Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (476 page)

II.

M. TurgeniefFs themes are all Russian; here and there the scene of a tale is laid in another country, but the actors are genuine Muscovites. It is the Russian type of human nature that he depicts; this perplexes, fascinates, inspires him. His works savour strongly of his native soil, like those of all great novelists, and give one who has read them all a strange sense of having had a prolonged experience of Russia. We seem to have travelled there in dreams, to have dwelt there in another state of being. M. Turgenieff gives us a peculiar sense of being out of harmony with his native land — of his having what one may call a poet’s quarrel with it. He loves the old, and he is unable to see where the new is drifting. American readers will peculiarly appreciate this state of mind; if they had a native novelist of a large pattern, it would probably be, in a degree, his own. Our author feels the Russian character intensely, and cherishes, in fancy, all its old manifestations — :the unemancipated peasants, the ignorant, absolute, half - barbarous proprietors, the quaint provincial society, the local types and customs of every kind. But Russian society, like our own, is in process of formation, the Russian character is in solution, in a sea of change, and the modified, modernized Russian, with his old limitations and his new pretensions, is not, to an imagination fond of caressing the old, fixed contours, an especially grateful phenomen. A satirist at all points, as we shall have occasion to say, M. Turgenieff is particularly unsparing of the new intellectual fashions prevailing among his countrymen. The express purpose of one of his novels, “Fathers and Sons,” is to contrast them with the old; and in most of his recent works, notably “Smoke,” they have been embodied in various grotesque figures.

It was not, however, in satire, but in thoroughly genial, poetical portraiture, that our author first made his mark. “The Memoirs of a Sportsman” were published in 1852, and were regarded, says one of the two French translators of the work, as much the same sort of contribution to the question of Russian serfdom as Mrs. Stowe’s famous novel to that of American slavery. This, perhaps, is forcing a point, for M. Turgenieff’s group of tales strikes us much less as a passionate pilce de circonstance than as a disinterested work of art. But circumstances helped it, of course, and it made a great impression — an impression that testifies to no small culture on the part of Russian readers. For never, surely, was a work with a polemic bearing more consistently low in tone, as painters say. The author treats us to such a scanty dose of flagrant horrors that the moral of the book is obvious only to attentive readers. No single episode pleads conclusively against the “peculiar institution” of Russia; the lesson is in the cumulative testimony of a multitude of fine touches — in an after - sense of sadness that sets wise readers thinking. It would be difficult to name a work that contains better instruction for those heated spirits who are fond of taking sides on the question of “art for art.” It offers a capital example of moral meaning giving a sense to form and form giving relief to moral meaning. Indeed, all the author’s characteristic merits are to be found in the “Memoirs,” with a certain amateurish looseness of texture which will charm many persons who find his later works too frugal, as it were, in shape. Of all his productions, this is indeed the most purely delightful. We especially recommend the little history of Foma, the forest - keeper, who, one rainy night, when the narrator has taken refuge in his hut, hears a peasant stealing faggots in the dark, dripping woods; rushes forth and falls upon him, drags the poor wretch home, flings him into a corner, and sits on in the smoky hovel (with the author, whom we perceive there, noting, feeling, measuring it all), while the rain batters the roof and the drenched starveling howls and whines and imprecates. Anything more dismally real in a narrower compass we have never read — anything more pathetic, with less of the machinery of pathos. In this case, as at every turn with M. Turgenieff, “It is life itself,” we murmur as we read, “and not this or that or the other story - teller’s more or less clever ‘Arrangement’ of life.” M. Turg6nieff deserves this praise in its largest application; for “life” in his pages is very far from meaning a dreary liability to sordid accidents, as it seems to mean with those writers of the grimly pathetic school who cultivate sympathy to the detriment of comprehension. He does equal justice — joyous justice — to all brighter accidents — to everything in experience that helps to keep it within the pale of legend. Two of the Sportsman’s reminiscences are inexpressibly charming — the chapter in which he spends a warm summer - night lying on the grass listening to the small boys who are sent out to watch the horses at pasture, as they sit chattering to each other of hobgoblins and fairies; and the truly beautiful description of a singing - match in a village ale - house, between two ragged serfs. The latter is simply a perfect poem. Very different, but in its way as characteristic, is the story of “A Russian Hamlet” — a poor gentleman whom the Sportsman, staying overnight at a fine house where he has been dining, finds assigned to him as room - mate, and who, lying in bed and staring at him grotesquely over the sheets, relates his lugubrious history. This sketch, more than its companions, strikes the deep moral note that was to reverberate through the author’s novels.

The story of “Rudin,” which followed soon after, is perhaps the most striking example of his preference for a theme which takes its starting - point in character — if need be, in morbid character. We have had no recent opportunity to refresh our memory of the tale, but we have not forgotten the fine quality of its interest — its air of psychological truth, unencumbered with the usual psychological apparatus. The theme is one which would mean little enough to a coarse imagination — the exhibition of a character peculiarly unrounded, unmoulded, unfinished, inapt for the regular romantic attitudes. Dmitri Rudin is a moral failure, like many of the author’s heroes — one of those fatally complex natures who cost their friends so many pleasures and pains; who might, and yet, evidently, might not, do great things; natures strong in impulse, in talk, in responsive emotion, but weak in will, in action, in the power to feel and do singly. Madame Sand’s “Horace” is a broad, free study of this type of person, always so interesting to imaginative and so intolerable to rational people; M. Turgenieff’s hero is an elaborate miniature - portrait. Without reading Rudin we should not know just how fine a point he can give to his pencil. But M. Turg^nieff, with his incisive psychology, like Madame Sand, with her expansive synthesis, might often be a vain demonstrator and a very dull novelist if he were not so constantly careful to be a dramatist. Everything, with him, takes the dramatic form; he is apparently unable to conceive anything independently of it, he has no recognition of unembodied ideas; an idea, with him, is such and such an individual, with such and such a nose and chin, such and such a hat and waistcoat, bearing the same relation to it as the look of a printed word does to its meaning. Abstract possibilities immediately become, to his vision, concrete situations, as elaborately defined and localized as an interior by Meissonier. In this way, as we read, we are always looking and listening; and we seem, indeed, at moments, for want of a running thread of explanation, to see rather more than we understand.

It is, however, in “Helfene” that the author’s closely commingled realism and idealism have obtained their greatest triumph. The tale is at once a homely chronicle and a miniature epic. The scene, the figures, are as present to us as if we saw them ordered and moving on a lamp - lit stage; and yet, as we recall it, the drama seems all pervaded and coloured by the light of the moral world. There are many things in “Hellene,” and it is difficult to speak of them in order. It is both so simple and so various, it proceeds with such an earnest tread to its dark termination, and yet it entertains and beguiles us so unceasingly as it goes, that we lose sight of its simple beauty in its confounding, entrancing reality. But we prize it, as we prize all the very best things, according to our meditative after - sense of it. Then we see its lovely unity melting its brilliant parts into a single harmonious tone. The story is all in the portrait of the heroine, who is a he roine in the literal sense of the word; a young girl of a will so calmly ardent and intense that she needs nothing but opportunity to become one of the figures about whom admiring legend clusters. She is really an elevated conception; and if, as we shall complain, there is bitterness in M. Turgdnieff’s imagination, there is certainly sweetness as well. It is striking that most of his flights of fancy are in his conceptions of women. With them only, occasionally, does he wholly forswear his irony and become frankly sympathetic. We hope it is not false ethnology to suppose that this is a sign of something, potentially at least, very fine in the character of his country - women. As fine a poet as you will would hardly have devised a Maria Alexandrovna (in “A Correspondence,”) an Hel6ne, a Lisa, a Tatiana, an Irene even, without having known some very admirable women. These ladies have a marked family likeness, an exquisite something in common which we may perhaps best designate as an absence of frivolous passion. They are addicted to none of those chatteries which French romancers consider the “ adorable “ thing in women. The baleful beauty, in “Smoke,” who robs Tatiana of her lover, acts in obedience to an impulse deeper than vulgar coquetry. And yet these fair Muscovites have a spontaneity, an independence, quite akin to the English ideal of maiden loveliness. Directly, superficially, they only half please. They puzzle us almost too much to charm, and we fully measure their beauty only when they are called upon to act. Then the author imagines them doing the most touching, the most inspiring things.

Heine’s loveliness is all in unswerving action. She passes before us toward her mysterious end with the swift, keen movement of a feathered arrow. She finds her opportunity, as we have called it, in her sympathy with a young Bulgarian patriot who dreams of rescuing his country from Turkish tyranny; and she surrenders herself to his love and his project with a tranquil passion which loses none of its poetry in M. Turgenieffs treatment. She is a supreme example of his taste for “original” young ladies. She would certainly be pronounced queer in most quiet circles. She has, indeed, a fascinating oddity of outline; and we never lose a vague sense that the author is presenting her to us with a charmed expectancy of his own, as a travelled friend would show us some quaintly - feathered bird brought from beyond the seas, but whose note he had not yet heard. To appreciate Heine’s oddity, you must read of the orthodoxy of the people who surround her. All about the central episode the story fades away into illimitable irony, as if the author wished to prove that, compared with the deadly seriousness of Hel£ne and Inssaroff, everything else is indeed a mere playing at life. We move among the minor episodes in a kind of atmosphere of sarcasm: now kindly, as where Bersenieff and Schubin are dealt with; now unsparingly comical, as in the case of her foolish parents and their tardy bewilderment — that of loquacious domestic fowls who find themselves responsible for the hatching of an eagle. The whole story is charged with lurking meanings, and to retail them would be as elaborate a task as picking threads out of a piece of fine tapestry. What is Mademoiselle Zoe, for instance, the little German dame de compagnie, but a humorous sidelight upon Heine’s intensity — Mademoiselle Zoe, with the pretty shoulders and her presence in the universe a sort of mere general rustle of muslin, accompanied, perhaps, by a faint toilet - perfume? There is nothing finer in all Turgenieff than the whole matter of Bersenieff’s and Schubin’s relation to H616ne. They, too, in their vivid reality, have a symbolic value, as they stand watching the woman they equally love whirled away from them in a current swifter than any force of their own. Schubin, the young sculptor, with his moods and his theories, his exaltations and depressions, his endless talk and his disjointed action, is a deeply ingenious image of the artistic temperament. Yet, after all, he strikes the practical middle key, and solves the problem of life by the definite application of what he can. Bersenieff, though a less fanciful, is perhaps, at bottom, a still more poetical figure. He is condemned to inaction, not by his intellectual fastidiousness, but by a conscious, intelligent, intellectual mediocrity, by the dogged loyalty of his judgment. There is something in his history more touching than even in that of Heline and Inssaroff. These two, and Schubin as well, have their consolations. If they are born to suffering, they are born also to rapture. They stand at the open door of passion, and they can sometimes forget. But poor Bersenieff, wherever he turns, meets conscience with uplifted finger, saying to him that though Homer may sometimes nod, the sane man never misreasons and the wise man assents to no mood that is not a working mood. He has not even the satisfaction of lodging a complaint against fate. He is by no means sure that he has one; and when he finds that his love is vain he translates it into friendship with a patient zeal capable almost of convincing his own soul that it is not a renunciation, but a consummation. Bersenieff, Schubin, Zoe, Uvar Ivano - vitsch, the indigent house - friend, with his placid depths of unuttered commentary, the pompous egotist of a father, the feeble egotist of a mother — these people thoroughly animate the little world that surrounds the central couple; and if we wonder how it is that from half a dozen figures we get such a sense of the world’s presence and complexity, we perceive the great sagacity of the choice of the types.

We should premise, in speaking of “A Nest of Noblemen” (the English translation bears, we believe, the simple title of “Lisa”), that of the two novels it was the earlier published. It dates from 1858; “Hdltoe” from 1859. The theme is an unhappy marriage and an unhappy love. Fedor Ivanovitsch Lavretzky marries a pretty young woman, and after three years of confident bliss finds himself grossly deceived. He separates from his wife, returns from Paris, where his eyes have been unsealed, to Russia, and, in the course of time, retires to his patrimonial estates. Here, after the pain of his wound has ached itself away and the health and strength of life’s prime have reaffirmed themselves, he encounters a young girl whom he comes at last to love with the double force of a tender heart that longs to redeem itself from bitterness. He receives news of his wife’s death, and immediately presumes upon his freedom to express his passion. The young girl listens, responds, and for a few brief days they are happy. But the report of Madame Lavretzky’s death has been, as the newspapers say, premature; she suddenly reappears, to remind her husband of his bondage and to convict Lisa almost of guilt. The pathetic force of the story lies, naturally, in its taking place in a country unfurnished with the modern facilities for divorce. Lisa and Lavretzky of course must part. Madame Lavretzky lives and blooms. Lisa goes into a convent, and her lover, defrauded of happiness, determines at least to try and be useful. He ploughs his fields and instructs his serfs. After the lapse of years he obtains entrance into her convent and catches a glimpse of her as she passes behind a grating, on her way across the chapel. She knows of his presence, but she does not even look at him; the trembling of her downcast lids alone betrays her sense of it. “What must they both have thought, have felt?” asks the author. “Who can know? who can say? There are moments in life, there are feelings, on which we can only cast a glance without stopping.” With an unanswered question his story characteristically closes. The husband, the wife, and the lover — the wife, the husband, and the woman loved — these are combinations in which modern fiction has been prolific; but M. Turgenieff’s treatment renews the youth of the well - worn fable. He has found its moral interest, if we may take the distinction, deeper than its sentimental one; a pair of lovers accepting adversity seem to him more eloquent than a pair of lovers grasping at happiness. The moral of his tale, as we are free to gather it, is that there is no effective plotting for happiness, that we must take what we can get, that adversity is a capable mill - stream, and that our ingenuity must go toward making it grind our corn. Certain it is that there is something very exquisite in Lavretzky’s history, and that M. Turgenieff has drawn from a theme associated with all manner of lincleanness a story embalmed in an aroma of purity This purity, indeed, is but a pervasive emanation from the character of Lisaveta Michailovna. American readers of Turgenieff have been struck with certain points of resemblance between American and Russian life. The resemblance is generally superficial; but it does not seem to us altogether fanciful to say that Russian young girls, as represented by Lisa, Tatiana, Maria Alexandrovna, have to our sense a touch of the faintly acrid perfume of the New England temperament — a hint of Puritan angularity. It is the women and young girls in our author’s tales who mainly represent strength of will — the power to resist, to wait, to attain. Lisa represents it in all that heroic intensity which says so much more to M. Turgenieff’s imagination than feline grace. The character conspicuous in the same tale for feline grace — Varvara Pavlovna, Lavretzky’s heardess wife — is conspicuous also for her moral flimsiness. In the integrity of Lisa, of H61£ne, even of the more dimly shadowed Maria Alexandrovna — a sort of finer distillation, as it seems, of masculine honour — there is something almost formidable : the strongest men are less positive in their strength. In the keenly pathetic scene in which Marfa Timofievna (the most delightful of the elderly maiden aunts of fiction) comes to Lisa in her room and implores her to renounce her project of entering a convent, we feel that there are depths of purpose in the young girl’s deferential sweetness that nothing in the world can overcome. She is intensely religious, as she ought to be for psychological truth, and nothing could more effectually disconnect her from the usual inginue of romance than our sense of the naturalness of her religious life. Her love for Lavretzky is a passion in its essence half renunciation. The first use she makes of the influence with him which his own love gives her is to try and reconcile him with his wife; and her foremost feeling, on learning that the latter is not dead, as they had believed, is an irremissible sense of pollution. The dusky, antique consciousness of sin in this tender, virginal soul is a combination which we seem somehow to praise amiss in calling it picturesque, but which it would be still more inexact to call didactic. Lisa is altogether a most remarkable portrait, and one that readers of the heroine’s own sex ought to contemplate with some complacency. They have been known to complain on the one hand that romancers abuse them, and on the other that they insufferably patronise them. Here is a picture drawn with all the tenderness of a lover, and yet with an indefinable — an almost unprecedented — respect. In this tale, as always with our author, the drama is quite uncommented; the poet never plays chorus; situations speak for themselves. When Lavretzky reads in the chronique of a French newspaper that his wife is dead, there is no description of his feelings, no portrayal of his mental attitude. The living, moving narrative has so effectually put us in the way of feeling with him that we can be depended upon. He had been reading in bed before going to sleep, had taken up the paper and discovered the momentous paragraph. He “threw himself into his clothes,” the author simply says, “went out into the garden, and walked up and down till morning in the same alley.” We close the book for a moment and pause, with a sense of personal excitement. But of M. Turgenieff’s genius for infusing a rich suggestiveness into common forms, the character of Gottlieb Lemm, the melancholy German music - master, is a perhaps surpassing example. Never was homely truth more poetical; never was poetry more minutely veracious.