It is hard not to regret that so much of his force went into satire and attempts at reformation for which, as he knew well, he was not well-equipped by nature. It is hard too not to wish that he had lived in an age which did not isolate its great men with adulation, but encouraged them to use the best of their powers. As it is, if we want to get unalloyed good from Ruskin, we take down not Modern Painters, or the Stones of Venice, or Sesame and Lilies, but Praeterita. There he has ceased to preach or to teach or to scourge. He is writing for the last time before he enters the prolonged season of death, and his mood is still perfectly clear, more sustained than usual, and unfailingly benignant. Compared with much of his writing, it is extremely simple in style; but the simplicity is the flower of perfect skill. The words lie like a transparent veil upon his meaning. And the passage with which the book ends, though it was written when he could hardly write, is surely more beautiful than those more elaborate and gilded ones which we are apt to cut out and admire:
“Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening in the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, Cor magis tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky or cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”
The Novels of Turgenev
RATHER more than fifty years ago Turgenev died in France and was buried in Russia, appropriately it may seem, if we remember how much he owed to France and yet how profoundly he belonged to his own land. The influence of both countries is to be felt if we look at his photograph for a moment before reading his books. The magnificent figure in the frock coat of Parisian civilization seems to be gazing over the houses far away at some wider view. He has the air of a wild beast who is captive but remembers whence he came. “C’est un colosse charmant, un doux géant aux cheveux blancs, qui a l’air du bienveillant génie d’une montagne ou d’une forêt” the brothers Goncourt wrote when they met him at dinner in 1863. “Il est beau, grandement beau, énormément beau, avec du bleu du ciel dans les yeux, avec le charme du chantonnement de l’accent russe, de cette cantilène où il y a un rien de l’enfant et du nègre.” And Henry James noted later the great physical splendour, the Slav languor and “the air of neglected strength, as if it had been part of his modesty never to remind himself that he was strong. He used sometimes to blush like a boy of sixteen”. Perhaps something of the same combination of qualities is to be found if we turn to his books.
At first, after years of absence it may be, they seem to us a little thin, slight and sketchlike in texture. Take Rudin, for instance — the reader will place it among the French school, among the copies rather than the originals, with the feeling that the writer has set himself an admirable model, but in following it has sacrificed something of his own character and force. But the superficial impression deepens and sharpens itself as the pages are turned. The scene has a size out of all proportion to its length. It expands in the mind and lies there giving off fresh ideas, emotions, and pictures much as a moment in real life will sometimes only yield its meaning long after it has passed. We notice that though the people talk in the most natural speaking voices, what they say is always unexpected; the meaning goes on after the sound has stopped. Moreover, they do not have to speak in order to make us feel their presence; “Volintsev started and raised his head, as though he had just waked up” — we had felt him there though he had not spoken. And when in some pause we look out of the window, the emotion is returned to us, deepened, because it is given through another medium, by the trees or the clouds, by the barking of a dog, or the song of a nightingale. Thus we are surrounded on all sides — by the talk, by the silence, by the look of things. The scene is extraordinarily complete.
It is easy to say that in order to gain a simplicity so complex Turgenev has gone through a long struggle of elimination beforehand. He knows all about his people, so that when he writes he chooses only what is most salient without apparent effort. But when we have finished Rudin, Fathers and Children, Smoke, On the Eve and the others, many questions suggest themselves to which it is not so easy to find an answer. They are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment. Can we then find out from Turgenev himself what principles guided him — had he, for all his seeming ease and lightness, some drastic theory of art? A novelist, of course, lives so much deeper down than a critic that his statements are apt to be contradictory and confusing; they seem to break in process of coming to the surface, and do not hold together in the light of reason. Still, Turgenev was much interested in the art of fiction, and one or two of his sayings may help us to clarify our impressions of the famous novels. Once, for example, a young writer brought him the manuscript of a novel to criticize. Turgenev objected that he had made his heroine say the wrong thing. “What then ought she to have said?” the author asked. Turgenev exploded. “Trouver l’expression propre, c’est votre affaire!” But, the youth objected, he could not find it. “Eh bien! vous devez la trouver.... Ne pensez pas que je sais l’expression et que je ne veux pas vous la dire. Trouver, en la cherchant, une expression propre est impossible: elle doit couler de source. Quelquefois même, il faut créer l’expression ou le mot.” And he advised him to put away his manuscript for a month or so, when the expression might come to him. If not— “Si vous n’y arrivez pas, cela voudra dire que vous ne ferez jamais rien qui vaille.” From this it would seem that Turgenev is among those who hold that the right expression, which is of the utmost importance, is not to be had by observation, but comes from the depths unconsciously. You cannot find by looking. But then again he speaks of the novelist’s art, and now he lays the greatest emphasis upon the need of observation. The novelist must observe everything exactly, in himself and in others. “La douleur passera et la page excellente reste.” He must observe perpetually, impersonally, impartially. And still he is only at the beginning. “... il faut encore lire, toujours étudier, approfondir tout ce qui entoure, non seulement tâcher de saisir la vie dans toutes les manifestations, mais encore la comprendre, comprendre les lois d’après lesquelles elle se meut et qui ne se montrent pas toujours...” That, was how he himself worked before he grew old and lazy he said. But one has need of strong muscles to do it, he added; nor if we consider what he is asking can we accuse him of exaggeration.
For he is asking the novelist not only to do many things but some that seem incompatible. He has to observe facts impartially, yet he must also interpret them. Many novelists do the one; many do the other — we have the photograph and the poem. But few combine the fact and the vision; and the rare quality that we find in Turgenev is the result of this double process. For in these short chapters he is doing two very different things at the same time. With his infallible eye he observes everything accurately. Solomin picks up a pair of gloves; they were “white chamois-leather gloves, recently washed, every finger of which had stretched at the tip and looked like a finger-biscuit”. But he stops when he has shown us the glove exactly; the interpreter is at his elbow to insist that even a glove must be relevant to the character, or to the idea. But the idea alone is not enough; the interpreter is never allowed to mount unchecked into the realms of imagination; again the observer pulls him back and reminds him of the other truth, the truth of fact. Even Bazarov, the heroic, packed his best trousers at the top of his bag when he wanted to impress a lady. The two partners work in closest alliance. We look at the same
thing from different angles, and that is one reason why the short chapters hold so much; they contain so many contrasts. On one and the same page we have irony and passion; the poetic and the commonplace; a tap drips and a nightingale sings. And yet, though the scene is made up of contrasts, it remains the same scene; our impressions are all relevant to each other.
Such a balance, of course, between two very different faculties is extremely rare, especially in English fiction, and demands some sacrifices. The great characters, with whom we are so familiar in our literature, the Micawbers, the Pecksniffs, the Becky Sharps, will not flourish under such supervision; they need, it seems, more licence; they must be allowed to dominate and perhaps to destroy other competitors. With the possible exception of Bazarov and of Harlov in A Lear of the Steppes no one character in Turgenev’s novels stands out above and beyond the rest so that we remember him apart from the book. The Rudins, the Lavretskys, the Litvinovs, the Elenas, the Lisas, the Mariannas shade off into each other, making, with all their variations, one subtle and profound type rather than several distinct and highly individualized men and women. Then, again, the poet novelists like Emily Brontë, Hardy, or Melville, to whom facts are symbols, certainly give us a more overwhelming and passionate experience in Wuthering Heights or The Return of the Native or Moby Dick than any that Turgenev offers us. And yet what Turgenev offers us not only often affects us as poetry, but his books are perhaps more completely satisfying than the others. They are curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.
For the other quality that Turgenev possesses in so great a degree is the rare gift of symmetry, of balance. He gives us, in comparison with other novelists, a generalized and harmonized picture of life. And this is not only because his scope is wide — he shows us different societies, the peasant’s, the intellectual’s, the aristocrat’s, the merchant’s — but we are conscious of some further control and order. Yet such symmetry, as we are reminded, perhaps, by reading A House of Gentlefolk, is not the result of a supreme gift for storytelling. Turgenev, on the contrary, often tells a story very badly. There are loops and circumlocutions in his narrative—”... we must ask the reader’s permission to break off the thread of our story for a time,” he will say. And then for fifty pages or so we are involved in greatgrandfathers and great-grandmothers, much to our confusion, until we are back with Lavretsky at O “where we parted from him, and whither we will now ask the indulgent reader to return with us.” The good storyteller, who sees his book as a succession of events, would never have suffered that interruption. But Turgenev did not see his books as a succession of events; he saw them as a succession of emotions radiating from some character at the centre. A Bazalov, a Harlov seen in the flesh, perhaps, once in the corner of a railway carriage, becomes of paramount importance and acts as a magnet which has the power to draw things mysteriously belonging, though apparently incongruous, together. The connexion is not of events but of emotions, and if at the end of the book we feel a sense of completeness, it must be that in spite of his defects as a storyteller Turgenev’s ear for emotion was so fine that even if he uses an abrupt contrast, or passes away from his people to a description of the sky or of the forest, all is held together by the truth of his insight. He never distracts us with the real incongruity — the introduction of an emotion that is false, or a transition that is arbitrary.
It is for this reason that his novels are not merely symmetrical but make us feel so intensely. His heroes and heroines are among the few fictitious characters of whose love we are convinced. It is a passion of extraordinary purity and intensity. The love of Elena for Insarov, her anguish when he fails to come, her despair when she seeks refuge in the chapel in the rain; the death of Bazarov and the sorrow of his old father and mother remain in the mind like actual experiences. And yet, strangely enough, the individual never dominates; many other things seem to be going on at the same time. We hear the hum of life in the fields; a horse champs his bit; a butterfly circles and settles. And as we notice, without seeming to notice, life going on, we feel more intensely for the men and women themselves because they are not the whole of life, but only part of the whole. Something of this, of course, is due to the fact that Turgenev’s people are profoundly conscious of their relation to things outside themselves. “What is my youth for, what am I living for, why have I a soul, what is it all for?” Elena asks in her diary. The question is always on their lips.
It lends a profundity to talk that is otherwise light, amusing, full of exact observation. Turgenev is never, as in England he might have been, merely the brilliant historian of manners. But not only do they question the aim of their own lives but they brood over the question of Russia. The intellectuals are always working for Russia; they sit up arguing about the future of Russia till the dawn rises over the eternal samovar. “They worry and worry away at that unlucky subject, as children chew away at a bit of india-rubber,” Potugin remarks in Smoke. Turgenev, exiled in body, cannot absent himself from Russia — he has the almost morbid sensibility that comes from a feeling of inferiority and suppression. And yet he never allows himself to become a partisan, a mouthpiece. Irony never deserts him; there is always the other side, the contrast. In the midst of political ardour we are shown Fomushka and Fimushka, “chubby, spruce little things, a perfect pair of little poll-parrots,” who manage to exist very happily singing glees in spite of their country. Also it is a difficult business, he reminds us, to know the peasants, not merely to study them. “I could not simplify myself,” wrote Nezhdanov, the intellectual, before he killed himself. Moreover though Turgenev could have said with Marianna “... I suffer for all the oppressed, the poor, the wretched in Russia,” it was for the good of the cause, just as it was for the good of his art, not to expatiate, not to explain. “Non, quand tu as énoncé le fait, n’insiste pas. Que le lecteur le discute et le comprenne lui-même. Croyez-moi, c’est mieux dans l’intérêt même des idées qui vous sont chères.” He compelled himself to stand outside; he laughed at the intellectuals; he showed up the windiness of their arguments, the sublime folly of their attempts. But his emotion, and their failure, affect us all the more powerfully now because of that aloofness. Yet if this method was partly the result of discipline and theory, no theory, as Turgenev’s novels abundantly prove, is able to go to the root of the matter and eliminate the artist himself; his temperament remains ineradicable. Nobody, we say over and over again as we read him, even in a translation, could have written this except Turgenev. His birth, his race, the impressions of his childhood, pervade everything that he wrote.
But, though temperament is fated and inevitable, the writer has a choice, and a very important one, in the use he makes of it. “I” he must be; but there are many different “I’s” in the same person. Shall he be the “I” who has suffered this slight, that injury, who desires to impose his own personality, to win popularity and power for himself and his views; or shall he suppress that “I” in favour of the one who sees as far as he can impartially and honestly, without wishing to plead a cause or to justify himself? Turgenev had no doubt about his choice; he refused to write “élégamment et chaudement ce que vous ressentez à l’aspect de cette chose ou de cet homme.” He used the other self, the self which has been so rid of superfluities that it is almost impersonal in its intense individuality; the self which he defines in speaking of the actress Violetta: —
She had thrown aside everything subsidiary, everything superfluous, and found herself; a rare, a lofty delight for an artist! She had suddenly crossed the limit, which it is impossible to define, beyond which is the abiding place of beauty.
That is why his novels are still so much of our own time; no hot and personal emotion has made them local and transitory; the man who speaks is not a prophet clothed with thunder but a seer who tries to understand. Of course there are weaknesses; one grows old and lazy as he said; sometimes his books are slight, confused, and perhaps sentimental. But they dwell in “the abiding place of beauty” because he c
hose to write with the most fundamental part of his being as a writer; nor, for all his irony and aloofness, do we ever doubt the depth of his feeling.
Half of Thomas Hardy
THOMAS HARDY, it is not surprising to learn, had not sufficient admiration for himself to record his recollections and not enough interest in himself to brood over his own character. “A naturalist’s interest in the hatching of a queer egg or germ is the utmost introspective consideration you should allow yourself,” he wrote, and the observation was made in a pocket-book which nobody but himself was to read. Hence, though he was forced to agree that a life of him must be written, it is by his wish a life so devoid of artifice, so simple in its structure that it resembles nothing so much as the talk of an old man over the fire about his past. Much of it indeed was written down by Mrs. Hardy as he spoke it. Many of the phrases are unmistakably his own. And whatever it may lack in substance or in symmetry is more than made up for by the sound of the speaking voice and the suggestiveness which it carries with it. Indeed, by no other method could Mrs. Hardy have kept so close to her husband’s spirit.
For Hardy was the last person to be subjected to the rigours of biography. Never was anyone less stereotyped, less formalized, less flattened out by the burden of fame and the weight of old age. He sprang up effortlessly, unconsciously, like a heather root under a stone, not by imposing his views or by impressing his personality, but by being simply and consistently himself. Everything he wrote — it is a quality that makes up for a thousand faults — had this integrity ingrained in it. One finds it again pervading his life. Fantastic as it sounds, one can scarcely help fancying that it was Hardy who imagined it all — the fiddling father, the mother who loved reading, the house “between woodland and heathland”; the old English family, with its legends of Monmouth and Sedgemoor, and its “spent social energies”, who had come down in the world— “So we go down, down, down,” said Hardy, meeting the head of his family trudging beside a common spring trap in the road. Everything takes on the colour of his own temperament. His memories have the quality of moments of vision. He could remember coming home at three in the morning from fiddling with his father — for the Hardys had fiddled in church and farm for generations without taking a penny for it, and little Tom was a dancer and a fiddler from his birth — and seeing “a white human figure without a head” in the hedge — a man almost frozen to death. He could remember the farm-women at the harvest supper “sitting on a bench against the wall in the barn and leaning against each other as they warbled,
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 455
