A RUSSIAN NOVEL.*
M. TOURGUENEF is better known than any living Russian author in France and England by the popularity which his " Recits d'un Chasseur " achieved. Setting aside the deep interest which all sketches of social life in a country so little known as Russia possess, and the special attraction of a book that has been prohi- bited, there can be no doubt that those tales had high merit of a somewhat rare kind. They were the work of a keen observer, and the dry wit and almost sombre sentiment that ran through them were all the more interesting from the writer's evident care to write quietly. .4 Knot of Gentlemen is said to have met in Russia with even greater favour than its predecessor. There are some ob- vious reasons for this. There is nothing in it to offend national vanity, and a single story is generally more popular than a series of tales. But whether the longer form is equally suited to M. Tourguenef 's genius is, we think, a question. His plot is the simplest possible, and the book is really made up of a series of vivid personal outlines, which, if not irrelevant, are not necessary to the action. Again, the writer's skill in portrait-painting is rather physiognomical, so to speak, than psychological—he observes and sketches, but he never divines and analyzes. A clear and vivid style, a constantly sustained interest, and moral sympathies of a high order, combine to give the work a considerable place even in European lite- rature ; but it wants that highest imaginative faculty which embodies eternal types, and so works for immortality. This shallowness belongs, we believe, to the author's country and times quite as much as to himself. Gogol and Boulgarin are at least equally fond of broad features and general effects. Perhaps a young people ure like children whose perceptive faculties are educated before their sympathies. The ostensible plot of .ci Knot of Gentlemen has no apparent con- nexion with the title, and turns on a rather hackneyed situation.
* Une Nichle de Gentilliommes Newts de ha Vie de Province es Riasie. Par Ivan TOurgitenet, Loudon: D. Nutt. A country gent. leman, Fedor Lavretzky, with peasant Ilood in Ills veins, and with the habits and manners of a thoughtful German student, marries for love a heartless, frivolous woman, Varvara Kora- byne. For a time the two live pleasantly. Lavretzky's wealth secures his wife the position she can appreciate, and she has the tact to make her husband thoroughly happy while she is betraying him Accident reveals her dishonour, and all its circumstances have been unpardonable : the lover is a mere lay-figure of a man, without mind or character, and Varvara, with a keen enjoyment of her perfidy, has played off her husband, as he now remembers, to his face. "A few days before she had placed herself at the piano in the presence of Ernest and under his own eyes, and had sung Vieux marl, marl farouche' (a song of Puschkin's). He recalled the expression of her face, the strange brilliancy of her eyes, the glow of her cheeks." Russian ideas of honour and morality are very like English in many points, and Lavretzky, instead of challenging the seducer, as a Francis or German hero must have done, settles a pension on his wife, and leaves her. She remains in hearty enjoyment of Paris, and the in- jured man returns to Russia. After sonic years' solitude, he emerges again into the society of his relations. If his faith in God and man has seemed to himself shaken by the disenchantment of his hopes, there is that in his nature which makes sympathy a necessity to him, and his experience has quickened his moral insight. He'is thrown into the company of a cousin, Lisa, whom he can meet without embarrassment, and her naive religious nature attracts, first his confidence and then his affections, all the more readily that his second love is not passionate and unreasoning as the first was. She, on her side, is fascinated by the stern melancholy man, whose character is thrown into bism4 relief by the double contrast of her gossiping, foolish mother, and of a shallow-hearted, flashy employe, her mother's favourite and her own lover, who goes tame about the house. Suddenly Lavretzky learns from a French journal that his wife is dead. For a few days his happiness is complete. Then, just as Lisa has learned to translate her instincts into a sentiment which she need not blush for, he returns one day to his house, and is greeted by his wife, whose death has been falsely announced, and who comes with her child and French maid to extract fresh funds. Oue or two scenes of exquisite comedy follow. Varvara boldly presents herself in the house of Lisa's mother, and convinces the worthy lady that Lavretzky must have been in fault to quarrel with so admirable a wife, while she begins a quiet flirtation with Lisa's old lover, the employe Panchine. Lavretzky assigns his wife a residence and income, and parts for ever from Lisa. Unhappily the revelation has come too late for her; she cannot change, she cannot forget, and she dares not look back. But she has had a simple Christian training, and turns naturally to God for relief. Finding home desolate she takes the veil. Lavretzky is sobered instead of being stunned by this'second great shock of his life, and faith in the noble woman he has known makes him a useful and good man again at the very time when all hope is dead. "It is said that he has visited the convent to which Lisa has retired, and that lie has seen her again. She was going to the choir ; she has passed close to him, with an even, quick, and modest step, bearing herself as nuns do ; and she did not look towards him, but the lid of the eye that was nearest him quivered slightly, and her wan face was yet a little more bowed, and her closed hands, with the rosary twisted round them, were a little more closely pressed. What did they both think and feel Who can know, who can say? Life has moments and emotions which it is scarcely right to speak of, which we cannot linger over." While the plot is thus simple, it is varied by a great number of subordinate personages and situations. Lavretzky s grandfather, a Russian gentleman of the old school, a cross between Squire Western and a Virginian slave-owner, brutal and capricious, but with a certain rough power df government, is contrasted with his son, Lavretzky's father, Ivan, a heartless Tribble, brought up by a Voltairean abbe, who marries a peasant to prove his faith in Rousseau and enrage his father, and deserts her to live as the canaille three of great cities are accustomed. Ivan, an Anglomaniac and constitutional theorist under Alexander, is transformed by the failure of Pestal's insurrection into a devout Russian gentleman, who stays on his estates, eschews poli- tics, and fears God and the Czar. Al. Tourguenef has happily taken advantage of the sudden and violent transitions which despotism in a half-civilized country ensures to intensify the lights and shades of his narrative. Of course, women are less subject to these political in- fluences. But "the old witch," Glafyra, Ivan's sister, whose chief passions are avarice and government, who envies her brother's foreign graces, and yet lives with him till his death for the sake of a good establishment, is a character that modern society would strangely modify; and another old aunt of the hero, Marpha Tunofecvna, who hates humbug, and tells a contemptible man in plain words that he is lying, while she stands loyally by Lavretzky in dis- grace, and by Lisa in misery, belongs by her training to the same prm-social period. Perhaps, however, the ethnological contrasts, as, for want of a better word, we must call them, are even more marked than the historical. M. Tourguenef appears to divide the modern society he deals with into two broad classes. One of these represents French culture—for it ought not to be con- founded with French character—engrafted on a hard, shallow, and bad nature, which, if left to itself, would be simply barren and repul- sive. Panchine and"Yarvara, the two scapegoats of the novel, come under this head, and differ merely as the small affectations of a provin- cial dandy, whose very blood seems watered with can-de-Cologne, differ from the hypocrisies of a Parisian " bonne," whose animal passions are the only real part of her life. It is easy to understand wily in the present reaction against the regime of Nicholas, the conventional Thank God !' thought Lavretzky, that it is so.' the capital, even if not " resumed" by Virginia, would cease to be de. The condescension of the lover who goes so far as to tell his feasible or habitable. In truth, however, these arguments are all mistress that she is sensible, and his delight at finding that she dis- beside the true issue. The South fights to extend slavery, to " pro- claims all originality, are alike inimitable. Does M. Tourguenef vent the girdling of the beautiful tree," and the North consciously agree with his countryman, the tradesman who told Baron Haxthau- or unconsciously is resisting that process. It is on that ground, and sea that he should like to marry a German woman, because they not on any merit in the poor Government which so feebly manages
worked hard and spent little? the resistance, that we hold the Northern people entitled to all the We doubt whether M. Tourguenef will ever rise above the level sympathies of freemen. he has attained. There is a finish about his portraits which looks The article on " Sunday" will excite no slight controversy, the like the mannerism of a mature artist, and he seems in this last writer bringing great learning and an orthodox temper to the defence work to have drawn on personal experiences, though we would not of the liberal theory of that institution. He argues that the Jewish accuse him of reproducing a private history in detail. The concep- code on the subject cannot. be binding, and that no positive injunc- tion of a strong, silent man, maddened by finding that the woman he tion in favour of Sunday can be found in the Christian law, while loved was worthless, and restored to a nobler life by meeting a better the necessity for such an injunction was clear, the Jewish Sabbath woman, whom God's hand detaches from him at the moment of union, involving an innovation on all existing calendars. This point is, we is so completely beyond the run of ordinary situations, that it almost think, as new as it is well put :
seems as if the man who describes it mast have lived it. In this part " Even in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, custom seems to have of the novel every touch tells. Lavretzky's fate in marriage seems fluctuated, as conflicting influences might determine, between the use of the merely the violent end that waits on all " violent delight," and in Greek Calendar and that of the Latin. Neither of these, as every one knows, the icture of his intercourse with Lisa, and still more in the glimpses
p
month of thirty days, not only among the Athenians but in its other local of his life after parting with her, we recognize little by little that the varieties, proceeded on 'the obvious and convenient arrangement of a threefold noblest part of love is not always its fruition. Again, consciously division into decades. The Roman month had its more complicated arrange- or not, the artist has preserved a moral balance of loss and gain be- ment, ruled by Calends, Nones, and Ides; and side by side with this, in the tween his hero and heroine. Lisa's character wants originative rural districts of Italy, subsisted the old Etruscan system of Nundines. In all this there was nothing to facilitate the introduction of a seventh day festival: power and intuitive tact. Her intercourse with Lavretzky so far nothing to sustain the computation of it, and to give it currency and meaning. elevates her moral perceptions as to save her from all risk of mar- Imposed upon a purely Gentile community such a festival would have entailed riage with the worthless employe, into which otherwise she would an embarrassing disarrangement of ideas, as well as many practical incon- have glided from ignorance, borrowed admiration, and distrust of her veniences. That the Apostles should have enjoined such an observance upon better instincts. 7Elie opportunity of comparing the ring of false such communities is inconceivable except on Sabbatarian grounds; and these metal and true has not been lost on her. Before she is certain that grounds Dr. Hassey has agreed (and, as we think, has most justly agreed) to she loves Lavretzky she has learned to estimate Panchine at his true abandon."
value, and, in spite of her mother's opposition, to dismiss him. Per- haps the convent is not too high a price to pay for her escape.
than one reason : i
" Agafili (her nurse) never quitted her, and it was a curious sight to see them together. Agafia, erect and austere, her spinning in her hand, clothed in
black, with a dark kerchief for head-dress, her face thin and transparent as wax, " What, then, does M. Thiers think of the present Empire? Does he regard but the features always beautiful and expressive, and the child at her feet on a Napoleon the Third as now rebuilding by degrees that fabric of Constitutional stool, working also, or listening, her eyes raised with a serious expression to her Imperialism, as it is termed, which he declares that the Allied Despots so rah- nurse's recitals. Await told her no stories; she used to repeat to her in a lesaly threw down? Does he suppose that Napoleon I., even under the most fa- grave and measured tone the history of the Virgin, of the servants of God, and vourable circumstances, would have given to Europe more peace, or to France of the holy martyrs. She used to describe the life of saints in the desert: how more freedom, than they have obtained from Napoleon III.? If he seeks for a they hallowed themselves in the endurance of hunger and misery, and how, living example of the spirit of the institutions of the Empire, he has only to look without fearing even the emperors, they taught the law of Christ; how the birds around him. Yet by a singular contradiction, N. Thiers is at once the great of heaven brought them food, and the wild beasts listened to them. She told apologist of the Empire in his books, and its antagonist in his political life; so her that the soil, watered with their blood, was covered with flowers; and the that the consistency of his conduct is the condemnation of his opinions." little girl, who loved flowers, asked her then if it was the passion-flower. The Quarterly opens with a life of Shelley which marks strongly Agafea's tone was gentle and serious, and she shared the impression which her powerful and the still more rious pious words produced. Lisa listened to her: the image of the present and all- powerful God was deeply graven in her soul, and filled her with a soft and change in the tone of modern criticism. Time was when Shelley blessed fear. Christ had thus become for her a well-known guest, a being was to the Quarterly what the Papacy is to the Record, an embodi- familiar as a relation. Agafea had taught her to pray to God. Sometimes she meat of moral evil, which it was impious even to discuss except for woke her early, wrapped her up carefully, and took her to matins. Lisa followed the purpose of detailed vituperation. The reviewer to-day describes her, walking stealthily, and holding her breath. The cold and broken light of
him at least with fairness, and, while severe upon the unquestionable the morning, the freshness and emptiness of the church, the secrecy with which
these furtive visits were surrounded, the mysterious return home to be put to blemishes of his life, finds it "impossible not to believe with Moore bed again, all impressed the little girl, and moved the very depths of her being. and De Quincey that he was in reality capable of loving that religion Agafea never chided her; when she was displeased she was silent, and Lisa which he insanely. hated. And we know that, though he saw no understood her silence: she even perceived with the penetration of childhood Divinity in its founder, he had come to understand that it was in
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