[3] Haumant, p. 174.

But enough! Indeed one may well be asked, Is it necessary to defend so great a classic as Turgenev against modern criticisms of this character? Perhaps it is not a mere waste of time, for certain reasons. Turgenev’s supremacy, as artist, accepted by the élite in France, Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Maupassant, etc., and by the best European critics, such as Brandes, was impaired in Russian eyes by his growing unpopularity after 1867. Brückner says justly:

“To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without liberty of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion, literature became the last refuge of his freedom of thought, the only means of propagating higher ideas. He expected and demanded of his country’s literature not merely aesthetic recreation; he placed it at the service of everything noble and good, of his aspiration, of the enlightenment and emancipation of the spirit. Hence the striking partiality, nay, unfairness, displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own literature when they did not answer to the claims or the expectations of their party or their day. A purely aesthetic handling of the subject would not gain it full acceptance.”

Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts directed against Turgenev’s successive masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming. Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press, righteous or self-righteous, is seen, tape-measure in hand, arbitrarily finding fault with Turgenev’s subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious perfection. It is a crowd of critical gnats dancing airily round the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh. Even before the publication of Smoke (1867) Turgenev was accused of being out of date, and his frequent spells of residence abroad, at Baden, Paris, etc. (though he returned to Russia nearly every year), and his “life devotion” to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate the story that he no longer knew the Russia of the day. And indeed there is truth in the dictum that Turgenev was pre-eminently a chronicler of the Pre-Reform days, or as he himself said, “a writer of the transition period.” But the bulk of his works, even those into which no tendency could be read, such as The Torrents of Spring or A Lear of the Steppes, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic creations, so deeply imbued was the intelligent Russian with the “war-like” criticism of Drobrolubov, Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mihaïlovsky, etc., critics who, in Brückner’s words, “relegated aesthetics to ladies’ society, and turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social preaching.” A strong reaction in Turgenev’s favour was manifested at the Pushkin statue celebration in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral obsequies in Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty-five deputations met at his grave. But, later, MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov, and latterly MM. Haumant, Brückner and Baring, have declared that “the general admiration” for Turgenev’s genius has greatly weakened, and that Turgenev’s star has paled before the stars of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This undercutting style of criticism—“They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat with Shakespeare,” as Meredith puts it—seems a little clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision and temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev is irreplaceable. The spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated as widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. It is true that for our triumphant bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple with the rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our congested civilization, quality in art is little understood or prized. And Turgenev, by his art’s harmonious union of form and subject, of grace and strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs, as Renan said, to the school of Greek perfection.

Since Turgenev is pre-eminently an intellectual force, as well as an artist with a consummate sense of beauty, it is difficult for a critic to hold the balance equitably between the social significance of Turgenev’s pictures of life and the beauty of his vision. Far too little attention has been paid to him as artist. This is no doubt not merely due to the fact that while the majority of critics either naïvely ignore or take for granted his supreme quality, the more perfect is a work of art the more impossible is it to do it critical justice. The great artists, as Botticelli, who are peculiarly mannered, it is far easier to criticize and comment on than is a great artist, as Praxiteles, whose harmony of form conceals subtleties of technique unique in spiritual handling. The discussion of technical beauties, however, is not only a thankless business but tends to defeat its own object. It is better to seek to appreciate the spirit of a master, and to dwell on his human value rather than on his aesthetic originality. The present writer need scarcely add that he is dissatisfied with his inadequate discussion of Turgenev’s masterpieces, but fragmentary as it is, he believes his is almost the only detailed attempt yet made in the English language.

II
YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK

CHAPTER II

YOUTH, FAMILY AND EARLY WORK