This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of life which Turgenev
gives us in _A Lear of the Steppes_ is the highest demand we can make
from art. _Acia_, the last story in the present volume, though it gives
us a sense of mystery, is not inevitable: the end is _faked_ to suit
the artist’s purpose, and thus, as in other ways, it is far inferior
to _Lear_. _Faust_, the second story, has consummate charm in its
strange atmosphere of the supernatural mingling with things earthly,
but it is not, as is _Lear_, life seen from the surface to the revealed
depths; it is a revelation of the strange forces in life, presented
beautifully; but it is rather an idea, a problem to be worked out by
certain characters, than a piece of life inevitable and growing. When
an artist creates in us the sense of inevitability, then his work
is at its highest, and is obeying nature’s law of growth, unfolding
from out itself as inevitably as a tree or a flower or a human being
unfolds from out itself. Turgenev at his highest never quits nature,
yet he always uses the surface, and what is apparent, to disclose her
most secret principles, her deepest potentialities, her inmost laws
of being, and whatever he presents he presents clearly and simply.
This combination of powers marks only the few supreme artists. Even
great masters often fail in perfect _naturalness_: Tolstoi’s _The Death
of Ivan Ilytch_, for example, one of the most powerful stories ever
written, has too little that is typical of the whole of life, too much
that is strained towards the general purpose of the story, to be really
_natural_. Turgenev’s special feat in fiction is that his characters
reveal themselves by the most ordinary details of their every-day life;
and while these details are always giving us the whole life of the
people, and their inner life as well, the novel’s significance is being
built up simply out of these details, built up by the same process,
in fact, as nature creates for us a single strong impression out of a
multitude of little details. The Impressionists, it is true, often give
us amazingly clever pictures of life, seen subtly and drawn naturally;
but, in general, their able pictures of the way men think and act do
not reveal more than the actual thinking and acting that men betray to
one another,--they do not betray the whole significance of their lives
more than does the daily life itself. And so the Impressionists give
pictures of life’s surface, and not interpretations of its eternal
depths: they pass away as portraits of the time, amazingly felicitous
artistic portraits. But Turgenev’s power as a poet comes in, whenever
he draws a commonplace figure, to make it bring with it a sense of the
mystery of its existence. In _Lear_ the steward Kvitsinsky plays a
subsidiary part; he has apparently no significance in the story, and
very little is told about him. But who does not perceive that Turgenev
looks at and presents the figure of this man in a manner totally
different from the way any clever novelist of the second rank would
look at and use him? Kvitsinsky, in Turgenev’s hands, is an individual
with all the individual’s mystery in his glance, his coming and going,
his way of taking things; but he is a part of the household’s breath,
of its very existence; he breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates
an atmosphere of his own. If Hugo had created him he would have been
out of focus immediately; Balzac would have described the household
minutely, and then let Kvitsinsky appear as a separate entity in it;
the Impressionists would sketch him as a living picture, a part of
the household, but he would remain as first created, he would always
repeat the first impression he makes on us, a certain man in a certain
aspect; and they would not give us the steward revealing his character
imperceptibly from day to day in his minute actions, naturally, and
little by little, as this man reveals his.
It is then in his marvellous sense of the growth of life that Turgenev
is superior to most of his rivals. Not only did he observe life
minutely and comprehensively, but he reproduces it as a constantly
growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally or arbitrarily.
For example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, take Lavretsky’s and Liza’s
changes of mood when they are falling in love one with another: it is
nature herself in them changing very delicately and insensibly; we
feel that the whole picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life,
and cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut flowers, an
effect which many clever novelists often give us. And in _Lear_ we feel
that the life in Harlov’s village is still going on, growing yonder,
still growing with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when, in
Turgenev’s last words, ‘The story-teller ceased, and we talked a little
longer, and then parted, each to his home.’