At the hour of death, Turgénief’s last thought turns to Tolstoï. I beg the reader to go back to that admirable letter, to that short literary will, in which the dying author salutes, and calls back to the arena from which he is just departing, his great rival in talent and in glory.
It would be very strange, if having lived long in France, and having made precious literary friendships, Turgénief had not mentioned names particularly interesting for French readers. He speaks much in his letters of the contemporaneous realistic school, and he judges it favorably, especially at its first beginning. He does more than enjoy the Goncourts and Zolas. He makes arrangements for them with the directors of Russian journals or reviews; he endeavors to have one or two thousands of francs more paid for their manuscripts, by giving them to be translated into Russian before they are published in France.
Especially for Zola did he use his mediatorial influence. He seems very happy to help him; nevertheless, he does not fail to note with his delicate and imperceptible irony certain amusing traits of character. “As far as Zola is concerned, you told me that you would pay more for his manuscript than Stasulevitch. I have informed Zola.... His teeth have taken fire at it.” “In his last visit to Paris, Stasulevitch, having made Zola’s acquaintance, gilded him from head to foot, on the one condition that Zola should belong to him alone. So the European messenger (Vyestnik Yevropui) seems in Zola’s eyes like the fabulous hen with the golden eggs, which he must guard like the apple of his eye.”
The friendship, made of admiration and sympathy, between Turgénief and Flaubert, is well known. It is painted in Turgénief’s letters in truly expressive lines: “I have translated one of Gustave Flaubert’s stories. It is not long, but of incomparable beauty. It will appear in the April number of ‘The European Messenger.’ Perhaps two translations of it will appear. I recommend it to you in advance. I have endeavored, so far as in me lay, to reproduce the colors and tone of the original.” Flaubert dies. Turgénief is so moved that he breaks with all his habits. He, so sober, so disliking noise, wire-pulling, puffing, puts himself at the head of a demonstration in the Russian journals; and he opens a subscription for a monument to his friend. He speaks with genuine disgust of the low interpretations to which this intervention on his part gave rise. His enemies affected to see in this something like the return of an old actor, who had left the stage, and was tormented by yearning for the scenes.
It would not be well to dwell too strongly on Turgénief’s judgment in regard to Victor Hugo. Turgénief was a true poet, but when he wrote in verse he never rose above mediocrity. He knew it, and he criticised this part of his work very severely. The quality of his verses is explained better when it is seen how narrowly and unfairly he judges La Légende des Siècles. The epic grandeur and originality of this work escape him: its swing is too powerful, and it wearies him; its brilliancy is too intense, and it blinds him. He judges Victor Hugo as a poet of thirty years ago—Pushkin, if he had come to life—might have done: he did not much rise above the Byronian horizon.[46]
He is, however, more just towards Swinburne, the English Hugo. But here, again, his criticism is superficial: favorable as it is, one can see that he has not had time to find his reasons, and touch bottom.
The critical faculty is evidently less keen in Turgénief than in others of his friends,—Shchedrin, for example. He it was who caused the scales to fall from Turgénief’s eyes, and revealed for him what he himself felt somewhat confusedly as to the often artificial and conventional character of our realists. “I would have kissed you with delight, ... to such a degree what you say about the romances of Goncourt and Zola hits the case, and is true. As for me, it seemed so confusedly, as though I had a heavy feeling over the epigastrium. I have just this moment uttered the Akh! of relief, and seen clearly.... It cannot be said that they have not talent, but they do not follow the right way: they are already inventing too much. Their literature smacks of literature, and that is bad.”
Although he was warned, Turgénief was not the man to wish to put others on the lookout. The success of another did not fill him with any envy. On the other hand, the disappointment of those who were dear to him caused him real pain. After the failure of one of George Sand’s dramas, he wrote this charming word: “If I had met her, I should not have said any thing of the fiasco of her poor piece: like a respectful son of Noah, I turn away my eyes, and hide the nakedness of my grandam.”
He had recovered from his boyish enthusiasm for the work of the illustrious novelist, “I cannot any longer hold by George Sand, any more than by Schiller”, he wrote in 1856. But in place of admiration for the diminished and collapsed merits of the writer, there was substituted, especially in latter years, a touching worship for the truly virile virtues of the woman.
This is the way he speaks of her, on the day of her death, in a letter meant for publication: “It was impossible to enter into the circle of her private life, and not become her adorer in another sense, and perhaps in a better sense. Every one felt immediately that he was in presence of an infinitely generous and benevolent nature, in which all the egotism had been long and thoroughly burned away by the ever-ardent flame of poetic enthusiasm and faith in the ideal; a nature to which all that was human became accessible and dear, and from which exhaled, as it were a breath of cordiality, of friendliness, and above all that, an unconscious aureole, something sublime, free, heroic. Believe me, George Sand is one of our saints.”