We are
sorry to say that when, many years later, we ascended, for the first
time, to the roof of Milan Cathedral, what we first thought of was not
the “waveless plain of Lombardy” nor the beauty of the edifice, but the
“little London snob” whom Brown, Jones, and Robinson saw writing his
name on one of the pinnacles of the church. We had our preferences in
this genial trio. We adored little Jones, the artist--if memory doesn’t
betray us (we haven’t seen the book for twenty years), and Jones _was_
the artist. It is difficult to say why we adored him, but it was
certainly the dream of our life at that foolish period to make his
acquaintance. We did so, in fact, not very long after. We were taken in
due course to Europe, and we met him on a steamboat on the Lake of
Geneva. There was no introduction, we had no conversation, but he was
the Jones we had prefigured and loved. Thackeray’s Christmas books (_The
Rose and the Ring_ apart--it dates from 1854) came before this: we
remember them in our earliest years. They, too, were of the family of
_Punch_--which is my excuse for this superfluity of preface--and they
were a revelation of English manners. “English manners,” for a child,
could of course only mean certain individual English figures--the
figures in _Our Street_, in _Doctor Birch and his Young Friends_ (we
were glad we were not of the number), in _Mrs. Perkins’s Ball_. In the
first of these charming little volumes there is a pictorial exposition
of the reason why the nurse-maids in _Our Street_ like Kensington
Gardens. When in the course of time we were taken to walk in those
lovely shades, we looked about us for a simpering young woman and an
insinuating soldier on a bench, with a bawling baby sprawling on the
path hard by, and we were not slow to discover the group.