I
Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others, has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James, distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism. It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books. He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read his, though the older man confessed to having found one of the novels written de main de maitre. His heedlessness about himself and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.
There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel, the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their liking was mutual.
Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose. “And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again. ‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a sonata—does that suit you?”
In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone. Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr. James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one, and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude. To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his career by certain of his contemporaries.
The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it: “It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious, quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman, was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into cyclopean frames.”
These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique, Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm, dreams, and theorizing.
Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence, fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history. Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and crossed the Channel after good game in England.
“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.” And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle screaming for something,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he was always at déjeuner—that gout of his was not acquired on wind. It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough heard much good singing in her salon. The mistake is all the more curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.”
Rich as he was, but a charitable spendthrift, Turgénieff was not sorry to inherit from his brother a legacy of 250,000 francs. It is a notion of mine that the richer a novelist the better his art. Poverty does not agree with certain geniuses. With composers who masquerade in the theatres money is a necessity. Without it their art never blows to a blossoming. Look at Wagner, at Gluck, for example, and then on the other hand consider that wretched, grimy Beethoven in mean Vienna lodgings, yelling as he composed in his deaf estate, the water he spilt slowly filtering through the crazy seams of a crazy man’s floor! He lived in an ideal land, where clean napery and the pliant spine of the time-server were but encumbrances. Not so the novel maker, the architect of prose philosophies like Schopenhauer’s and Flaubert’s. Leisure, the leisure that feeds on a competence, is a necessity for these latter. Schopenhauer knew it, and, practical man, urged all philosophers to cultivate the wherewithal for leisure—money; and Goethe in the last book of Wilhelm Meister sets forth most admirably his idea of an artist’s abode. Dickens and Thackeray, a great genius, a great artist, were forced to drive their pens for bread and cheese. Both fell short of the perfection achieved by Flaubert, Turgénieff, and Tolstoy, all three very wealthy men and tardy producers. The rule holds good for Balzac. The haste that kills all art was not thrust upon the other three by hunger, and we are the richer. Your lyric poet, your symphonist, fattens spiritually on a lean life, but their brethren should have a bank account.
Turgénieff did not care much for Sarah Bernhardt:—
I could not know that my opinion on Sarah Bernhardt would become public property, and I am very sorry for it. But I am not in the habit of withdrawing my opinions, even when I have expressed them in a private and friendly conversation, and they are made public against my will. Yes, I consider M. A——’s criticism of her quite true and just. This woman is clever and skilful; she has her business at her fingers’ ends, is gifted with a charming voice and educated in a good school; but she has nothing natural about her, no artistic temperament whatever, and she tries to make up for this by Parisian license. She is eaten through and through with chic, réclame, and pose. She is monotonous, cold, and dry; in short, without a single spark of talent in the highest sense of the word. Her gait is that of a hen; she has no play of features; the movements of her hands are purposely angular in order to be piquant; the whole thing reeks of the boulevards, of Figaro, and patchouli. You see that, to my mind, M. A—— has been even too lenient. You quote Zola as an authority, although you always rebel against all authorities, so you must allow me to quote Augier, who once said to me: “Cette femme n’a aucun talent; on dit d’elle que c’est un paquet de nerfs—c’est un paquet de ficelles.” But, you will ask, Why then such a world-wide reputation? What do I care? I only speak my own feelings, and I am glad to find somebody who supports my view.
But these ficelles are artistic to-day. Doubtless Turgénieff would have been one of the first to recognize the unassuming realistic talents of Duse. There is nothing more touching than his adjuration to Tolstoy to forsake his half-cracked philosophy and return to literature:—
Very dear Leon Nikolaievitch: It is a long time since I wrote to you. I was then, and I am now, on my deathbed. I cannot recover; there is no longer the least chance of it. I am writing to you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to make you a last urgent prayer. My friend, return to literary work. This gift has come to you from there whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could know that you would listen to my prayer!... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know if this letter reaches you. I clasp you for the last time to my heart—you and all yours.... I can write no more.... I am tired.
Tolstoy, on his side, could never understand Turgénieff’s fear of death. He said:—
Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince Trubetzkoy.”
And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have thought the man was there in person.
Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M. Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,” he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and “above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal. His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:—
“In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great, powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to great people.”
Prince Krapotkin in his Autobiography of a Revolutionist thus describes Turgénieff:—
His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful; his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humor, and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence of affectation which are characteristic of all the best Russian writers. His fine head revealed a formidable development of brain power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest brain then known—that of Cuvier—reaching something over two thousand grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but got new ones, to repeat the weighing. His talk was especially remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out of one of his novels.
Of all novel writers of our century, Turgénieff has certainly attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds to the Russian ear like music—music as deep as that of Beethoven.
Touching on the objections raised by the Nihilists as to the truth of the portrait of Bazaroff, Prince Krapotkin writes:—
The principal novels—the series of Dmitri Rudin, A Nobleman’s Nest, On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil—represent the leading “history making” types of the educated classes of Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched with a fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in any other literature. Yet Fathers and Sons—a novel which he rightly considered his profoundest work—was received by the young people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that the Nihilist Bazaroff was by no means a true representation of his class; many described him even as a caricature upon nihilism. This misunderstanding deeply affected Turgénieff, and, although a reconciliation between him and the young generation took place later on, at St. Petersburg, after he had written Virgin Soil, the wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.
He knew from Lavroff that I was a devoted admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to Antokolsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazaroff. I frankly replied, “Bazaroff is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you did your other heroes!” “No, I loved him, intensely loved him,” Turgénieff replied, with an unexpected vigor. “Wait; when we get home I will show you my diary, in which I noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazaroff’s death.” Turgénieff certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazaroff. He so identified himself with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazaroff’s point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these characters. “Analysis first of all, and egotism, and therefore no faith; an egotist cannot even believe in himself;” so he characterized Hamlet. “Therefore he is a sceptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote who fights against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helm of Mambrin (who of us has never made the same mistake?) is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which they alone may see. They search, they fall, but they rise again, and find it—and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and deceit are his enemies; and his scepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.”
These thoughts of Turgénieff give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazaroff. He represented his superiority well, but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love to a sick friend which he bestowed on his heroes when they approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.
Although suffering from a cancer in the spinal cord, Turgénieff wrote to Alexander III, begging him to give Russia a constitution—this was in the autumn of 1881—but of course to no purpose. The man whose books helped to bring about the emancipation of the serfs died in exile, not even a prophet in the literature of his own country. Yet, because of their poets and prose masters Russia will one day be free, and then Turgénieff’s name will be writ in golden letters as the artist, the patriot.