In studying the Russian novel it is amusing to note the childish
attitude of certain English men of letters to the novel in general,
their depreciation of its influence and of the public's 'inordinate'
love of fiction. Many men of letters to-day look on the novel as a mere
story-book, as a series of light-coloured, amusing pictures for their
'idle hours,' and on memoirs, biographies, histories, criticism, and
poetry as the age's _serious_ contribution to literature. Whereas
the reverse is the case. The most serious and significant of all
literary forms the modern world has evolved is the novel; and brought to
its highest development, the novel shares with poetry to-day the honour
of being the supreme instrument of the great artist's literary skill.
To survey the field of the novel as a mere pleasure-garden marked out
for the crowd's diversion--a field of recreation adorned here and there
by the masterpieces of a few great men--argues in the modern critic
either an academical attitude to literature and life, or a one-eyed
obtuseness, or merely the usual insensitive taste. The drama in all but
two countries has been willy-nilly abandoned by artists as a coarse
playground for the great public's romps and frolics, but the novel can
be preserved exactly so long as the critics understand that to exercise
a delicate art is the one _serious_ duty of the artistic life. It
is no more an argument against the vital significance of the novel that
tens of thousands of people--that everybody, in fact--should to-day
essay that form of art, than it is an argument against poetry that for
all the centuries droves and flocks of versifiers and scribblers and
rhymesters have succeeded in making the name of poet a little foolish in
worldly eyes. The true function of poetry! That can only be vindicated
in common opinion by the severity and enthusiasm of critics in stripping
bare the false, and in hailing as the true all that is animated by the
living breath of beauty. The true function of the novel! That can only
be supported by those who understand that the adequate representation
and criticism of human life would be impossible for modern men were the
novel to go the way of the drama, and be abandoned to the mass of vulgar
standards. That the novel is the most insidious means of mirroring human
society Cervantes in his great classic revealed to seventeenth-century
Europe. Richardson and Fielding and Sterne in their turn, as great
realists and impressionists, proved to the eighteenth century that the
novel is as flexible as life itself. And from their days to the days of
Henry James the form of the novel has been adapted by European genius to
the exact needs, outlook, and attitude to life of each successive
generation. To the French, especially to Flaubert and Maupassant, must
be given the credit of so perfecting the novel's technique that it has
become the great means of cosmopolitan culture. It was, however,
reserved for the youngest of European literatures, for the Russian
school, to raise the novel to being the absolute and triumphant
expression by the national genius of the national soul.
Turgenev's place in modern European literature is best defined by saying
that while he stands as a great classic in the ranks of the great
novelists, along with Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Balzac, Dickens,
Thackeray, Meredith, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Maupassant, he is the greatest
of them all, in the sense that he is the supreme artist. As has been
recognised by the best French critics, Turgenev's art is both wider in
its range and more beautiful in its form than the work of any modern
European artist. The novel modelled by Turgenev's hands, the Russian
novel, became _the_ great modern instrument for showing 'the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure.' To reproduce human life
in all its subtlety as it moves and breathes before us, and at the same
time to assess its values by the great poetic insight that reveals man's
relations to the universe around him,--that is an art only transcended
by Shakespeare's own in its unique creation of a universe of great human
types. And, comparing Turgenev with the European masters, we see that if
he has made the novel both more delicate and more powerful than their
example shows it, it is because as the supreme artist he filled it with
the breath of poetry where others in general spoke the word of prose.
Turgenev's horizon always broadens before our eyes: where Fielding and
Richardson speak for the country and the town, Turgenev speaks for the
nation. While Balzac makes defile before us an endless stream of human
figures, Turgenev's characters reveal themselves as wider apart in the
range of their spirit, as more mysteriously alive in their inevitable
essence, than do Meredith's or Flaubert's, than do Thackeray's or
Maupassant's. Where Tolstoi uses an immense canvas in _War and
Peace_, wherein Europe may see the march of a whole generation,
Turgenev in _Fathers and Children_ concentrates in the few words of
a single character, Bazarov, the essence of modern science's attitude to
life, that scientific spirit which has transformed both European life
and thought. It is, however, superfluous to draw further parallels
between Turgenev and his great rivals. In England alone, perhaps, is it
necessary to say to the young novelist that the novel can become
anything, can be anything, according to the hands that use it. In its
application to life, its future development can by no means be gauged.
It is the most complex of all literary instruments, the chief method
to-day of analysing the complexities of modern life. If you love your
art, if you would exalt it, treat it absolutely seriously. If you would
study it in its highest form, the form the greatest artist of our time
has perfected--remember Turgenev.