Another reason why Turgenev's characters are so interesting, is because in each case he has given a remarkable combination of individual and type. Here is where he completely overshadows Sudermann, even Ibsen, for their most successful personages are abnormal. Panshin, for example, is a familiar type in any Continental city; he is merely the representative of the young society man. He is accomplished, sings fairly well, sketches a little, rides horseback finely, is a ready conversationalist; while underneath all these superficial adornments he is shallow and vulgar. Ordinary acquaintances might not suspect his inherent vulgarity--all Lisa knows is that she does not like him; but the experienced woman of the world, the wife of Lavretsky, understands him instantly, and has not the slightest difficulty in bringing his vulgarity to the surface. Familiar type as he is,--there are thousands of his ilk in all great centres of civilisation,--Panshin is individual, and we hate him as though he had shadowed our own lives. Again, Varvara herself is the type of society woman whom Turgenev knew well, and whom he both hated and feared; yet she is as distinct an individual as any that he has given us. He did not scruple to create abnormal figures when he chose; it is certainly to be hoped that Maria, in Torrents of Spring, is abnormal even among her class; but she is an engine of sin rather than a real woman, and is not nearly so convincingly drawn as the simple old mother of Bazarov.
Turgenev represents realism at its best, because he deals with souls rather than with bodies. It is in this respect that his enormous superiority over Zola is most clearly shown. When L'Assommoir was published, George Moore asked Turgenev how he liked it, and he replied: "What difference does it make to me whether a woman sweats in the middle of her back or under her arm? I want to know how she thinks, not how she feels." In that concrete illustration, Turgenev diagnosed the weakness of naturalism. No one has ever analysed the passion of love more successfully than he; but he is interested in the growth of love in the mind, rather than in its carnal manifestations.
Finally, Turgenev, although an uncompromising realist, was at heart always a poet. In reading him we feel that what he says is true, it is life indeed; but we also feel an inexpressible charm. It is the mysterious charm of music, that makes our hearts swell and our eyes swim. He saw life, as every one must see it, through the medium of his own soul. As Joseph Conrad has said, no novelist describes the world; he simply describes his own world. Turgenev had the temperament of a poet, just the opposite temperament from such men of genius as Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. Their books receive our mental homage, and deserve it; but they are without charm. On closing their novels, we never feel that wonderful afterglow that lingers after the reading of Turgenev. To read him is not only to be mentally stimulated, it is to be purified and ennobled; for though he never wrote a sermon in disguise, or attempted the didactic, the ethical element in his tragedies is so pervasive that one cannot read him without hating sin and loving virtue. Thus the works of the man who is perhaps the greatest novelist in history are in harmony with what we recognise as the deepest and most eternal truth, both in life and in our own hearts.
The silver tones and subtle music of Turgenev's clavichord were followed by the crashing force of Tolstoi's organ harmonies, and by the thrilling, heart-piercing discords struck by Dostoevski. Still more sensational sounds come from the younger Russian men of to-day, and all this bewildering audacity of composition has in certain places drowned for a time the less pretentious beauty of Turgenev's method. During the early years of the twentieth century, there has been a visible reaction against him, an attempt to persuade the world that after all he was a subordinate and secondary man. This attitude is shown plainly in Mr. Baring's Landmarks in Russian Literature, whose book is chiefly valuable for its sympathetic understanding of the genius of Dostoevski. How far this reaction has gone may be seen in the remark of Professor Brückner, in his Literary History of Russia: "The great, healthy artist Turgenev always moves along levelled paths, in the fair avenues of an ancient landowner's park. Æsthetic pleasure is in his well-balanced narrative of how Jack and Jill did not come together: deeper ideas he in no wise stirs in us." If A House of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Children stir no deeper ideas than that in the mind of Professor Brückner, whose fault is it? One can only pity him. But there are still left some humble individuals, at least one, who, caring little for politics and the ephemeral nature of political watchwords and party strife, and still less for faddish fashions in art, persist in giving their highest homage to the great artists whose work shows the most perfect union of Truth and Beauty.
IV
DOSTOEVSKI
THE life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil. He was often as poor as a rat; he suffered from a horrible disease; he was sick and in prison, and no one visited him; he knew the bitterness of death. Such a man's testimony as to the value of life is worth attention; he was a faithful witness, and we know that his testimony is true.
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on the 30 October 1821, at Moscow. His father was a poor surgeon, and his mother the daughter of a mercantile man. He was acquainted with grief from the start, being born in a hospital. There were five children, and they very soon discovered the exact meaning of such words as hunger and cold. Poverty in early years sometimes makes men rather close and miserly in middle age, as it certainly did in the case of Ibsen, who seemed to think that charity began and ended at home. Not so Dostoevski: he was often victimised, he gave freely and impulsively, and was chronically in debt. He had about as much business instinct as a prize-fighter or an opera singer. As Merezhkovski puts it: "This victim of poverty dealt with money as if he held it not an evil, but utter rubbish. Dostoevski thinks he loves money, but money flees him. Tolstoi thinks he hates money, but money loves him, and accumulates about him. The one, dreaming all his life of wealth, lived, and but for his wife's business qualities would have died, a beggar. The other, all his life dreaming and preaching of poverty, not only has not given away, but has greatly multiplied his very substantial possessions." In order to make an impressive contrast, the Russian critic is here unfair to Tolstoi, but there is perhaps some truth in the Tolstoi paradox. No wonder Dostoevski loved children, for he was himself a great child.
He was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put together.
When he was twenty-seven years old, having impulsively expressed revolutionary opinions at a Radical Club to which he belonged, he was arrested with a number of his mates, and after an imprisonment of some months, he was led out on the 22 December 1849, with twenty-one companions, to the scaffold. He passed through all the horror of dying, for visible preparations had been made for the execution, and he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane.