CHAPTER IVTOLSTOY AND TOURGENIEV

The eightieth birthday of Count Tolstoy, which was celebrated in Russia on August 28 (old style), 1908, was closely followed by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Tourgeniev, who died on September 3, 1883, at the age of sixty-five. These two anniversaries followed close upon the publication of a translation into English of the complete works of Count Tolstoy by Professor Wiener; and it is not long ago that a new edition of the complete works of Tourgeniev, translated into English by Mrs. Garnett, appeared. Both these translations have been made with great care, and are faithful and accurate. Thirty years ago it is certain that European critics, and probable that Russian critics, would have observed, in commenting on the concurrence of these two events, that Tolstoy and Tourgeniev were the two giants of modern Russian literature. Is the case the sameto-day? Is it still true that, in the opinion of Russia and of Europe, the names of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev stand pre-eminently above all their contemporaries?

With regard to Tolstoy the question can be answered without the slightest hesitation. Time, which has inflicted such mournful damage on so many great reputations in the last twenty-five years, has not only left the fame of Tolstoy’s masterpieces unimpaired, but has increased our sense of their greatness. The question arises, whose work forms the complement to that of Tolstoy, and shares his undisputed dominion of modern Russian literature? Is it Tourgeniev? In Russia at the present day the answer would be “No,” it is not Tourgeniev. And in Europe, students of Russian literature who are acquainted with the Russian language—as we see in M. Emile Haumant’s study of Tourgeniev’s life and work, and in Professor Brückner’s history of Russian literature—would also answer in the negative, although their denial would be less emphatic and not perhaps unqualified.

The other giant, the complement of Tolstoy, almost any Russian critic of the present day without hesitation would pronounce to be Dostoievsky; and the foreign critic who is thoroughly acquainted with Dostoievsky’s work cannot butagree with him. I propose to go more fully into the question of the merits and demerits of Dostoievsky later on; but it is impossible not to mention him here, because the very existence of his work powerfully affects our judgment when we come to look at that of his contemporaries. We can no more ignore his presence and his influence than we could ignore the presence of a colossal fresco by Leonardo da Vinci in a room in which there were only two other religious pictures, one by Rembrandt and one by Vandyck. For any one who is familiar with Dostoievsky, and has felt his tremendous influence, cannot look at the work of his contemporaries with the same eyes as before. To such a one, the rising of Dostoievsky’s red and troubled planet, while causing the rays of Tourgeniev’s serene star to pale, leaves the rays of Tolstoy’s orb undiminished and undimmed. Tolstoy and Dostoievsky shine in the firmament of Russian literature like two planets, one of them as radiant as the planet Jupiter, the other as ominous as the planet Mars. Beside either of these the light of Tourgeniev twinkles, pure indeed, and full of pearly lustre, like the moon faintly seen in the east at the end of an autumnal day.

It is rash to make broad generalisations.They bring with them a certain element of exaggeration which must be discounted. Nevertheless I believe that I am stating a fundamental truth in saying that the Russian character can, roughly speaking, be divided into two types, and these two types dominate the whole of Russian literature. The first is that which I shall call, for want of a better name, Lucifer, the fallen angel. The second type is that of the hero of all Russian folk-tales, Ivan Durak, Ivan the Fool, or the Little Fool. There are innumerable folk-tales in Russian which tell the adventures of Ivan the Fool, who, by his very simplicity and foolishness, outwits the wisdom of the world. This type is characteristic of one Russian ideal. The simple fool is venerated in Russia as something holy. It is acknowledged that his childish innocence is more precious than the wisdom of the wise. Ivan Durak may be said to be the hero of all Dostoievsky’s novels. He is the aim and ideal of Dostoievsky’s life, an aim and ideal which he fully achieves. He is also the aim and ideal of Tolstoy’s teaching, but an aim and ideal which Tolstoy recommends to others and only partly achieves himself.

The first type I have called, for want of a better name, since I can find no concrete symbol of it in Russian folk-lore, Lucifer, the fallen angel. This type is the embodiment of stubborn andobdurate pride, the spirit which cannot bend; such is Milton’s Satan, with his

“Courage never to submit or yield,And what is else not to be overcome.”

This type is also widely prevalent in Russia, although it cannot be said to be a popular type, embodied, like Ivan the Fool, in a national symbol. One of the most striking instances of this, the Lucifer type, which I have come across, was a peasant called Nazarenko, who was a member of the first Duma. He was a tall, powerfully built, rugged-looking man, spare and rather thin, with clear-cut prominent features, black penetrating eyes, and thick black tangled hair. He looked as if he had stepped out of a sacred picture by Velasquez. This man had the pride of Lucifer. There was at that time, in July 1905, an Inter-parliamentary Congress sitting in London. Five delegates of the Russian Duma were chosen to represent Russia. It was proposed that Nazarenko should represent the peasants. I asked him once if he were going. He answered:

“I shan’t go unless I am unanimously chosen by the others. I have written down my name and asked, but I shall not ask twice. I never ask twice for anything. When I say my prayers, I only ask God once for a thing, and if it is not granted, I never ask again. So it is not likelyI would ask my fellow-men twice for anything. I am like that. I leave out that passage in the prayers about being a miserable slave. I am not a miserable slave, either of man or of Heaven.”

Such a man recognises no authority, human or divine. Indeed he not only refuses to acknowledge authority, but it will be difficult for him to admire or bow down to any of those men or ideas which the majority have agreed to believe worthy of admiration, praise, or reverence.

Now, while Dostoievsky is the incarnation of the first type, of Ivan the Fool, Tolstoy is the incarnation of the second. It is true that, at a certain stage of his career, Tolstoy announced to the world that the ideal of Ivan Durak was the only ideal worth following. He perceives this aim with clearness, and, in preaching it, he has made a multitude of disciples; the only thing he has never been able to do is to make the supreme submission, the final surrender, and to become the type himself.

We know everything about Tolstoy, not only from the biographical writings of Fet and Behrs, but from his own autobiography, his novels, and hisConfession. He gives us a panorama of events down to the smallest detail of his long career, as well as of every phase of feeling, andevery shade and mood of his spiritual existence. The English reader who wishes to be acquainted with all the important facts of Tolstoy’s material and spiritual life cannot do better than readMr.Aylmer Maude’sLife of Tolstoy, which compresses into one well-planned and admirably executed volume all that is of interest during the first fifty years of Tolstoy’s career. In reading this book a phrase of Tourgeniev’s occurs to one. “Man is the same, from the cradle to the grave.” Tolstoy had been called inconsistent; but the student of his life and work, far from finding inconsistency, will rather be struck by the unvarying and obstinate consistency of his ideas. Here, for instance, is an event recorded in Tolstoy’sConfession(p. 1):

“I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy, Vladimir Miliutin, long since dead, visited us one Sunday, and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. The discovery was that there is no God at all, and all we are taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council, and we all, I remember, became animated, and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible.”

There is already the germ of the man who was afterwards to look with such independent eyes onthe accepted beliefs and ideas of mankind, to play havoc with preconceived opinions, and to establish to his own satisfaction whether what was true for others was true for himself or not. Later he says:

“I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. Before I left the university, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed anything I had been taught.”[7]

A Russian writer, M. Kurbski, describes how, when he first met Tolstoy, he was overwhelmed by the look in Tolstoy’s eyes. They were more than eyes, he said; they were like electric searchlights, which penetrated into the depths of your mind, and, like a photographic lens, seized and retained for ever a positive picture. In hisChildhood and Youth, Tolstoy gives us the most vivid, the most natural, the most sensitive picture of childhood and youth that has ever been penned by the hand of man. And yet, after reading it, one is left half-unconsciously with the impression that the author feels there is something wrong, something unsatisfactory behind it all.

Tolstoy then passes on to describe the life of agrown-up man, inThe Morning of a Landowner, in which he tells how he tried to work in his own home, on his property, and to teach the peasants, and how nothing came of his experiments. And again we have the feeling of something unsatisfactory, and something wanting, something towards which the man is straining, and which escapes him.

A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man himself is more natural. And then we haveThe Cossacks, in which Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he has not found.

In 1854, Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War, which supplied him with the stuff for what are perhaps the most truthful pictures of war that have ever been written. But even here, we feel he has not yet found his heart’s desire. Something is wrong. He was recommended for the St. George’s Cross, but owing to his being without some necessary official document at the time of his recommendation, he failed to receive it. This incident is a symbol of the greater failure, the failure to achieve the inward happinessthat he is seeking—a solid ground to tread on, a bridge to the infinite, a final place of peace. In his private diary there is an entry made at the commencement of the war, while he was at Silistria, which runs as follows:

“I have no modesty; that is my great defect.... I am ugly, awkward, uncleanly, and lack society education. I am irritable, a bore to others, not modest; intolerant, and as shamefaced as a child.... I am almost an ignoramus. What I do know I have learnt anyhow, by myself, in snatches, without sequence, without a plan, and it amounts to very little. I am incontinent, undecided, inconstant, and stupidly vain and vehement, like all characterless people. I am not brave.... I am clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on anything.... I am honest; that is to say, I love goodness.... There is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that, should I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose the former. Yes, I am not modest, and therefore I am proud at heart, shamefaced, and shy in society.”

At the time that Tolstoy wrote this he was a master, asMr.Aylmer Maude points out, of the French and German languages, besides having some knowledge of English, Latin, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar. He had published stories whichhad caused the editors of the best Russian magazines to offer him the rate of pay accorded to the best-known writers. Therefore his discontent with his position, both intellectual and social, was in reality quite unfounded.

After the Crimean War, Tolstoy went abroad. He found nothing in Western Europe to satisfy him. On his return he settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, and married; and the great patriarchal phase of his life began, during which every gift and every happiness that man can be blessed with seemed to have fallen to his lot. It was then that he wroteWar and Peace, in which he describes the conflict between one half of Europe and the other. He takes one of the largest canvases ever attacked by man; and he writes a prose epic on a period full of tremendous events. His piercing glance sees through all the fictions of national prejudice and patriotic bias; and he gives us what we feel to be the facts as they were, the very truth. No detail is too small for him, no catastrophe too great. He traces the growth of the spreading tree to its minute seed, the course of the great river to its tiny source. He makes a whole vanished generation of public and private men live before our eyes in such a way that it is difficult to believe that these people are not a part of our actual experience; and that his creationsare not men and women we have seen with our own eyes, and whose voices we have heard with our own ears.

But when we put down this wonderful book, unequalled as a prose epic, as a panorama of a period and a gallery of a thousand finished portraits, we are still left with the impression that the author has not yet found what he is seeking. He is still asking why? and wherefore? What does it all mean? why all these horrors, why these sacrifices? Why all this conflict and suffering of nations? What do these high deeds, this heroism, mean? What is the significance of these State problems, and the patriotic self-sacrifice of nations? We are aware that the soul of Tolstoy is alone in an awful solitude, and that it is shivering on the heights, conscious that all round it is emptiness, darkness and despair.

Again, inWar and Peacewe are conscious that Tolstoy’s proud nature, the “Lucifer” type in him, is searching for another ideal; and that in the character of Pierre Bezuhov he is already setting up before us the ideal of Ivan Durak as the model which we should seek to imitate. And in Pierre Bezuhov we feel that there is something of Tolstoy himself. Manners change, but man, faced by the problem of life, is the same throughout all ages; and, whether consciously or unconsciously, Tolstoy proves this in writingAnnaKarenina. Here again, on a large canvas, we see unrolled before us the contemporary life of the upper classes in Russia, in St. Petersburg, and in the country, with the same sharpness of vision, which seizes every outward detail, and reveals every recess of the heart and mind. Nearly all characters in all fiction seem bookish beside those of Tolstoy. His men and women are so real and so true that, even if his psychological analysis of them may sometimes err and go wrong from its oversubtlety and its desire to explain too much, the characters themselves seem to correct this automatically, as though they were independent of their creator. He creates a character and gives it life. He may theorise on a character, just as he might theorise on a person in real life; and he may theorise wrong, simply because sometimes no theorising is necessary, and the very fact of a theory being set down in words may give a false impression; but, as soon as the character speaks and acts, it speaks and acts in the manner which is true to itself, and corrects the false impression of the theory, just as though it were an independent person over whom the author had no control.

Nearly every critic, at least nearly every English critic,[8]in dealing withAnna Karenina, has found fault with the author for the character of Vronsky.Anna Karenina, they say, could never have fallen in love with such an ordinary commonplace man. Vronsky, one critic has said (in a brilliant article), is only a glorified “Steerforth.” The answer to this is that if you go to St. Petersburg or to London, or to any other town you like to mention, you will find that the men with whom the Anna Kareninas of this world fall in love are precisely the Vronskys, and no one else, for the simple reason that Vronsky is a man. He is not a hero, and he is not a villain; he is not what people call “interesting,” but a man, as masculine as Anna is feminine, with many good qualities and many limitations, but above all things alive. Nearly every novelist, with the exception of Fielding, ends, in spite of himself, by placing his hero either above or beneath the standard of real life. There are many Vronskys to-day in St. Petersburg, and for the matter of that,mutatis mutandis, in London. But no novelist except Tolstoy has ever had the power to put this simple thing, an ordinary man, into a book. Put one of Meredith’s heroes next to Vronsky, and Meredith’s hero will appear like a figure dressed up for a fancy-dress ball. Put one of Bourget’s heroes next to him, with all his psychological documents attached to him, and, in spite of all the analysis in the world, side by side with Tolstoy’s human being he will seem but a plaster-cast. Yet, allthe time, inAnna Kareninawe feel, as inWar and Peace, that the author is still unsatisfied and hungry, searching for something he has not yet found; and once again, this time in still sharper outline and more living colours, he paints an ideal of simplicity which is taking us towards Ivan Durak in the character of Levin. Into this character, too, we feel that Tolstoy has put a great deal of himself; and that Levin, if he is not Tolstoy himself, is what Tolstoy would like to be. But the loneliness and the void that are round Tolstoy’s mind are not yet filled; and in that loneliness and in that void we are sharply conscious of the brooding presence of despair, and the power of darkness.

We feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark; that to him there is something wrong in the whole of human life, a radical mistake. He is conscious that, with all his genius, he has only been able to record the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same time, that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found, nor in what it consists. It is at this moment that the crisis occurred in Tolstoy’s life which divides it outwardly into two sections, although it constitutes no break in his inward evolution. Thefear of the dark, of the abyss yawning in front of him, was so strong that he felt he must rid himself of it at all costs.

“I felt terror” (he writes) “of what was awaiting me, though I knew that this terror was more terrible than my position itself; I could not wait patiently for the end; my horror of the darkness was too great, and I felt I must rid myself of it as soon as possible by noose or bullet.”

This terror was not a physical fear of death, but an abstract fear, arising from the consciousness that the cold mists of decay were rising round him. By the realisation of the nothingness of everything, of what Leopardi calls “l’infinita vanità del tutto,” he was brought to the verge of suicide. And then came the change which he describes thus in hisConfession: “I grew to hate myself; and now all has become clear to me.” This was the preliminary step of the development which led him to believe that he had at last found the final and everlasting truth. “A man has only got not to desire lands or money, in order to enter into the kingdom of God.” Property, he came to believe, was the source of all evil. “It is not a law of nature, the will of God, or a historical necessity; rather a superstition, neither strong nor terrible, but weak and contemptible.” To free oneself from this superstition he thought wasas easy as to stamp on a spider. He desired literally to carry out the teaching of the Gospels, to give up all he had and to become a beggar.

This ideal he was not able to carry out in practice. His family, his wife, opposed him: and he was not strong enough to face the uncompromising and terrible sayings which speak of a man’s foes being those of his own household, of father being divided against son, and household against household, of the dead being left to bury their dead. He put before him the ideal of the Christian saints, and of the early Russian martyrs who literally acted upon the saying of Christ: “Whoso leaveth not house and lands and children for My sake, is not worthy of Me.” Tolstoy, instead of crushing the spider of property, shut his eyes to it. He refused to handle money, or to have anything to do with it; but this does not alter the fact that it was handled for him, so that he retained its advantages, and this without any of the harassment which arises from the handling of property. His affairs were, and still are, managed for him; and he continued to live as he had done before. No sane person would think of blaming Tolstoy for this. He was not by nature a St. Francis; he was not by nature a Russian martyr, but the reverse. What one does resent is not that his practice is inconsistent with his teaching, but that his teaching is inconsistent withthe ideal which it professes to embody. He takes the Christian teaching, and tells the world that it is the only hope of salvation, the only key to the riddle of life. At the same time he neglects the first truth on which that teaching is based, namely, that man must be born again; he must humble himself and become as a little child. It is just this final and absolute surrender that Tolstoy has been unable to make. Instead of loving God through himself, and loving himself for the God in him, he hates himself, and refuses to recognise the gifts that God has given him. It is for this reason that he talks of all his great work, with the exception of a few stories written for children, as being worthless. It is for this reason that he ceased writing novels, and attempted to plough the fields. And the cause of all this is simply spiritual pride, because he was unwilling “to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” Providence had made him a novelist and a writer, and not a tiller of the fields. Providence had made him not only a novelist, but perhaps the greatest novelist that has ever lived; yet he deliberately turns upon this gift, and spurns it, and spits upon it, and says that it is worth nothing.

The question is, has a human being the right to do this, especially if, for any reasons whatever, he is not able to make the full and completerenunciation, and to cut himself off from the world altogether? The answer is that if this be the foundation of Tolstoy’s teaching, people have a right to complain of there being something wrong in it. If he had left the world and become a pilgrim, like one of the early Russian saints, not a word could have been said; or if he had remained in the world, preaching the ideals of Christianity and carrying them out as far as he could, not a word could have been said. But, while he has not followed the first course, he has preached that the second course is wrong. He has striven after the ideal of Ivan Durak, but has been unable to find it, simply because he has been unable to humble himself; he has re-written the Gospels to suit his own temperament. The cry of his youth, “I have no modesty,” remains true of him after his conversion. It is rather that he has no humility; and, instead of acknowledging that every man is appointed to a definite task, and that there is no such thing as a superfluous man or a superfluous task, he has preached that all tasks are superfluous except what he himself considers to be necessary; instead of preaching the love of the divine “image of the King,” with which man is stamped like a coin, he has told us to love the maker of the coin by hatred of His handiwork, quite regardless of the image with which it is stamped.

This all arises from the dual personality in the man, the conflict between the titanic “Lucifer” and the other element in him, for ever searching for the ideal of Ivan Durak. The Titan is consumed with desire to become Ivan Durak; he preaches to the whole world that they should do so, but he cannot do it himself. Other proud and titanic natures have done it; but Tolstoy cannot do what Dante did. Dante was proud and a Titan, but Dante divested himself of his pride, and seeing the truth, said: “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.” Nor can Tolstoy attain to Goethe’s great cry of recognition of the “himmlische Mächte,” “Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass.” He remains isolated in his high and terrible solitude:

“In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb.”

Tourgeniev said of Tolstoy, “He never loved any one but himself.” Merejkowski, in hisTolstoy as Man and Artist, a creative work of criticism, is nearer the truth when he says, He has never loved any man, “not even himself!” But Merejkowski considers that the full circle of Tolstoy’s spiritual life is not closed. He does not believe he has found the truth which he has sought for all his life, nor that he is, as yet, at rest.

“I cannot refuse to believe him” (he writes) “when he speaks of himself as a pitiable fledglingfallen from the nest. Yes, however terrible, it is true. This Titan, with all his vigour, is lying on his back and wailing in the high grass, as you and I and all the rest of us. No, he has found nothing; no faith, no God. And his whole justification is solely in his hopeless prayer, this piercing and plaintive cry of boundless solitude and dread.... Will he at last understand that there is no higher or lower in the matter; that the two seemingly contradictory and equally true paths, leading to one and the same goal, are not two paths, but one path which merely seems to be two; and that it is not by going against what is earthly or fleeing from it, but only through what is earthly, that we can reach the Divine; that it is not by divesting ourselves of the flesh, but through the flesh, that we can reach that which is beyond the flesh? Shall we fear the flesh? we, the children of Him who said, ‘My blood is drink indeed, and My flesh is meat indeed’; we, whose God is that God whose Word was made flesh?”[9]

Yet, whatever the mistakes of Tolstoy’s teaching may be, they do not detract from the moral authority of the man. All his life he has searched for the truth, and all his life he has said exactly what he thought; and though he has fearlessly attacked all constituted authorities, nobody has dared to touch him. He is too great. This is the firsttime independent thought has prevailed in Russia; and this victory is the greatest service he has rendered to Russiaas a man.

Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky could endure Tourgeniev; their dislike of him is interesting, and helps us to understand the nature of their work and of their artistic ideals, and the nature of the distance that separates the work of Tourgeniev from that of Tolstoy. “I despise the man,” Tolstoy wrote of Tourgeniev to Fet. Dostoievsky, in his novelThe Possessed,[10]draws a scathing portrait of Tourgeniev, in which every defect of the man is noted but grossly exaggerated. This portrait is not uninstructive.

“I read his works in my childhood,” Dostoievsky writes, “I even revelled in them. They were the delight of my boyhood and my youth. Then I gradually grew to feel colder towards his writing.” He goes on to say that Tourgeniev is one of those authors who powerfully affect one generation, and are then put on the shelf, like the scene of a theatre. The reason of this dislike, of the inability to admire Tourgeniev’s work, which was shared by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, is perhaps that both these men, each in his own way, reached the absolute truth of the life which was round them. Tolstoy painted the outer andthe inner life of those with whom he came in contact, in a manner such as has never been seen before or since; and Dostoievsky painted the inner life (however fantastic he made the outer machinery of his work) with an insight that has never been attained before or since. Now Tourgeniev painted people of the same epoch, the same generation; he dealt with the same material; he dealt with it as an artist and as a poet, as a great artist, and as a great poet. But his vision was weak and narrow compared with that of Tolstoy, and his understanding was cold and shallow compared with that of Dostoievsky. His characters, beside those of Tolstoy, seem caricatures, and beside those of Dostoievsky they are conventional.

In Europe no foreign writer has ever received more abundant praise from the most eclectic judges than has Tourgeniev. Flaubert said of him: “Quel gigantesque bonhomme que ce Scythe!” George Sand said: “Maître, il nous faut tous aller à votre école.” Taine speaks of Tourgeniev’s work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles. Twenty-five years have now passed since Tourgeniev’s death; and, as M. Haumant points out in his book, the period of reaction and of doubt, with regard to his work, has now set in even in Europe. People are beginning to ask themselves whether Tourgeniev’s pictures are true, whether the Russians that he describesever existed, and whether the praise which was bestowed upon him by his astonished contemporaries all over Europe was not a gross exaggeration.

One reason of the abundant and perhaps excessive praise which was showered on Tourgeniev by European critics is that it was chiefly through Tourgeniev’s work that Europe discovered Russian literature, and became aware that novels were being written in which dramatic issues, as poignant and terrible as those of Greek tragedy, arose simply out of the clash of certain characters in everyday life. The simplicity of Russian literature, the naturalness of the characters in Russian fiction, came like a revelation to Europe; and, as this revelation came about partly through the work of Tourgeniev, it is not difficult to understand that he received the praise not only due to him as an artist, but the praise for all the qualities which are inseparable from the work of any Russian.

Heine says somewhere that the man who first came to Germany was astonished at the abundance of ideas there. “This man,” he says, “was like the traveller who found a nugget of gold directly he arrived in El Dorado; but his enthusiasm died down when he discovered that in El Dorado there was nothing but nuggets of gold.” As it was with ideas in Germany, according to Heine, so was it with the naturalness of Tourgeniev. Compared with the work of Tolstoy and that of allother Russian writers, Tourgeniev’s naturalness is less astonishing, because he possesses the same qualities that they possess, only in a less degree.

When all is said, Tourgeniev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry in his work. Every Russian schoolboy has read the works of Tourgeniev before he has left school; and every Russian schoolboy will probably continue to do so, because Tourgeniev’s prose remains a classic model of simple, beautiful, and harmonious language, and as such it can hardly be excelled. Tourgeniev never wrote anything better than the book which brought him fame, theSportsman’s Sketches. In this book nearly the whole of his talent finds expression. One does not know which to admire more—the delicacy of the art in choosing and recording his impressions, or the limpid and musical utterance with which they are recorded. To the reader who only knows his work through a translation, three-quarters of the beauty are lost; yet so great is the truth, and so moving is the poetry of these sketches, that even in translation they will strike a reader as unrivalled.

There is, perhaps, nothing so difficult in the world to translate as stories dealing with Russian peasants. The simplicity and directness of theirspeech are the despair of the translator; and to translate them properly would require literary talent at once as great and as delicate as the author’s. Mrs. Garnett’s version of Tourgeniev’s work is admirable; yet in reading the translation of theSportsman’s Sketches, and comparing it with the original, one feels that the task is an almost impossible one. Some writers, Rudyard Kipling for instance, succeed in conveying to us the impression which is made by the conversation of men in exotic countries. When Rudyard Kipling gives us the speech of an Indian, he translates it into simple and biblical English. There is no doubt this is the right way to deal with the matter; it is the method which was adopted with perfect success by the great writers of the eighteenth century, the method of Fielding and Smollett in dealing with the conversation of simple men. One cannot help thinking that it is a mistake, in translating the speech of people like Russian peasants, or Indians, or Greeks, however familiar the speech may be, to try to render it by the equivalent colloquial or slang English. For instance, Mrs. Garnett, in translating one of Tourgeniev’s masterpieces,The Singers, turns the Russian words “nie vryosh” (Art thou not lying?) by “Isn’t it your humbug?” In the same story she translates the Russian word “molchat” by theslang expression “shut up.” Now “shut up” might, in certain circumstances, be the colloquial equivalent of “molchat”; but the expression conveyed is utterly false, and it would be better to translate it simply “be silent”; because to translate the talk of the Russian peasant into English colloquialisms conveys precisely the same impression, to any one familiar with the original, which he would receive were he to come across the talk of a Scotch gillie translated into English cockney slang.

This may seem a small point, but in reality it is the chief problem of all translation, and especially of that translation which deals with the talk and the ways of simple men. It is therefore of cardinal importance, when the material in question happens to be the talk of Russian peasants; and I have seen no translation in which this mistake is not made. How great the beauty of the original must be is proved by the fact that even in a translation of this kind one can still discern it, and that one receives at least a shadow of the impression which the author intended to convey. If theSportsman’s Sketchesbe the masterpiece of Tourgeniev, he rose to the same heights once more at the close of his career, when he wrote the incomparablePoems in Prose. Here once more he touched the particular vibrating string which was his specialsecret, and which thrills and echoes in the heart with so lingering a sweetness.

So much for Tourgeniev as a poet. But Tourgeniev was a novelist, he was famous as a novelist, and must be considered as such. His three principal novels,A House of Gentlefolk,Fathers and Sons, andVirgin Soil, laid the foundation of his European fame. Their merits consist in the ideal character of the women described, the absence of tricks of mechanism and melodrama, the naturalness of the sequence of the events, the harmony and proportion of the whole, and the vividness of the characters. No one can deny that the characters of Tourgeniev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Tourgeniev is this: that Tourgeniev’s characters are as living as any characters ever are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy’s characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Tourgeniev’s characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them; and that they are permeated by the faults of the author’s own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness. M. Haumant points out that the want of backbone in all Tourgeniev’s characters does not prove that types of this kindmust necessarily be untrue or misleading pictures of the Russian character, since Tourgeniev was not only a Russian, but an exceptionally gifted and remarkable Russian. Tourgeniev himself divides all humanity into two types, the Don Quixotes and the Hamlets. With but one notable exception, he almost exclusively portrayed the Hamlets. Feeble, nerveless people, full of ideas, enthusiastic in speech, capable by their words of exciting enthusiasm and even of creating belief in themselves, but incapable of action and devoid of will; they lack both the sublime simplicity and the weakness of Ivan Durak, which is not weakness but strength, because it proceeds from a profound goodness.

To this there is one exception. InFathers and Sons, Tourgeniev drew a portrait of the “Lucifer” type, of an unbending and inflexible will, namely, Bazarov. There is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive; and nothing that he wrote ever aroused so much controversy and censure as this figure. Tourgeniev invented the type of the intellectual Nihilist in fiction. If he was not the first to invent the word, he was the first to apply it and to give it currency. The type remains, and will remain, of the man who believes in nothing, bows to nothing, bends to nothing, and who retains his invincible pride until death strikes him down. Here again, compared with theNihilists whom Dostoievsky has drawn in hisPossessed, we feel that, so far as the inner truth of this type is concerned, Tourgeniev’s Bazarov is a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be; and that Dostoievsky’s Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth. Tourgeniev never actually saw the real thing as Tolstoy might have seen it and described it; nor could he divine by intuition the real thing as Dostoievsky divined it, whether he saw it or not. But Tourgeniev evolved a type out of his artistic imagination, and made a living figure which, to us at any rate, is extraordinarily striking. This character has proved, however, highly irritating to those who knew the prototype from which it was admittedly drawn, and considered him not only a far more interesting character than Tourgeniev’s conception, but quite different from it. But whatever fault may be found with Bazarov, none can be found with the description of his death. Here Tourgeniev reaches his high-water mark as a novelist, and strikes a note of manly pathos which, by its reserve, suggests an infinity of things all the more striking for being left unsaid. The death of Bazarov is one of the great pages of the world’s fiction.

InVirgin Soil, Tourgeniev attempts to give a sketch of underground life in Russia—therevolutionary movement, helpless in face of the ignorance of the masses and the unpreparedness of the nation at large for any such movement. Here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day critics who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing.[11]Nevertheless, in spite of Tourgeniev’s limitations, these three books,A House of Gentlefolk,Fathers and Sons, andVirgin Soil, must always have a permanent value as reflecting the atmosphere of the generation which he paints, even though his pictures be marred by caricatures, and feeble when compared with those of his rivals.

Of his other novels, the most important areOn the Eve,Smoke,Spring Waters, andRudin(the most striking portrait in his gallery of Hamlets). InSpring Waters, Tourgeniev’s poetry is allowed free play; the result is therefore an entrancing masterpiece. With regard toOn the Eve, Tolstoy writes thus:[12]

“These are excellent negative characters, the artist and the father. The rest are not types;even their conception, their position, is not typical, or they are quite insignificant. That, however, is always Tourgeniev’s mistake. The girl is hopelessly bad. ‘Ah, how I love thee!... Her eyelashes were long.’ In general it always surprises me that Tourgeniev, with his mental powers and poetic sensibility, should, even in his methods, not be able to refrain from banality. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds and does not pity.”

Again, in writing ofSmoke, Tolstoy says:[13]

“AboutSmoke, I think that the strength of poetry lies in love; and the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of love there is no poetry; but strength falsely directed—the result of the poet’s having an unpleasant, weak character—creates dislike. InSmokethere is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive.”

These criticisms, especially the latter, may be said to sum up the case of the “Advocatus Diaboli” with regard to Tourgeniev. I have quoted them because they represent what many educated Russians feel at the present day about a great part of Tourgeniev’s work, however keenlythey appreciate his poetical sensibility and his gift of style. The view deserves to be pointed out, because all that can be said in praise of Tourgeniev has not only been expressed with admirable nicety and discrimination by widely different critics of various nationalities, but their praise is constantly being quoted; whereas the other side of the question is seldom mentioned. Yet in the case ofOn the Eve, Tolstoy’s criticism is manifestly unfair. Tolstoy was unable by his nature to do full justice to Tourgeniev. Perhaps the most impartial and acute criticism of Tourgeniev’s work that exists is to be found in M. de Vogüé’sRoman Russe. M. de Vogüé is not indeed blind to Tourgeniev’s defects; he recognises the superiority both of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but he nevertheless gives Tourgeniev his full meed of appreciation.

The lapse of years has only emphasised the elements of banality and conventionality which are to be found in Tourgeniev’s work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements ofwood, cloud, mist and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot. This does not detract from the beauty of his pictures, and our admiration for them is not lessened; but all temptation to exaggerate its merits vanishes when we turn from his work to that of stronger masters.

To sum up, it may be said that the picture of Russia obtained from the whole of Tourgeniev’s work has been incomplete, but it is not inaccurate; and such as it is, with all its faults, it is invaluable. In 1847, Bielinski, in writing to Tourgeniev, said: “It seems to me that you have little or no creative genius. Your vocation is to depict reality.” This criticism remained true to the end of Tourgeniev’s career, but it omits his greatest gift, his poetry, the magical echoes, the “unheard melodies,” which he sets vibrating in our hearts by the music of his utterance. The last of Tourgeniev’s poems in prose is called “The Russian Language.” It runs as follows:

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