Who knows what Russia is preparing for us? Hitherto the reforms have been decreed by the throne; and the ukazes have remained without effect, because they have not had the support in the lever of the people. The expenditure of energy, starting from above, did not make the nation stir. But now suddenly the nation seems to be shaking off its torpor. The peasants, hitherto deaf to all voices, and stubbornly resistant of all progress, have perhaps found for themselves the way of safety and redemption. They are assembling in their villages, and they are organizing the league against drunkenness. This strike against the wine-shop is terrifying to the Russian clergy: they see in it a new form of heresy. In their eyes, these water-drinkers are raskolniks, and the most dangerous kind. We know the Russian proverb versified by Nekrásof: “The muzhik has a head like a bull: when a folly finds lodgement there, it is impossible to drive it out, even with heavy blows of the goad.” It is this headstrong obstinacy which seemed to postpone forever, and which may precipitate to-morrow, the settlement of the social question.
IV.
The expressions, “Russian ideal,” “representative type of one generation,” and other terms of this kind, which one must necessarily use to mark the connection between Turgénief’s different works, must not be allowed to give a false idea of the nature of his talent and of his methods in fiction.
He has himself defined his talent. He has explained his methods so far as they were essential. We have, therefore, only to turn to these precious directions. “I will tell you in a few words that I am, so far as preference goes, a realist; and that I am interested, more than all else, in the living truth of the human physiognomy.” He says elsewhere, that at no moment of his career has he ever taken for his point of departure in a new creation an abstract idea, but that he has always started with the true image, the objective reality, the characteristic personage observed and living.
Here is the very principle of his æsthetic, as he summed it up in his letter to Mr. King, a novelist just beginning his career: “If the study of the human physiognomy, and of the life of another, interests you more than the promulgation of your own feelings and your own ideas; if, for example, it is more agreeable for you to reproduce accurately the external appearance not only of a man, but also of a simple object, than to express with elegance and warmth what you feel in seeing this object or this man,—then you are an objective writer, and you can begin a story or a novel.”
Truth is not disagreeable to those who love it: it gives life to their conceptions. Turgénief’s work, the political bearing of which we have already tried to show our readers, is a little world where go and come a thousand people with variously expressive characters and faces. The creator of such living characters as these has been compared to a great portrait-painter. The comparison is unjust to the novelist. Like the great painters of portraits, he seizes a dominant feature, and expresses it powerfully. It is thus that in a book, on the canvas, the resemblance is caught. But the art of a Titian, of a Reynolds, renders the aspect of the face, and reveals, if you like, something more,—the temperament of the model. It goes scarcely beyond that. The novelist expresses, besides, a whole order of hidden facts, a whole internal spectacle, of which the brush scarcely gives us an inkling. There is therefore a double field of studies to go over, a double power of observation to put into use. It is necessary at one and the same time to note the attitude, and interpret the disposition; to catch the expression of the face, and to penetrate the meaning of the character.
Turgénief possessed this double talent to a very high degree. As a general thing, he paints with broad touches; and his portrait, both physically and morally, is finished in few words. Sometimes the detail is more minute, but the accumulation of lines serves only to verify the dominant impression. I refer the reader to the romance of “The Abandoned One,” and to that admirable portrait of the old Russian gentleman in the time of Catherine II. What a calling-back of the past is given by this old man of lofty stature, perfumed with ambergris, glacial in doublet of silk with its relief of stock and lace ruffles, a suspicion of powder on his hair brought behind into a cue, and in his hand a gold snuff-box ornamented with the empress’s cipher! He always speaks French; he scarcely knows Russian. He reads perforce every day Voltaire, Mably, Helvétius, the Encyclopédistes; he has whilom improvised verses in Madame de Polignac’s salon; he has been among the guests at Trianon; he has seen Mirabeau wearing coat-buttons of extravagant size, and his opinion on our great orator is, that he was “exaggerated in all respects; that, on the whole, he was a man of low tone, in spite of his birth.”
It is seen by this example, that Turgénief’s portraits often represent a class in an individual. They are the expression of an epoch. In fact, though he studies nature closely, he takes pains not to content himself, as our realists do, with the first model that comes to hand. He carefully seeks for the character whose features are sufficiently marked and original, so that in copying it he shall be sure to reproduce the general type. Thus he discovered Bazarof, the hero of “Fathers and Sons.” The idea was given him by the chance which brought to his sick-bed in a small Russian city the “young doctor of the district,” who served him for his model. I do not know whether all the characters of “Virgin Soil,” without exception, passed under the author’s eyes; but I have heard Turgénief tell how he knew, and was able to study, the most characteristic personage of the story, the Nihilist woman,—the upright, solemn, and rather absurd, but strong and sublime Mashurina.
It was by his knowledge of the heart of women, and by the thorough-going fascination of his heroines, that Turgénief left far behind him his great predecessor Gogol. By an inexplicable peculiarity, the author of “The Revizor,” of “Dead Souls,” cared only to paint women who were not women at all, who are lifeless abstractions or caricatures.[39] The most gossiping biographers are embarrassed to explain the reason of this impotence. All that can be said is that Gogol dreaded too much the approach of woman-kind, ever to have the chance to study the sex. On the contrary, Turgénief’s heroines are so life-like, that under each portrait his readers have tried to recognize and name some model. All well-informed Russians would have told you in what palace in Warsaw dwelt Iréna of “Smoke,” or at the first official reception would have pointed you Mrs. Sipiagina of “Virgin Soil.” It certainly seems that all these delicate creations have the irresistible seduction of reality. There is not a romance, not a story, by Turgénief, in which there does not shine forth some feminine face, sometimes of a rather strange grace, but singularly lifelike and touching. Natalia and her sister in “Dmitri Rudin,” Liza in “A Nest of Noblemen,” Elena in “On the Eve,” Marian in “Virgin Soil,”—it would be necessary to name them all.
What rather surprises the French reader is not to find them always beautiful; at least, with that perfect and improbable beauty which our novelists do not hesitate to give their expressionless dolls. One has regular features, a pretty foot, but her hands are too large. Another, at first sight, seems ugly: “She wore her thick chestnut hair short, and she seemed to be fretful; but her whole person gave the impression of something strong, passionate, and fiery. Her feet and her hands were extremely dainty; her little body, robust and supple, reminded one of the Florentine statuettes of the sixteenth century; her movements were graceful and harmonious.” What idealized beauty would have this living grace?