I believe Tennyson to have written a great quantity of immortal and magnificently beautiful verse. I believe that Tennyson possesses an enduring throne in the Temple of English poets. I believe Tourgeniev to have written a great quantity of immortal and inexpressibly beautiful prose, and I believe that he will hold an enduring seat in the Temple of Russian literature. I think this is clear. But supposing a Russian critic were to write on the English literature and the English taste of the present day, and supposing he were to say, “Of course, as we Russians all feel, there is only one English poet in the English literature of the last hundred years, and that is Tennyson. Tennyson is the great and only representative of English art; the only writer who has expressed the English soul.” We should then suspect he had never studied the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Browning and Swinburne. Well, this, it seems to me, is exactly how Tourgeniev is treated in England. All I wished to point out was that the point of view of a Russian was necessarily different, owing to his larger field of vision and to the greater extent and depth of his knowledge, and to his closer communion with the work of his national authors.
But, as I have said, it was taken for granted by some people that I wished to show that Tourgeniev was not a classic. I will therefore, at the risk of wearying my readers, repeat—with as much variation as I can muster—what I consider to be some of Tourgeniev’s special claims to enduring fame.
I have said he was a great poet; but the words seem bare and dead when one considers the peculiar nature of the shy and entrancing poetry that is in Tourgeniev’s work. He has the magic that water gives to the reflected images of trees, hills and woods; he touches the ugly facts of life, softens and transfigures them so that they lose none of their reality, but gain a majesty and a mystery that comes from beyond the world, just as the moonlight softens and transfigures the wrinkled palaces and decaying porticoes of Venice, hiding what is sordid, heightening the beauty of line, and giving a quality of magic to every stately building, to each delicate pillar and chiselled arch.
Then there is in his work a note of wistful tenderness that steals into the heart and fills it with an incommunicable pleasureable sadness, as do the songs you hear in Russia on dark summer nights in the villages, or, better still, on the broad waters of some huge silent river,—songs aching with an ecstasy of homesickness, songs which are something half-way between the whining sadness of Oriental music and the rippling plaintiveness of Irish and Scotch folk-song; songs that are imperatively melodious, but strange to us in their rhythm, constantly changing yet subordinated to definite law, varying indeed with an invariable law; songs whose notes, without being definitely sharp or flat, seem a little bit higher, or a shade lower than you expect, and in which certain notes come over and over again with an insistent appeal, a heartbreaking iteration, and an almost intolerable pathos; songs which end abruptly and suddenly, so that you feel that they are meant to begin again at once and to go on for ever.
This is how Tourgeniev’s poetical quality—as manifested in his Sportsman’s Sketches, his Poems in Prose, and in many other of his works—strikes me. But I doubt if any one unacquainted with the Russian language would derive such impressions, for it is above all things Tourgeniev’s language—the words he uses and the way in which he uses them—that is magical. Every sentence is a phrase of perfect melody; limpid, simple and sensuous. And all this must necessarily half disappear in a translation, however good.
But then Tourgeniev is not only a poet. He is a great novelist and something more than a great novelist. He has recorded for all time the atmosphere of a certain epoch. He has done for Russia what Trollope did for England: he has exactly conveyed the atmosphere and the tone of the fifties. The characters of Trollope and Tourgeniev are excelled by those of other writers—and I do not mean to put Tourgeniev on the level of Trollope, because Tourgeniev is an infinitely greater writer and an artist of an altogether higher order—; but for giving the general picture and atmosphere of England during the fifties, I do not believe any one has excelled Trollope; and for giving the general atmosphere of the fifties in Russia, of a certain class, I do not believe any one—with the possible exception of Aksakov, the Russian Trollope,—has excelled what Tourgeniev did in his best known books, Fathers and Sons, Virgin Soil, and A House of Gentlefolk.
Then, of course, Tourgeniev has gifts of shrewd characterisation, the power of creating delightful women, gifts of pathos and psychology, and artistic gifts of observation and selection, the whole being always illumined and refined by the essential poetry of his temperament, and the magical manner in which, like an inspired conductor leading an orchestra of delicate wood and wind instruments, he handles the Russian language. But when it comes to judging who has interpreted more truly Russian life as a whole, and who has gazed deepest into the Russian soul and expressed most truly and fully what is there, then I can but repeat that I think he falls far short of Tolstoy, in the one case, and of Dostoievsky, in the other. Judged as a whole, I think he is far excelled, for different reasons, by Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and by Gogol, who surpasses him immeasurably alike in imagination, humour and truth. I have endeavoured to explain why in various portions of this book. I will not add anything further here, and I only hope that I have made it sufficiently clear that although I admire other Russian writers more than Tourgeniev, I am no image-breaker; and that although I worship more fervently at other altars, I never for a moment intended either to deny or to depreciate the authentic ray of divine light that burns in Tourgeniev’s work.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See, for instance, Mr. Frank Harris in his Shakespeare the Man: His Tragedy. See footnote, p. 124.
[16] The most striking instance I have come across lately of the cult for Tourgeniev in England is in Mr. Frank Harris’ remarkable book on Shakespeare. He illustrates his thesis that Shakespeare could not create a manly character, by saying that Shakespeare could not have drawn a Bazarov or a Marianna. Leaving the thesis out of the discussion, it is to me almost incredible that any one could think Tourgeniev’s characters manly, compared with those of Shakespeare. Tourgeniev played a hundred variations on the theme of the minor Hamlet. He painted a whole gallery of little Hamlets. Bazarov attains his strength at the expense of intellectual nihilism, but he is a neuropath compared with Mercutio. And Bazarov is the only one of Tourgeniev’s characters (and Tourgeniev’s acutest critics agree with this,—see Brückner and Vogüé) that has strength. Tourgeniev could no more have created a Falstaff than he could have flown. Where are these manly characters of Tourgeniev? Who are they? Indeed a Russian critic lately pointed out, à propos of Tchekov, that the whole of Russian politics, literature, and art, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, suffered from the misfortune of there being so many such Hamlets and so few Fortinbrases. I am convinced that had Mr. Harris been a Russian, or had Tourgeniev been an Englishman, Mr. Harris would not have held these views.