THE MUSICAL TASTE OF TURGÉNIEFF
I
Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others, has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James, distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism. It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books. He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read his, though the older man confessed to having found one of the novels written de main de maitre. His heedlessness about himself and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.
There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel, the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their liking was mutual.
Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose. “And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again. ‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a sonata—does that suit you?”
In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone. Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr. James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one, and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude. To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his career by certain of his contemporaries.
The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it: “It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious, quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman, was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into cyclopean frames.”
These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique, Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm, dreams, and theorizing.
Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence, fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history. Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and crossed the Channel after good game in England.
“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.” And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle screaming for something,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he was always at déjeuner—that gout of his was not acquired on wind. It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough heard much good singing in her salon. The mistake is all the more curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.”