I
An examination of _A Lear of the Steppes_ is of especial interest to
authors, as the story is so exquisite in its structure, so overwhelming
in its effects, that it exposes the artificiality of the great majority
of the clever works of art in fiction. _A Lear of the Steppes_ is
great in art because it is a living organic whole, springing from the
deep roots of life itself; and the innumerable works of art that are
fabricated and pasted together from an ingenious plan--works that do
not grow from the inevitability of things--appear at once insignificant
or false in comparison.
In examining the art, the artist will note that Turgenev’s method of
introducing his story is a lesson in sincerity. Harlov, the Lear of
the story, is brought forward with such force on the threshold that
all eyes resting on his figure cannot but follow his after movements.
And absolute conviction gained, all the artist’s artful after-devices
and subtle presentations and side-lights on the story are not apparent
under the straightforward ease and the seeming carelessness with
which the narrator describes his boyish memories. Then, Harlov’s
household, his two daughters, and a crowd of minor characters, are
brought before us as persons in the tragedy, and we see that all these
people are living each from the innate laws of his being, _apparently
independently of the author’s scheme_. This conviction, that the author
has no pre-arranged plan, convinces us that in the story we are living
a piece of life: here we are verily plunging into life itself.
And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people
of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around, are
known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life. Suddenly
a break--the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific forces that
underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives, burst on us
astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes up to the
surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody runs about dazed,
annoyed, futile; we watch the other people sustaining their own
individuality inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events
which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people
huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of
life, life slowly returns to its old grooves--with a difference to us,
the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or
a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is
Turgenev’s analysis of the situation after Harlov’s death, marvellous
is the simple description of the neighbourhood’s attitude to the Harlov
family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the after-life
of Harlov’s daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on
these women, Turgenev flashes into the reader’s mind an extraordinary
sense of the inevitability of these women’s natures, of their innate
growth fashioning their after-lives as logically as a beech puts out
beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves. Through Turgenev’s single glimpse
at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he
has carried us into a new world: yet it is the old world; one needs to
know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by
art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of
mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth.