BOOKS.
TURGENEV.•
BY gathering together the various Prefaces contributed by him so his wife's translations of the novels and testae of Turgenev, and adding some supplementary chapters and a brilliant " Fore- word " by Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Edward Garnett has given us a very interesting study of the great Russian novelist. Of Turgenev's life he tells us little, save in so fur as it bears directly on his work ; he is primarily concerned with Turgenev as an artist and an interpreter of the Russian mind. He writes as an enthusiast, and we do not blame him for that. But in defending Turgenev from his detractors he shows a heat far removed from the serenity of his hero. None the less, we must admit that Mr. Garnett carries the war into the enemy's country with spirit and success ; be has little difficulty in convicting Mr. Maurice Baring of sundry ineonsist- caries, andquoteswith great effect the testimony of Kropotkin and Stepniak as against those who maintain that Turgenev's characters belonged to bookland rather than to real life. Turgenev was a neer, not a photographer. As for the causes of his comparative unpopularity, Mr. Garnett ascribes them in great part to his virtues —his beauty of form, and bill belief its the inspiration of Love and the influence of good women (now regarded ea vicex jeu)—in which Ito is nearer Shakespeare than the modern Russians. He indignantly repels the charge that he failed " to get face to face with Nature,' barring his view not only on the testimony of de Vogad, but oa quotations illustrating Turgenev's intimate first-hand observation. N tr has Ito much difficulty in disposing of the charge of Turger ev's indebtedness to other authors, which was at moot a pasting phase of discipleship. He was influenced by the romanticists, but was in essentials a realist. Turgenev was by his width of interests and by residence a cosmopolitan, but none the less a great interpreter of the Russian mind in pre-Reform days. He felt an imperious need of escaping from Oro intellectual bondage of Russia into Europe. Ho was not of the fine of which martyrs are made—in a moment of self-reproach he described himself as a peltroon ; he was not a politician or a partisan, but it is at least arguable that he was enabled to render his country greater service by living out of it than remaining permanently within its borders. And throughout his life, as Mr. Garnett maintains, his character was meekest by the four dominant traits shown in his earliest work— a generous tenderness of heart, no enthusiasm for the good, sensitiveness to beauty of form and feeling, an infinite capacity for the passion of love." But undoubtedly his cosmopolitanism and his continued absence from Russia impaired bis hold on the younger Russians. His detachment irritated theses ; they wanted militant propagandism, and could not admit that the wounds of a friend could be faithful. And as regards his limited appeal to the novel-readers of the present generation, Mr. Garnett has hardly allowed enough for his restraint, his self-effacement, and the atmoophero of autunmal melancholy that brood's over his pages. His Russian successors are not exhilarating, Heaven knows, but they are mare sensational, violent, and even melodramatic. Turgenev rarely resorted to the brutalities of modem realism, and had no love of ugliness for its own sake. He was, in the mains a fastidious artist, and excelled in the art of omission.
Turgenev had already made two long tours abroad, and formed his lifelong attachment to the Viarslot household, before the publication in 1852 of his first important work, .4 Sportsman's Sketches—those wonderful studies of Russian provincial life, which, according to Turgenev himself, were largely instrumental in inducing Alexander IL to abolish serfdom. In these studies, as Mr. Garnett happily says, ho " saw man's fugitive life in relation to the vast universal drama of Nature" ; and again, " the people's figures are always seen in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows, and to Nature." Tie episode of the stinging-match in The Singers is quoted at length in illustration of Turgenev's relentless fidelity ; the triumphant singer swiftly relapsing from spiritual ecstasy to sheer animalism. Rodin, written largely during Turgenev enforced confinement to his estate for writing a sympathetic article on Clogol's death, is the picture of an ineffectual but inspiring '41 stint, who spent himself in brilliant talk, disillusioned the woman who loved him by his weakness of will, died uselessly in a hopelers rause, and yet was a true torchbearer of liberty. The House of Gentlgfolk (1859) will always be remembered for the exquisite portrait of the heroine Liza, which Kropotkin called " the best impersonation possible of the average, thoroughly good and honest Russian girl of the times." The story is tragic and the ending painful, but though magnanimity may seem to fall before unscrupulous egotism, Mr. Garnett rightly insists that the ultimate reaction in the mind of the reader is towards spiritual beauty. Mr. Garnett finds the inner meaning of On the Ere in Elena's attraction to the Bulgarian Insarov so symbolizing Russia's con. scioursness of her own weakness and her cry for strong men. Fathers • reclean,: a Melly. try Fsaward Genets.. With a Foreword by Joseph Conrad. London: W. Conks, Sons, and co. tee act.' and Children (1862), in which the scene is dominated by the Nihilist Bazarof, was the most fiercely canvassed of all Turgenev's books. It was hailed by the Reactionaries as unmasking the dangers of the New Order, and hotly resented by the extreme Reformers as a caricature. Turgenev was wounded by both vices, but supplied the best comment in his frank admission that "the reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author sloes not elsow clear sympathy or antipathy to his own chase" Mr. Garnett thinks that Bazarof stood for " the sceptical conscience of modern science "—for the miens which inspired every revolutionary movement on the Continent, though men of this typo were doomed to live in obscurity and to die wirecognized on the threshold. Sntoke (1807) marked the final rupture between Turgenev and the party of Young Ronan, who never forgave him for his mordant satire of talkers and charlatans,. But in tho view of his latest critic it was rather an attack on all Russian parties for their common weakness el' will. Virgin Sul (1877) "gives us the historical justificat ion of rho Nihilist move- ment, and the prophecy of its surface failure ; it traces out the deep roots of the necessity of ouch a movement ; it shows forth the ironical and inevitable weakness of this party of selfanerifice." Hero the strongest character is a woman, Mnrinmus, the Nihilist enthusiast, while in N'eehdasme poet and half-aristocrat, Turgenev perhaps consciously portrayed the tragedy of his own position, In Mr. Garnett's words :-
" Born with the brain of an arietorrat, lie NezIsslaneal represents the uneasy, educated conscience of the aristocrat•, the emiscieneo which is over seeking to propitiate real be responsible for the people,' but is ever driven hack by its inability to make itself understood by the masses, which have been crystallized by hard facts, for hundreds of years, into a great caste of their own. Nezlidanof understands instinctively how impossible, how feral, is the task of ` going to the people' ; his sympathy is with thorn, but not of Vines. Banished by his attitude from his own caste, he seeks refuge in poetry and art ; but there is not enough of aridity. not enough of the national life in his art for him to feel himself mom than a dilettante." Two years before his death, when already in broken health, Turgenev beta Kropotkin that he was worried by the thought that it was his duty to write to Alexander [IL, asking him to give the country a Constitution, and to prove by gelid arguments the 'weer:Hay of that step ; but added, " I feel that I must do it, but I feel I shall not be able to do it."
Turgenev's shorter stories, some forty in number, prove Iant
to be a master of the Indeed, the peculiar qualities of Iris art are perhaps here displayed to the greatest ',erection. Turgenev's relations with the literary leaders of Franco are briefly touched on. His generous appreciation of aspiring talent is noted, but something might have been acid of his visits to Eaglame There is a most interesting account in the Memoir of Telles-ern of a visit from Turgenev and a wonderful story which ho told his Moat about peasants and the Tsar. Reference might have laces also. made to his felicitous treatment of mimic in his novels and the literary use to which he turned Ida dreams in his latter years – a practice which Stevenson also cultivates!. But seals all dedoetione, Mr. Garnett has laid all lovers of Turgenev under a large debt by his sympathetic and acute Molly.
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