And the story goes on flowing easily and naturally till the people of the neighbourhood, the peasants, the woods and fields around, are known by us as intimately as is any neighbourhood in life. Suddenly a break—the tragedy is upon us. Suddenly the terrific forces that underlie human life, even the meanest of human lives, burst on us astonished and breathless, precisely as a tragedy comes up to the surface and bursts on us in real life: everybody runs about dazed, annoyed, futile; we watch other people sustaining their own individuality inadequately in the face of the monstrous new events which go their fatal way logically, events which leave the people huddled and useless and gasping. And destruction having burst out of life, life slowly returns to its old grooves—with a difference to us, the difference in the relation of people one to another that a death or a tragedy always leaves to the survivors. Marvellous in its truth is Turgenev’s analysis of the situation after Harlov’s death, marvellous is the simple description of the neighbourhood’s attitude to the Harlov family, and marvellous is the lifting of the scene on the afterlife of Harlov’s daughters. In the pages (pages 140, 141, 146, 147) on these women, Turgenev flashes into the reader’s mind an extraordinary sense of the inevitability of these women’s natures, of their innate growth fashioning their after-lives as logically as a beech puts out beech-leaves and an oak oak-leaves. Through Turgenev’s single glimpse at their fortunes one knows the whole intervening fifteen years; he has carried us into a new world; yet it is the old world; one needs to know no more. It is life arbitrary but inevitable, life so clarified by art that it is absolutely interpreted; but life with all the sense of mystery that nature breathes around it in its ceaseless growth.
This sense of inevitability and of the mystery of life which Turgenev gives us in A Lear of the Steppes is the highest demand we can make from art. If we contrast with it two examples of Turgenev’s more “romantic” manner, Acia, though it gives us a sense of mystery, is not inevitable: the end is faked to suit the artist’s purpose, and thus, as in other ways, it is far inferior to Lear. Faust has consummate charm in its strange atmosphere of the supernatural mingling with things earthly, but it is not, as is A Lear of the Steppes, life seen from the surface to the revealed depths; it is a revelation of the strange forces in life, presented beautifully; but it is rather an idea, a problem to be worked out by certain characters, than a piece of life inevitable and growing. When an artist creates in us the sense of inevitability, then his work is at its highest, and is obeying Nature’s law of growth, unfolding from out itself as inevitably as a tree or a flower or a human being unfolds from out itself. Turgenev at his highest never quits Nature, yet he always uses the surface, and what is apparent, to disclose her most secret principles, her deepest potentialities, her inmost laws of being, and whatever he presents he presents clearly and simply. This combination of powers marks only the few supreme artists. Even great masters often fail in perfect naturalness: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilytch, for instance, one of the most powerful stories ever written, has too little of what is typical of the whole of life, too much that is strained towards the general purpose of the story, to be perfectly natural. Turgenev’s special feat in fiction is that his characters reveal themselves by the most ordinary details of their everyday life; and while these details are always giving us the whole life of the people, and their inner life as well, the novel’s significance is being built up simply out of these details, built up by the same process, in fact, as Nature creates for us a single strong impression out of a multitude of little details.
Again, Turgenev’s power as a poet comes in, whenever he draws a commonplace figure, to make it bring with it a sense of the mystery of its existence. In Lear the steward Kvitsinsky plays a subsidiary part; he has apparently no significance in the story, and very little is told about him. But who does not perceive that Turgenev looks at and presents the figure of this man in a manner totally different from the way any clever novelist of the second rank would look at and use him? Kvitsinsky, in Turgenev’s hands, is an individual with all the individual’s mystery in his glance, his coming and going, his way of taking things; but he is a part of the household’s breath, of its very existence; he breathes the atmosphere naturally and creates an atmosphere of his own.
It is, then, in his marvellous sense of the growth of life that Turgenev is superior to most of his rivals. Not only did he observe life minutely and comprehensively, but he reproduced it as a constantly growing phenomenon, growing naturally, not accidentally or arbitrarily. For example, in A House of Gentlefolk, take Lavretsky’s and Liza’s changes of mood when they are falling in love with one another; it is Nature herself in them changing very delicately and insensibly; we feel that the whole picture is alive, not an effect cut out from life, and cut off from it at the same time, like a bunch of cut flowers, an effect which many clever novelists often give us. And in Lear we feel that the life in Harlov’s village is still going on, growing yonder, still growing with all its mysterious sameness and changes, when, in Turgenev’s last words, “The story-teller ceased, and we talked a little longer, and then parted, each to his home.”
XI
NOTE ON TURGENEV’S LIFE
CHAPTER XI
Note on Turgenev’s Life—His Character and Philosophy—Enough —Hamlet and Don Quixote—The Poems in Prose—Turgenev’s last Illness and Death—His Epitaph.
If we have said nothing hitherto about the twenty years of Turgenev’s life (1855-1877), in which the six great novels were composed, it is because his cosmopolitan activities, social, political, intellectual, were too many to be chronicled in the compass of a short Study. They may be here indicated in a few lines. Lengthy stays in France, and visits to Germany, Italy, England, were alternated with residence every year at Spasskoe. His attachment to Madame Viardot and her family (which may be studied in Lettres à Madame Viardot, Paris, 1907, a series unfortunately not published in its entirety) led to his joining their household at Courtavenel and Paris, and later (1864) to settling with them at Baden. His residence in France brought him into contact with nearly all the celebrated French men of letters, Mérimeé, Taine, Renan, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, etc., and later with the chiefs of the young naturalistic school, as Zola, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s political outlook and Liberal creed are best represented in his Correspondence with Hertzen, to whom he communicated Russian news for The Bell: his relations and quarrel with Tolstoy, and his enthusiastic appreciation of the latter’s genius are recorded in Biriukoff’s Life of Tolstoy, and in Halperine-Kaminsky’s Correspondence. For his relations with Russian contemporary men of letters, Fet, Grigorovitch, Nekrassov, Dostoevsky, Annenkov, Aksakov, etc., there exists a mass of documents, letters and reminiscences in the Russian. For a general sketch of Turgenev’s life the English reader can turn to E. Haumant’s Ivan Tourguénief, Paris, 1906; for an account of Turgenev’s youth, his relations with the Nihilists, his later life in Paris, etc., to Michel Delines’ Tourguénief Inconnu, and also to the much-abused but valuable volume, Souvenirs sur Tourguéneff, by Isaac Pavlovsky.