We hold to the good old belief that the presumption, in life, is in
favor of the brighter side, and we deem it, in art, an indispensable
condition of our interest in a deprest observer that he should have at
least tried his best to be cheerful. The truth, we take it, lies for
the pathetic in poetry and romance very much where it lies for the
"immoral." Morbid pathos is reflective pathos; ingenious pathos,
pathos not freshly born of the occasion; noxious immorality is
superficial immorality, immorality without natural roots in the
subject. We value most the "realists" who have an ideal of delicacy
and the elegiasts who have an ideal of joy.
[Footnote 67: From "French Poets and Novelists," published by
Macmillan & Company, of London.]
"Picturesque gloom, possibly," a thick and thin admirer of M.
Turgeneff's may say to us, "at least you will admit that it is
picturesque." This we heartily concede, and, recalled to a sense of
our author's brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our
restrictions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his
imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, or, indeed,
for that matter, to its simple intensity and fecundity. No romancer
has created a greater number of the figures that breathe and move and
speak, in their habits as they might have lived; none, on the whole,
seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in portraiture, none
has mingled so much ideal beauty with so much unsparing reality. His
sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element
of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and
pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but
rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant;
wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people
of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it
stands is no illusion, no fantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake
up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it
nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give
it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to
pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the
volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight,
but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids
us learn to will and seek to understand.
So much as this we seem to decipher between the lines of M.
Turgeneff's minutely written chronicle. He himself has sought to
understand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. He gives, at
least, no meager account of life, and he has done liberal justice to
its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect,
roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains,
nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator between the world
and our curiosity. If we had space, we should like to set forth that
he is by no means our ideal story-teller--this honorable genius
possessing, attributively, a rarer skill than the finest required for
producing an artful _rechauffe_ of the actual. But even for better
romancers we must wait for a better world. Whether the world in its
higher state of perfection will occasionally offer color to scandal,
we hesitate to pronounce; but we are prone to conceive of the ultimate
novelist as a personage altogether purged of sarcasm. The imaginative
force now expended in this direction he will devote to describing
cities of gold and heavens of sapphire. But, for the present, we
gratefully accept M. Turgeneff, and reflect that his manner suits the
most frequent mood of the greater number of readers. If he were a
dogmatic optimist we suspect that, as things go, we should long ago
have ceased to miss him from our library. The personal optimism of
most of us no romancer can confirm or dissipate, and our personal
troubles, generally, place fictions of all kinds in an impertinent
light. To our usual working mood the world is apt to seem M.
Turgeneff's hard world, and when, at moments, the strain and the
pressure deepen, the ironical element figures not a little in our form
of address to those short-sighted friends who have whispered that it
is an easy one.