THE PLACE OF TOURGENIEV
In the preceding I have tried very briefly to point out the state of
the barometer of public opinion (the barometer of the average educated
man and not of any exclusive clique) with regard to Tourgeniev’s
reputation in Russia at the present day.
That and no more. I have not devoted a special chapter in this book
to Tourgeniev for the reasons I have already stated: namely, that his
work is better known in England than most other Russian classics, and
that admirable appreciations of his work exist already, written by
famous critics, such as Mr. Henry James and M. Melchior de Vogüé. There
is in England, among people who care for literature and who study the
literature of Europe, a perfectly definite estimate of Tourgeniev. It
is for this reason that I confined myself to trying to elucidate what
the average Russian thinks to-day about Tourgeniev compared with other
Russian writers, and to noticing any changes which have come about with
regard to the estimate of his work in Russia and in Europe during the
last twenty years. I thought this was sufficient.
But I now realise from several able criticisms on my study of Tolstoy
and Tourgeniev when it appeared in the _Quarterly Review_, that I had
laid myself open to be misunderstood. It was taken for granted in
several quarters not only that I underrated Tourgeniev as a writer,
but that I wished to convey the impression that his reputation was a
bubble that had burst. Nothing was farther from my intention than this.
And here lies the great danger of trying to talk of any foreign writer
from the point of view of that writer’s country and not from that of
your own country. You are instantly misunderstood. For instance, if you
say Alfred de Musset is not so much admired now in France as he used
to be in the sixties, the English reader, who may only recently have
discovered Alfred de Musset, and, indeed, may be approaching French
poetry as a whole for the first time, at once retorts: “There is a man
who is depreciating one of France’s greatest writers!”
Now what I wish to convey with regard to Tourgeniev is simply this:
Firstly, that although he is and always will remain a Russian classic,
he is not, rightly or wrongly, so enthusiastically admired as he used
to be: new writers have risen since his time (not necessarily better
ones, but men who have opened windows on undreamed-of vistas); and
not only this, but one of his own contemporaries, Dostoievsky, has
been brought into a larger and clearer light of fame than he enjoyed
in his lifetime, owing to the dissipation of the mists of political
prejudices and temporary and local polemics, differences, quarrels and
controversies.
But the English reader has, as a general rule, never got farther than
Tourgeniev. He is generally quite unacquainted with the other Russian
classics; and so when it is said that there are others greater than
he--Dostoievsky and Gogol, for instance,--the English reader thinks an
attempt is being made to break a cherished and holy image. And if he
admires Tourgeniev,--which, if he likes Russian literature at all he is
almost sure to do,--it makes him angry.
Secondly, I wish to say that owing to the generally prevailing limited
view of the educated intellectual Englishman as to the field of
Russian literature as a whole, I do think he is inclined to overrate
the genius and position of Tourgeniev in Russian literature, great as
they are. There is, I think, an exaggerated cult for Tourgeniev among
intellectual Englishmen.[15] The case of Tennyson seems to me to afford
a very close parallel to that of Tourgeniev.
Mr. Gosse pointed out not long ago in a subtle and masterly article
that Tennyson, although we were now celebrating his centenary, had not
reached that moment when a poet is rapturously rediscovered by a far
younger generation than his own, but that he had reached that point
when the present generation felt no particular excitement about his
work. This seems to me the exact truth about Tourgeniev’s reputation
in Russia at the present day. Everybody has read him, and everybody
will always read him because he is a classic and because he has written
immortal things, but now, in the year 1909, there is no particular
excitement about _Fathers and Sons_ in Russia: just as now there is no
particular excitement about the “Idylls of the King” or “In Memoriam”
in England to-day. Tourgeniev has not yet been rediscovered.
Of course, there are some critics who in “the fearless old fashion” say
boldly that Tennyson’s reputation is dead; that he exists no longer,
and that we need not trouble to mention him. I read some such sweeping
pronouncement not long ago by an able journalist. There are doubtless
Russian critics who say the same about Tourgeniev. As to whether they
are right or wrong, I will not bother myself or my readers, but I do
wish to make it as clear as daylight that I myself hold no such opinion
either with regard to Tourgeniev or to Tennyson.
I believe Tennyson to have written a great quantity of immortal and
magnificently beautiful verse. I believe that Tennyson possesses an
enduring throne in the Temple of English poets. I believe Tourgeniev to
have written a great quantity of immortal and inexpressibly beautiful
prose, and I believe that he will hold an enduring seat in the Temple
of Russian literature. I think this is clear. But supposing a Russian
critic were to write on the English literature and the English taste
of the present day, and supposing he were to say, “Of course, as we
Russians all feel, there is only one English poet in the English
literature of the last hundred years, and that is Tennyson. Tennyson is
the great and only representative of English art; the only writer who
has expressed the English soul.” We should then suspect he had never
studied the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge,
Browning and Swinburne. Well, this, it seems to me, is exactly how
Tourgeniev is treated in England. All I wished to point out was that
the point of view of a Russian was necessarily different, owing to
his larger field of vision and to the greater extent and depth of his
knowledge, and to his closer communion with the work of his national
authors.
But, as I have said, it was taken for granted by some people that I
wished to show that Tourgeniev was not a classic. I will therefore, at
the risk of wearying my readers, repeat--with as much variation as I
can muster--what I consider to be some of Tourgeniev’s special claims
to enduring fame.
I have said he was a great poet; but the words seem bare and dead when
one considers the peculiar nature of the shy and entrancing poetry
that is in Tourgeniev’s work. He has the magic that water gives to the
reflected images of trees, hills and woods; he touches the ugly facts
of life, softens and transfigures them so that they lose none of their
reality, but gain a majesty and a mystery that comes from beyond the
world, just as the moonlight softens and transfigures the wrinkled
palaces and decaying porticoes of Venice, hiding what is sordid,
heightening the beauty of line, and giving a quality of magic to every
stately building, to each delicate pillar and chiselled arch.
Then there is in his work a note of wistful tenderness that steals into
the heart and fills it with an incommunicable pleasureable sadness, as
do the songs you hear in Russia on dark summer nights in the villages,
or, better still, on the broad waters of some huge silent river,--songs
aching with an ecstasy of homesickness, songs which are something
half-way between the whining sadness of Oriental music and the
rippling plaintiveness of Irish and Scotch folk-song; songs that are
imperatively melodious, but strange to us in their rhythm, constantly
changing yet subordinated to definite law, varying indeed with an
invariable law; songs whose notes, without being definitely sharp or
flat, seem a little bit higher, or a shade lower than you expect, and
in which certain notes come over and over again with an insistent
appeal, a heartbreaking iteration, and an almost intolerable pathos;
songs which end abruptly and suddenly, so that you feel that they are
meant to begin again at once and to go on for ever.
This is how Tourgeniev’s poetical quality--as manifested in his
_Sportsman’s Sketches_, his _Poems in Prose_, and in many other of
his works--strikes me. But I doubt if any one unacquainted with the
Russian language would derive such impressions, for it is above all
things Tourgeniev’s language--the words he uses and the way in which
he uses them--that is magical. Every sentence is a phrase of perfect
melody; limpid, simple and sensuous. And all this must necessarily half
disappear in a translation, however good.
But then Tourgeniev is not only a poet. He is a great novelist and
something more than a great novelist. He has recorded for all time the
atmosphere of a certain epoch. He has done for Russia what Trollope
did for England: he has exactly conveyed the atmosphere and the tone
of the fifties. The characters of Trollope and Tourgeniev are excelled
by those of other writers--and I do not mean to put Tourgeniev on
the level of Trollope, because Tourgeniev is an infinitely greater
writer and an artist of an altogether higher order--; but for giving
the general picture and atmosphere of England during the fifties, I do
not believe any one has excelled Trollope; and for giving the general
atmosphere of the fifties in Russia, of a certain class, I do not
believe any one--with the possible exception of Aksakov, the Russian
Trollope,--has excelled what Tourgeniev did in his best known books,
_Fathers and Sons_, _Virgin Soil_, and _A House of Gentlefolk_.
Then, of course, Tourgeniev has gifts of shrewd characterisation, the
power of creating delightful women, gifts of pathos and psychology, and
artistic gifts of observation and selection, the whole being always
illumined and refined by the essential poetry of his temperament, and
the magical manner in which, like an inspired conductor leading an
orchestra of delicate wood and wind instruments, he handles the Russian
language. But when it comes to judging who has interpreted more truly
Russian life as a whole, and who has gazed deepest into the Russian
soul and expressed most truly and fully what is there, then I can but
repeat that I think he falls far short of Tolstoy, in the one case,
and of Dostoievsky, in the other. Judged as a whole, I think he is far
excelled, for different reasons, by Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and by Gogol,
who surpasses him immeasurably alike in imagination, humour and truth.
I have endeavoured to explain why in various portions of this book. I
will not add anything further here, and I only hope that I have made it
sufficiently clear that although I admire other Russian writers more
than Tourgeniev, I am no image-breaker; and that although I worship
more fervently at other altars, I never for a moment intended either to
deny or to depreciate the authentic ray of divine light that burns in
Tourgeniev’s work.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See, for instance, Mr. Frank Harris in his _Shakespeare the Man:
His Tragedy_. See footnote, p. 124.
[16] The most striking instance I have come across lately of the cult
for Tourgeniev in England is in Mr. Frank Harris’ remarkable book on
Shakespeare. He illustrates his thesis that Shakespeare could not
create a manly character, by saying that Shakespeare could not have
drawn a _Bazarov_ or a _Marianna_. Leaving the thesis out of the
discussion, it is to me almost incredible that any one could think
Tourgeniev’s characters manly, compared with those of Shakespeare.
Tourgeniev played a hundred variations on the theme of the minor
Hamlet. He painted a whole gallery of little Hamlets. _Bazarov_ attains
his strength at the expense of intellectual nihilism, but he is a
neuropath compared with Mercutio. And _Bazarov_ is the only one of
Tourgeniev’s characters (and Tourgeniev’s acutest critics agree with
this,--see Brückner and Vogüé) that has strength. Tourgeniev could no
more have created a Falstaff than he could have flown. Where are these
manly characters of Tourgeniev? Who are they? Indeed a Russian critic
lately pointed out, _à propos_ of Tchekov, that the whole of Russian
politics, literature, and art, during the latter half of the nineteenth
century, suffered from the misfortune of there being so many such
Hamlets and so few Fortinbrases. I am convinced that had Mr. Harris
been a Russian, or had Tourgeniev been an Englishman, Mr. Harris would
not have held these views.