“The wind blew facing the train; whitish clouds of steam, some singly, others mingled with other darker clouds of smoke, whirled in endless file past the window at which Litvinoff was sitting. He began to watch this steam, this smoke. Incessantly mounting, rising, falling, twisting and hooking on to the grass, to the bushes, as though in sportive antics, lengthening out, and hiding away, clouds upon clouds flew by ... they were for ever changing and stayed still the same in their monotonous, hurrying, wearisome sport! Sometimes the wind changed, the line bent to right or left, and suddenly the whole mass vanished, and at once reappeared at the opposite window; then again the huge tail was flung out, and again it veiled Litvinoff’s view of the vast plain of the Rhine. He gazed and gazed, and a strange reverie came over him.... He was alone in the compartment; there was no one to disturb him. ‘Smoke, smoke,’ he repeated several times; and suddenly it all seemed as smoke to him, everything, his own life, Russian life—everything human, especially everything Russian. ‘All smoke and steam,’ he thought; ‘all seems for ever changing, on all sides new forms, phantoms flying after phantoms, while in reality it is all the same and the same again; everything hurrying, flying towards something, and everything vanishing without a trace, attaining to nothing; another wind blows, and all is dashing in the opposite direction, and there again the same untiring, restless—and useless gambols!’”
At last, however, after some years devoted to conscientious labor upon his own estate, Litvinoff’s engagement with Tatyana is renewed.
Certainly the character of Irina is well drawn. There is such a mixture of actual sincerity and deep passion in her intrigues, such a proud contempt for the petty world around her, such a charming humility in her momentary repentance, that it is no wonder Litvinoff yields. There is a striking similarity between this fair creature and Beatrix in “Henry Esmond,” though one can not but feel that the great English novelist has drawn his heroine with a more skilful hand. It is said that one of the mistresses of Alexander II furnished the model for Irina.
In describing Tatyana Shestoff, the author gives us in a very few words a charming picture of womanly dignity and reserve, especially in the scene where Litvinoff tries to tell her that he no longer loves her.
Occasionally, in sketching his characters, Turgenieff can set before you in a short sentence a very lively picture. Take for instance, the following description of Bambaeff:
“He was no longer young; he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislaff Bambaeff wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth.”
LORNA DOONE
RICHARD BLACKMORE
How much the apparent merit of a book depends upon the mood in which we peruse it! When I first read “Lorna Doone” I went over it rapidly, anxious to extract the meat of it as quickly as possible; and while I found many quaint observations and poetical descriptions, the style was diffuse and sometimes crabbed, the narrative was often tedious, and to my mind the book was lacking in fidelity to truth and deep knowledge of human nature. The love passages seemed particularly weak, and I found it hard to understand how a dull-witted countryman, such as John Ridd declares himself to be, could write so well and so ill in different places.
But “Lorna Doone” must not be read in that way. When I took it up a second time, lingering over some of the more striking portions of it and no longer disturbing myself about the plot, I found it quite different from what it had seemed to me at first. It is a story unlike any other, and with a charm which is all its own. The deliberate minuteness of the narrative interferes indeed with the action of the characters and the dramatic power of the tale—it is hard to seize the salient points in it; it seems lacking in perspective; the picture is like one of the very old masters, to be studied more in detail than as a whole. The characterization of most of the personages is not very striking, and yet there is one that is finely drawn—that of John Ridd himself; for it is he, and not Lorna, who is the chief personage of the story. Here the archaic diction, the homespun phrases, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and the quaint philosophy show very plainly the essential characteristics of the narrator, a modest, sturdy, honest, big-hearted farmer, Herculean, slow in speech and in wrath, but terrible when aroused. The roots of his character are planted deep in the soil. “I feel,” he says, “with every blade of grass as if it had a history, and make a child of every bud, as if it knew and loved me.” He is a lover both of nature and his kind, such a man in a smaller sphere as our Lincoln must have been. What wonderful descriptions of farm life, of the ducks, the pigs, the horses, the birds, as well as of natural phenomena, the sunsets, the deep Doone valley, the great snowstorm which buried all the earth!
Many of the scenes are admirably described, as where he watches the passing of the bandits along the Doone track and sees the figure of the little girl thrown across the saddle; the murder of his father by the outlaws and his mother’s solitary visit to the stronghold of the murderers in vain quest of justice; his first expedition to the Doone Valley, and his meeting with the beautiful girl who afterwards becomes his wife; his interview with the terrible Chief Justice Jeffreys, whose eyes “were holes for the devil to glare from”; and, finest of all, the sad story told by Benita, the Italian maid, of the fate of Lorna’s parents and the attack upon the coach when Lorna was carried away. Such excellences are more than enough to redeem the tediousness of the less important parts of the book, and to entitle it to a high as well as a unique place in literature.