All these sources reveal Turgenev in much the same light, a man of boundless cosmopolitan interests, of a broad, sane, fertile mind, of the most generous and tender heart. Some of his contemporaries touch on certain weaknesses, his vacillating will, his fits of hypochondria, his romantic affectation in youth, etc., but everybody bears witness (as does his Correspondence) to his lovableness, and the extraordinary altruism and sweetness of his nature. Thus Maupassant, a keen judge of character, records:
“He was one of the most remarkable writers of this century, and at the same time the most honest, straightforward, universally sincere and affectionate man one could possibly meet. He was simplicity itself, kind and honest to excess, more good-natured than any one in the world, affectionate as men rarely are, and loyal to his friends whether living or dead.
“No more cultivated, penetrating spirit, no more loyal, generous heart than his ever existed.”
Such a man’s philosophy can in no sense be termed “pessimistic,” since the wells of his spirit are constantly fed by springs of understanding, love and charity. The whole body of Turgenev’s work appeals to our faith in the ever-springing, renovating power of man’s love of the good and the beautiful, and to his spiritual struggle with evil. But, faced by the threatening mass of wrong, of human stupidity and greed, of men’s pettiness and blindness, Turgenev’s beauty of feeling often recoils in a wave of melancholy and of sombre mournfulness. Thus in Enough (1864), a fragment inspired by the seas of acrimonious misunderstanding raised by Fathers and Children, Turgenev has concentrated in a prose poem of lyrical beauty, an access of profound dejection. Here we see laid bare the roots of Turgenev’s philosophic melancholy,—man’s insignificance in face of “the deaf, blind, dumb force of nature ... which triumphs not even in her conquests but goes onward, onward devouring all things.... She creates destroying, and she cares not whether she creates or she destroys.... How can we stand against those coarse and mighty waves, endlessly, unceasingly, moving upward? How have faith in the value and dignity of the fleeting images, that in the dark, on the edge of the abyss, we shape out of dust for an instant?” After recording many exquisite memories of nature and of love, Turgenev, then, compares human activities to those of gnats on the forest edge on a frosty day when the sun gleams for a moment: “At once the gnats swarm up on all sides; they sport in the warm rays, bustle, flutter up and down, circle round one another.... The sun is hidden—the gnats fall in a feeble shower, and there is the end of their momentary life. And men are ever the same.” “What is terrible is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane.”
“But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation: patriotism, right, freedom, humanity, art? Yes, those words there are and many men live by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life: still the same motley picture—in reality so little complex—would unroll beside him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name ... why in the name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood—in a word, the same busy squirrel’s turning in the old, unchanged wheel....”
With this passage of weary disillusionment and disgust of life we may compare one in Phantoms, written a year earlier: “These human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies; their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable, how revolting it all suddenly was to me”; and one, no less significant, in the opening pages of The Torrents of Spring:
“He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human.... Everywhere the same everlasting pouring of water into a sieve, the everlasting beating of the air, everywhere the same self-deception—half in good faith, half conscious—any toy to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then all of a sudden old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever-growing, ever-growing and devouring dread of death ... and the plunge into the abyss.”
But to show these waves of pessimistic exhaustion in right relation to the whole volume of Turgenev’s work, one must contrast them with many hundreds of passages where the struggle of love, faith and courage, where the impulse of pity and beauty of conduct rank supreme in all human endeavour. And in his illuminating essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860), Turgenev holds the balance level between humanity’s blind faith in the power of the good (Don Quixote), and the disillusionment of its knowledge (Hamlet). Here Turgenev shows us that sincerity and force of conviction in the justice or goodness of a cause (however wrong-headed or absurd the idealist’s judgment may be) is the prime basis for the pursuit of virtue, and that true enthusiasm for goodness and beauty exacts self-sacrifice, disregard of one’s own interest, and forgetfulness of the “I.” Hamlet by his sceptical intelligence becomes so conscious of his own weakness, of the worthlessness of the crowd, of the self-regarding motives of men, that he is unable to love them. Hence his irony, his melancholy, his despair in the triumph of the good, for which he, too, struggles, while paralysed by his thoughts which sap his will and condemn him to inactivity. “The Hamlets,” says Turgenev, “find nothing, discover nothing, and leave no trace in their passage through the world but the memory of their personality: they have no spiritual legacy to bequeath. They do not love: they do not believe. How, then, should they find?”
Love and faith in the good and beautiful—based on forgetfulness of self—must therefore be set against and balance the rule of the intelligence, and this is precisely the effect Turgenev’s work makes on us and the effect which his personality made on his acquaintances. “This man was all good,” says Vogüé. “I think one would have to search the literary world for a long time before finding a writer capable of such modesty and such effacement,” says Halpérine-Kaminsky. “I am always thinking about Turgenev. I love him terribly,” says Tolstoy naïvely, after his lifelong hostility to Turgenev’s genius had been removed by the latter’s death. And all Turgenev’s acquaintances agreed that no one was so devoid of egoism, so generous in his enthusiasm for the works of other men as he.[25] The guiding law of his being was shown not only in his unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his rivals,[26] but to find excellent, absorbing qualities in the works of obscure, unsuccessful writers. This trait often appeared, to his own circle, to be proof of mere uncritical misplaced enthusiasm, but in fact Turgenev was a most severe and impartial critic.[27] There is in even the humblest work of art, that is not false, a nucleus of individual feeling, experience, insight which cannot be replaced. And Turgenev, always searching for the good, instantly detected any individual excellence and emphasized its value, without dwelling on a work’s mediocre elements. The world, and the generality of men, do exactly the reverse; they take pleasure in pointing out and publishing defects and weaknesses and in ignoring the points of strength.
[25] “On arriving at his rooms, Tourguéneff took from his writing-table a roll of paper. I give what he said word for word.
“‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Here is “copy” for your paper of an absolutely first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master—for he is a real master—is almost unknown in France, but I assure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes.’