Rich as he was, but a charitable spendthrift, Turgénieff was not sorry to inherit from his brother a legacy of 250,000 francs. It is a notion of mine that the richer a novelist the better his art. Poverty does not agree with certain geniuses. With composers who masquerade in the theatres money is a necessity. Without it their art never blows to a blossoming. Look at Wagner, at Gluck, for example, and then on the other hand consider that wretched, grimy Beethoven in mean Vienna lodgings, yelling as he composed in his deaf estate, the water he spilt slowly filtering through the crazy seams of a crazy man’s floor! He lived in an ideal land, where clean napery and the pliant spine of the time-server were but encumbrances. Not so the novel maker, the architect of prose philosophies like Schopenhauer’s and Flaubert’s. Leisure, the leisure that feeds on a competence, is a necessity for these latter. Schopenhauer knew it, and, practical man, urged all philosophers to cultivate the wherewithal for leisure—money; and Goethe in the last book of Wilhelm Meister sets forth most admirably his idea of an artist’s abode. Dickens and Thackeray, a great genius, a great artist, were forced to drive their pens for bread and cheese. Both fell short of the perfection achieved by Flaubert, Turgénieff, and Tolstoy, all three very wealthy men and tardy producers. The rule holds good for Balzac. The haste that kills all art was not thrust upon the other three by hunger, and we are the richer. Your lyric poet, your symphonist, fattens spiritually on a lean life, but their brethren should have a bank account.
Turgénieff did not care much for Sarah Bernhardt:—
I could not know that my opinion on Sarah Bernhardt would become public property, and I am very sorry for it. But I am not in the habit of withdrawing my opinions, even when I have expressed them in a private and friendly conversation, and they are made public against my will. Yes, I consider M. A——’s criticism of her quite true and just. This woman is clever and skilful; she has her business at her fingers’ ends, is gifted with a charming voice and educated in a good school; but she has nothing natural about her, no artistic temperament whatever, and she tries to make up for this by Parisian license. She is eaten through and through with chic, réclame, and pose. She is monotonous, cold, and dry; in short, without a single spark of talent in the highest sense of the word. Her gait is that of a hen; she has no play of features; the movements of her hands are purposely angular in order to be piquant; the whole thing reeks of the boulevards, of Figaro, and patchouli. You see that, to my mind, M. A—— has been even too lenient. You quote Zola as an authority, although you always rebel against all authorities, so you must allow me to quote Augier, who once said to me: “Cette femme n’a aucun talent; on dit d’elle que c’est un paquet de nerfs—c’est un paquet de ficelles.” But, you will ask, Why then such a world-wide reputation? What do I care? I only speak my own feelings, and I am glad to find somebody who supports my view.
But these ficelles are artistic to-day. Doubtless Turgénieff would have been one of the first to recognize the unassuming realistic talents of Duse. There is nothing more touching than his adjuration to Tolstoy to forsake his half-cracked philosophy and return to literature:—
Very dear Leon Nikolaievitch: It is a long time since I wrote to you. I was then, and I am now, on my deathbed. I cannot recover; there is no longer the least chance of it. I am writing to you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to make you a last urgent prayer. My friend, return to literary work. This gift has come to you from there whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could know that you would listen to my prayer!... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know if this letter reaches you. I clasp you for the last time to my heart—you and all yours.... I can write no more.... I am tired.
Tolstoy, on his side, could never understand Turgénieff’s fear of death. He said:—
Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince Trubetzkoy.”
And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have thought the man was there in person.
Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M. Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,” he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and “above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal. His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:—
“In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great, powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to great people.”