Mr. Edward Garnett has recently collected his prefaces to the novels and
stories of Turgenev, and refashioned them into a book in praise of the
genius of the most charming of Russian authors. I am afraid the word
"charming" has lost so much of its stamp and brightness with use as to
have become almost meaningless. But we apply it to Turgenev in its
fullest sense. We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming. He
is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a
personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some persons
who, when they come into a room, immediately make us feel happier.
Turgenev seems to "come into the room" in his books with just such a
welcome presence. That is why I wish Mr. Garnett had made his book a
biographical, as well as a critical, study.
He quotes Turgenev as saying: "All my life is in my books." Still, there
are a great many facts recorded about him in the letters and
reminiscences of those who knew him (and he was known in half the
countries of Europe), out of which we can construct a portrait. One
finds in the _Life of Sir Charles Dilke_, for instance, that Dilke
considered Turgenev "in the front rank" as a conversationalist. This
opinion interested one all the more because one had come to think of
Turgenev as something of a shy giant. I remember, too, reading in some
French book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in the
literary circles of Paris--a large figure with a curious chastity of
mind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilized
men of genius.
There are, indeed, as I have said, plenty of suggestions for a portrait
of Turgenev, quite apart from his novels. Mr. Garnett refers to some of
them in two excellent biographical chapters. He reminds us, for example,
of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals,
as when he introduced the work of Tolstoy to a French editor. "Listen,"
said Turgenev. "Here is 'copy' for your paper of an absolutely
first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master--for he
is a _real_ master--is almost unknown in France; but I assure you, on my
soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the
latchet of his shoes." The letter he addressed to Tolstoy from his
death-bed, urging him to return from propaganda to literature, is
famous, but it is a thing to which one always returns fondly as an
example of the noble disinterestedness of a great man of letters. "I
cannot recover," Turgenev wrote:--
That is out of the question. I am writing to you specially to say
how glad I am to be your contemporary, and to express my last and
sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift
came to you whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if
I could think my request would have an effect on you!... I can
neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it
all! My friend--great writer of our Russian land, listen to my
request!... I can write no more; I am tired.
One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever have
quarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev.
Perhaps it was that there was something barbarous and brutal in each of
them that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They were
both men of action in literature, militant, and by nature propagandist.
And probably Turgenev was as impatient with the faults of their strength
as they were with the faults of his weakness. He was a man whom it was
possible to disgust. Though he was Zola's friend, he complained that
_L'Assommoir_ left a bad taste in the mouth. Similarly, he discovered
something almost Sadistic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let his
imagination dwell on scenes of cruelty and horror. And he was as
strongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by his
sensationalism among horrors. One can guess exactly the frame of mind he
was in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "You
see, I consider myself a German." This has been quoted against Turgenev
as though he meant it literally, and as though it were a confession of
denationalization. His words were more subtle than that in their irony.
What they meant was simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like
most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European."
Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences
in _Rudin?_ He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the
narrowness with which it has been too often associated.
This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his
lifetime. It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued with
belittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death. He had
that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox. This sense of
truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an
insult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circles
of the political partisans. A great artist may be a member--and an
enthusiastic member--of a political party, but in his art he cannot
become a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist. In his
novels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russia
truthfully, not to paint and powder and "prettify" it for show purposes,
and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who were
asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the
master-pieces of a professional flatterer. When _Fathers and Children_
was published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemies
of everything in which Turgenev believed. "I received congratulations,"
he wrote,
almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies.
This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach
me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had
sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively
with sympathy.
This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political
party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he
belongs, as his subject. He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he is
compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way
as to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of his
enemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as
daylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by the
propagandist as worse than an enemy--a treacherous friend. Turgenev
deliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead to
the miseries of being misunderstood. When one thinks of the long years
of denunciation and hatred he endured for the sake of his art, one
cannot but regard him as one of the heroic figures of the nineteenth
century. "He has," Mr. Garnett tells us, "been accused of timidity and
cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries.... In an
access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was
comprised in one word--'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity nor
cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth. His first and last advice
to young writers, Mr. Garnett declares, was: "You need truth,
remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations." And if Turgenev was
remorseless in nothing else, he was remorseless in this--truth as
regards both his own sensations and the sensations of his
contemporaries. He seems, if we may judge from a sentence he wrote about
_Fathers and Children_, to have regarded himself almost as the first
realist. "It was a new method," he said, "as well as a new type I
introduced--that of Realizing instead of Idealizing." His claim has, at
least, this truth in it: he was the first artist to apply the realistic
method to a world seething with ideas and with political and
philosophical unrest. His adoption of the realistic method, however, was
the result of necessity no less than of choice. He "simply did not know
how to work otherwise," as he said. He had not the sort of imagination
that can invent men and women easily. He had always to draw from the
life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to
create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom
the various elements were harmonized together, to work from. I have
always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly."
When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character
and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was
human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps,
that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance.
That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance
higher than beauty or love or pity. The world before the war was afraid
above all things of losing vitality, and so it turned to contortionists
of genius such as Dostoevsky, or lesser contortionists, like some of the
Futurists, for fear restfulness should lead to death. It would be
foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but
he has that element in him. Mr. Conrad suggests a certain vice of
misshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenev
in comparison with his. "All his creations, fortunate or unfortunate,
oppressed and oppressors," he says in his fine tribute to Turgenev in
Mr. Garnett's book, "are human beings, not strange beasts in a
menagerie, or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy
darkness of mystical contradictions." That is well said. On the other
hand, it is only right to remember that, if Turgenev's characters are
human beings, they (at least the male characters) have a way of being
curiously ineffectual human beings. He understood the Hamlet in man
almost too well. From Rudin to the young revolutionist in _Virgin Soil_,
who makes such a mess of his propaganda among the peasantry, how many of
his characters are as remarkable for their weakness as their unsuccess!
Turgenev was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination in
regard to his fellow man--at least, his Russian fellow man. In _On the
Eve_, when he wished to create a central character that would act as an
appeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weakness
and apathy" (as Mr. Garnett puts it), he had to choose a Bulgarian, not
a Russian, for his hero. Mr. Garnett holds that the characterization of
Insarov, the Bulgarian, in _On the Eve_, is a failure, and puts this
down to the fact that Turgenev drew him, not from life, but from
hearsay. I think Mr. Garnett is wrong. I have known the counterpart of
Insarov among the members of at least one subject nation, and the
portrait seems to me to be essentially true and alive. Luckily, if
Turgenev could not put his trust in Russian men, he believed with all
his heart in the courage and goodness of Russian women. He was one of
the first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul.
With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimental
accidents. With Turgenev, women are equal human beings--saviours of men
and saviours of the world. _Virgin Soil_ becomes a book of hope instead
of despair as the triumphant figure of Marianna, the young girl of the
Revolution, conquers the imagination. Turgenev, as a creator of noble
women, ranks with Browning and Meredith. His realism was not, in the
last analysis, a realism of disparagement, but a realism of affection.
His farewell words, Mr. Garnett tells us, were: "Live and love others as
I have always loved them."