“About Smoke, I think that the strength of poetry lies in love; and the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of love there is no poetry; but strength falsely directed—the result of the poet’s having an unpleasant, weak character—creates dislike. In Smoke there is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive.”
These criticisms, especially the latter, may be said to sum up the case of the “Advocatus Diaboli” with regard to Tourgeniev. I have quoted them because they represent what many educated Russians feel at the present day about a great part of Tourgeniev’s work, however keenly they appreciate his poetical sensibility and his gift of style. The view deserves to be pointed out, because all that can be said in praise of Tourgeniev has not only been expressed with admirable nicety and discrimination by widely different critics of various nationalities, but their praise is constantly being quoted; whereas the other side of the question is seldom mentioned. Yet in the case of On the Eve, Tolstoy’s criticism is manifestly unfair. Tolstoy was unable by his nature to do full justice to Tourgeniev. Perhaps the most impartial and acute criticism of Tourgeniev’s work that exists is to be found in M. de Vogüé’s Roman Russe. M. de Vogüé is not indeed blind to Tourgeniev’s defects; he recognises the superiority both of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but he nevertheless gives Tourgeniev his full meed of appreciation.
The lapse of years has only emphasised the elements of banality and conventionality which are to be found in Tourgeniev’s work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot. This does not detract from the beauty of his pictures, and our admiration for them is not lessened; but all temptation to exaggerate its merits vanishes when we turn from his work to that of stronger masters.
To sum up, it may be said that the picture of Russia obtained from the whole of Tourgeniev’s work has been incomplete, but it is not inaccurate; and such as it is, with all its faults, it is invaluable. In 1847, Bielinski, in writing to Tourgeniev, said: “It seems to me that you have little or no creative genius. Your vocation is to depict reality.” This criticism remained true to the end of Tourgeniev’s career, but it omits his greatest gift, his poetry, the magical echoes, the “unheard melodies,” which he sets vibrating in our hearts by the music of his utterance. The last of Tourgeniev’s poems in prose is called “The Russian Language.” It runs as follows:
“In days of doubt, in the days of burdensome musing over the fate of my country, thou alone art my support and my mainstay, oh great, mighty, truthful, and unfettered Russian language! Were it not for thee, how should I not fall into despair at the sight of all that is being done at home? But how can I believe that such a tongue was given to any but a great people?”
No greater praise can be given to Tourgeniev than to say that he was worthy of his medium, and that no Russian prose writer ever handled the great instrument of his inheritance with a more delicate touch or a surer execution.
When Tourgeniev was dying, he wrote to Tolstoy and implored him to return to literature. “That gift,” he wrote, “came whence all comes to us. Return to your literary work, great writer of our Russian land!”
All through Tourgeniev’s life, in spite of his frequent quarrels with Tolstoy, he never ceased to admire the works of his rival. Tourgeniev had the gift of admiration. Tolstoy is absolutely devoid of it. The “Lucifer” spirit in him refuses to bow down before Shakespeare or Beethoven, simply because it is incapable of bending at all. To justify this want, this incapacity to admire the great masterpieces of the world, Tolstoy wrote a book called What is Art? in which he condemned theories he had himself enunciated years before. In this, and in a book on Shakespeare, he treats all art, the very greatest, as if it were in the same category with that of æsthetes who confine themselves to prattling of “Art for Art’s sake.” Beethoven he brushes aside because, he says, such music can only appeal to specialists. “What proportion of the world’s population,” he asks, “have ever heard the Ninth Symphony or seen ‘King Lear’? And how many of them enjoyed the one or the other?” If these things be the highest art, and yet the bulk of men live without them, and do not need them, then the highest art lacks all claim to such respect as Tolstoy is ready to accord to art. In commenting on this, Mr. Aylmer Maude writes: “The case of the specialists, when Tolstoy calls in question the merits of ‘King Lear’ or of the Ninth Symphony, is an easy one.”
But the fallacy does not lie here. The fallacy lies in thinking the matter is a case for specialists at all. It is not a case for specialists. Beethoven’s later quartettes may be a case for the specialist, just as the obscurer passages in Shakespeare may be a case for the specialist. This does not alter the fact that the whole of the German nation, and multitudes of people outside Germany, meet together to hear Beethoven’s symphonies played, and enjoy them. It does not alter the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are translated into every language and enjoyed, and, when they are performed, are enjoyed by the simplest and the most uneducated people. The highest receipts are obtained at the Théâtre Français on holidays and feast days, when the plays of Molière are given. Tolstoy leaves out the fact that very great art, such as that of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Beethoven, Mozart, appeals at the same time, and possibly for different reasons, to the highly trained specialist and to the most uncultivated ignoramus. This, Dr. Johnson points out, is the great merit of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and a child knows nothing more amusing. This is also true of Paradise Lost, an appreciation of which is held in England to be the highest criterion of scholarship. And Paradise Lost, translated into simple prose, is sold in cheap editions, with coloured pictures, all over Russia,[14] and greedily read by the peasants, who have no idea that it is a poem, but enjoy it as a tale of fantastic adventure and miraculous events. It appeals at the same time to their religious feeling and to their love of fairy tales, and impresses them by a certain elevation in the language (just as the chants in church impress them) which they unconsciously feel does them good.
It is this inability to admire which is the whole defect of Tolstoy, and it arises from his indomitable pride, which is the strength of his character, and causes him to tower like a giant over all his contemporaries. Therefore, in reviewing his whole work and his whole life, and in reviewing it in connection with that of his contemporaries, one comes to this conclusion. If Tolstoy, being as great as he is, has this great limitation, we can only repeat the platitude that no genius, however great, is without limitations; no ruby without a flaw. Were it otherwise—Had there been combined with Tolstoy’s power and directness of vision and creative genius, the large love and the childlike simplicity of Dostoievsky—we should have had, united in one man, the complete expression of the Russian race; that is to say, we should have had a complete man—which is impossible.