Turgenev’s sympathy with women and his unequalled power of drawing
them, not merely as they appear to men, but as they appear to each
other, has been dwelt on by many writers. And in truth, of the three
leading qualities into which his artistic powers may be arbitrarily
analysed, the most apparent is precisely that delicate feminine
intuition and sensitive emotional consciousness into all the nuances
of personal relations that women possess in life and are never able
to put into books. This fluid sympathetic perception is instinctive
in Turgenev: it is his temperament to be sympathetic or receptive to
all types, except, perhaps, to purely masculine men of action, whom
he never draws with success. His temperament is bathed in a delicate
emotional atmosphere quivering with light, which discloses all the
infinite riches of the created world, the relation of each character to
its particular universe, and the significance of its human fate. And
this state of soul or flow of mood in Turgenev is creative, as when
music floats from a distance to the listener, immediately the darkening
fields, the rough coarse earth of cheap human life, with all the grind
and petty monotony of existence, melt into harmony, and life is seen
as a mysterious whole, not merely as a puzzling discrepancy of gaps
and contradictions and days of little import. This fluid emotional
consciousness of Turgenev is feminine, inasmuch as it is a receptive,
sympathising, and harmonising attitude; but just where the woman’s
faculty of receptiveness ends, where her perception fails to go beyond
the facts she is alive to, Turgenev’s consciousness flashes out into
the great poet’s creative world, with its immense breadth of vision,
force, and imagination. Thus in laying down _A Lear of the Steppes_
the reader is conscious that he is seeing past the human life of the
tragedy on to the limitless seas of existence beyond,--he is looking
beyond the heads of the moving human figures out on to the infinite
horizon. Just where the woman’s interest would stop and rest satisfied
with the near personal elements in the drama, Turgenev’s constructive
poetic force sees the universal, and in turn interprets these figures
in relation to the far wider field of the race, the age, and makes them
symbolical of the deep forces of all human existence.
And thus Turgenev becomes a creator, originating a world greater than
he received. His creation of Bazarov in _Fathers and Children_ from
a three hours’ accidental meeting with a man while on a journey, is
an extraordinary instance of how unerringly his vision created in
fore-thought a world that was to come. He accepted the man, he was
penetrated with the new and strange conceptions of life offered, and
as a poet he saw in a flash the immense significance to society of
this man’s appearance in the age. He saw a new and formidable type
had arisen in the nation, negating its traditions, its beliefs, its
conceptions; and from this solitary meeting with an individual,
Turgenev laid bare and predicted the progress of the most formidable
social and political movement in modern Russia, predicted it and set it
forth in art, a decade before its birth.