Why we should read Part 31

VI

TURGENEV (1816-1883)

In Edward Garnett's admirable book on Turgenev Conrad lays his finger with unerring accuracy on the crux of the whole problem with regard to him when he says that we are apt to belittle a consummate artist who is quiet when we compare him with a t.i.tanic, restless genius like Dostoievsky. It is like comparing Jane Austen with Victor Hugo.

Incidentally Mr Garnett's book loses much of its value owing to his repeated endeavour to show Turgenev's superiority over Dostoievsky.

As a matter of fact, there is no comparison possible.

Turgenev came of n.o.ble birth and began by writing verse, but soon found his proper _metier_ in prose.

For two years he was exiled to his country estate for his quite harmless defence of Gogol. After this term was over he left Russia for Baden and Paris, which accounts to some extent for his aloofness from the problems which perturbed his countrymen, and makes him more a Cosmopolitan than National, like Dostoievsky. His five great novels, _Rudin_, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, _On the Eve_, _Fathers and Sons_ and _Smoke_, all appeared in the eleven years between 1856 and 1867 and he was at once appraised by all European critics, who discovered in him Russia for the first time, and the Russian woman in particular. His popularity at home was impaired on the publication of _Fathers and Sons_, because the revolutionaries saw in Bazarov, the hero, only calumny and a libel, whereas the reactionary party looked on the book as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he fell between two stools. In Europe, however, he gained larger and larger audiences, until an admiration for his work became the hall-mark of good taste.

But to-day Turgenev holds his own even in his own country, for his exquisite style, the majesty of his poetry and the sureness of his characterisation. Baring finds a parallel to Turgenev in this country in Tennyson, in that they are both Mid-Victorian, both shut off from the world by the trees of old parks; but Major Baring, as it seems to me, is fair to neither genius.

For Turgenev has an amazing insight into men's motives and actions which we do not commonly a.s.sociate with those who are shut off from the world.

Rudin is a picture of a type that peculiarly appealed to Turgenev, the Hamlet type of man who can only unpack his heart with words, but breaks down when he is asked to translate his theories into action: he is pa.s.sionately devoted to Liberty in his eloquent talk and makes Natasha, the daughter of the house in which he is staying, fall madly in love with him and persuade herself that she is ready to fly with him, but he, whose love is more that of the intellect than the heart, fails her and tells her to submit.

He is eventually killed in '48 on a barricade in Paris. In the epilogue we get his character beautifully unfolded to us.

"'I know him well,' continued Lezhneff, 'I am aware of his faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small scale.'

"'His is a character of genius!' cried Ba.s.sistoff.

"'Genius very likely he has!' replied Lezhneff, 'but as for character ... That's just his misfortune: there's no force of character in him....

But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sasha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in his blood--that is not his fault--and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use, that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom Nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. Sasha knows what Rudin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that Rudin's words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man's eloquence, and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man's ear, happily, is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation he will supply for himself!'

"'Bravo, bravo!' cried Ba.s.sistoff, 'that is justly spoken! And as regards Rudin's influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how to move you, he lifts you up; he does not let you stand still, he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire!'"

In _A n.o.bleman's Retreat_ we find a man, Lavretsiy by name, separated from his wife, who meets a good, honest girl, by name Liza: they fall in love with one another: for a moment they are led to believe that his wife is dead, but she reappears and Liza goes to a convent.

But it is in the next two novels, _On the Eve_ and _Fathers and Sons_, that we see Turgenev at his best.

_On the Eve_ is a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the Russia of the fifties.

The central figure of the novel is Elena, who comes near to being the most completely successful heroine in all fiction. We know her through and through, and she is, as are all Turgenev's heroines, well worth knowing. "Her strength of will, her serious, courageous, proud soul, her capacity for pa.s.sion, all the play of her delicate idealistic nature troubled by the contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness that the dawn of love brings to her, all this is conveyed to us by the simplest and the most consummate art." Her confession (in her diary) of her discovery that she loved the Bulgarian Insarov is in itself an amazing revelation of the working of a young girl's heart. Every side of her nature is shown us. We see her from her father's point of view, which is contemptuous; from her mother's, which is that of affectionate bewilderment; from one of her lovers (Shubin's), which is petulantly critical; from another of her lovers (Bevsenyev's), which is halfhearted enthralment; from Insarov's, which recognises her greatness of soul and sincerity of purpose.

Turgenev's magnificent clear-sightedness never manifests itself so sustainedly as in this book. Not only does each of the characters breathe and move and live from the first page, but politically too the author precisely hits off with his pen the Russian temperament. Of all the great Russian writers he is the least diffuse, the most of an artist. He is, after all, as he himself confessed, not so much a Russian as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe, and it is his mission to stand aloof and describe with absolute impartiality the various types that come before his eye without seeking to make his puppets conform to his own ideas or using them as a peg on which to hang a thesis of his own.

The foundation of his art lies in his portraits of women. Pure, virginal, heroic, self-sacrificing, boundless in their love and devotion to a man or cause, they form a gallery worthy to be set by the side of Shakespeare's and Meredith's heroines. They are very flesh and blood, very woman, and yet altogether fascinating, adorable, steadfast, superbly endowed with all the gifts that make for n.o.bility of soul.

Over the creation of these Turgenev showed himself to be deeply sensitive, responsive to all that is best in the feminine mind, of shrewd insight, unfailingly generous, absolutely sane and level-headed.

So perfect is his sense of balance, so consummate his artistry, that his work has been unduly depreciated by some critics: they do not easily forgive perfection of form, absolute harmony of style, a sense of proportion so exquisitely poised as his.

He reminds us again of Meredith in his highly intellectual conception as in his portraits of women. He became almost uncannily prophetic in his utterances about the educated cla.s.ses and their ideals.

He is so interested in characterisation that he needs no incidents to show the growth of his characters: indeed we are almost taken aback by such a dramatic situation as that of the drunken German being thrown into the lake by Insarov. We feel that the play of character upon character is enough, without fortuitous circ.u.mstances of this sort ...

but there is never anything repulsively inartistic in his work.

He is melancholy, and there is a strain of sadness throughout all Turgenev's work, but he is restrained: he never gives way to his emotions. He loves mankind even though he is clear-sighted with regard to his failings. As a philosopher he sees no reason to trust in man nor to think much of him: particularly does he lament the absence of men in Russia.

"'O great philosopher of the Russian world!' says Shubin to Uvar Ivanovitch, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose: one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength!...

"'We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere--either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful detail and are for ever feeling the pulse of every sensation and reporting to themselves: "That's what I feel, that's what I think." A useful, rational occupation! When will our time be? When will men be born among us?'"

This is not the man to flatter where praise is not deserved. He rather realises than idealises, and that is why it is so exhilarating and refreshing to come into contact with his women, for we can be sure that he paints as he sees and not as he would wish to see. He believes in his women and makes us believe in them. Stranger still is the discovery that he always draws from 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, on whom the various elements were harmonised together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly." To such purpose did he do this in _Fathers and Sons_ that he roused hostility of so savage a nature that he never afterwards became popular in Russia during his lifetime. On the other hand, "I received congratulations," he said, "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."

The type which he here speaks of is, of course, the Nihilist, Bazarov.

His readers were swayed by party pa.s.sion and consequently were unable to accept the portrait as a work of art. The fast-increasing antipathy between the old and new made the reactionaries, who hailed in this novel the picture of the insidious revolutionary ideas current in young Russia, ironically congratulate the former champion of Liberalism on his penetration and honesty in unmasking the Nihilist: the younger generation saw only a caricature of itself. "The whole ground of the misunderstanding," wrote Turgenev, "lay in the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pa.s.s through the usual phases. At the very moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as well as a new type I introduced.... The reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist to entertain."

And what is Bazarov? Let us listen again to Turgenev: "I dreamed of a sombre, savage and great figure, only half emerged from barbarism, strong, mechant, and honest, and nevertheless doomed to perish because it is always in advance of the future."

Mr Garnett calls him the bare mind of Science first applied to politics.

His watchword is not "Negation," as all his critics averred, but Reality.

His creator, whose first and last words to young writers was, "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations," was driven to confess that he shared all Bazarov's convictions except those on Art. He stands at the dividing-line between the religion of the Past which is Faith and that of the future which is Science. His savage egoism is necessary if he is to break away from all the old laws and customs that men held sacred. His aversion from Art and Poetry is simply due to his refusal to be hoodwinked by glamour. The Englishman sees in him merely the quintessence of bad form, bad taste, bad manners and colossal conceit, but in reality he stands for Humanity awakened from age-old superst.i.tions, Aggression, destroyed in his destroying: he must needs stand alone, and delights in doing so. Despising honour, success, public opinion, he allows nothing, not even love, to come between him and his fixity of purpose.

He towers above all the other people in the novel. If there still remain any who have so far held out against the fascination and consummate mastery of Turgenev, I would ask them to turn again to the twenty-seventh chapter of _Fathers and Sons_ and read aloud the account of Bazarov's last hours. Anything more poignant, more simple and yet more effective than the last scene of the parents at the grave does not exist: there Turgenev in one stroke epitomises the infinite aspiration, the eternal insignificance of the life of man.

So quietly does the artist work that hasty readers fail to realise his greatness after the storm and stress of Dostoievsky or the t.i.tanic canvases of Tolstoy: he lacked exuberance: his men are, Hamlet-like, unable to make mouths at the invisible event, ineffectual, their native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought--it is left to his women to be independent, to know their own minds, to be courageous, pure, crystal-clear, simple, strong, no longer mere s.e.xual incidents in a man's life, but helping companions. In his love of language and his power of making us breathe the air of his landscapes he affords an interesting parallel to Tennyson: we find an echo of him in Elena's diary: "To be good is not enough: to do good--yes, that is the great thing in life."

But where he is most himself and most a genius is in his wonderful capacity for making his characters all reveal themselves in the ordinary details of daily life.

VII

GONCHAROV (1812-1891)

Goncharov is important from the English point of view through one book alone. But this novel, _Oblmov_, far transcends in value many far more famous books that we should do better to leave unread until we have appreciated this most Russian of the Russian works of art.

Oblmov, the hero of the novel, is a n.o.bleman whose main characteristic is lack of initiative, due primarily to the indolence caused by riches.

"'From my earliest childhood,'" Oblmov asks, "'have I myself ever put on my socks?'"

We see him first in his lodgings in Petrograd in bed: he is too lazy to get up. Not that he lacked interest in life.

"The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him," Goncharov writes; "the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere far away--probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves into decisions.... Moved by a moral force, he would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ...

the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism, and then, what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect from so great an effort! But--the morning would pa.s.s away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline towards rest--the storms in his soul would subside--his head would shake off the worrying thoughts--his blood would circulate more slowly in his veins--and Oblomoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back; looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring house--and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that sunset!"

His landlord wishes him to change his lodgings while his rooms are put into repair. He is terrified at the prospect of going through the trouble of moving.

Later he meets a young girl called Olga, in some ways curiously reminiscent of Turgenev's heroines. She devotes herself to the cause of curing Oblmov, with whom she falls in love, of his laziness. She tries by every means in her power to rouse him to exert himself in art and literature. At first she seems to succeed: they are about to marry: but his slackness comes over him again; he cannot even take the first necessary steps.

He sinks back into his life of dressing gown and slippers in spite of Olga's splendid efforts to make a man of him. In the end she is compelled to give up the struggle to reform him, and in a parting scene which is as good as anything I know of its kind she describes the sort of life they would lead if she acquiesced in his desires.