August 18, 2025 • 30 mins
In Partial Portraits, acclaimed writer Henry James offers a fascinating exploration into the lives and works of a remarkable array of literary figures, some of whom he knew personally. Delve into the creative minds of legends like Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Alphonse Daudet, Guy De Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev, and George du Maurier. This insightful narrative reveals the rich tapestry of their inspirations and artistic journeys. (Summary by Rita Boutros)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter nine, Part one of partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritobutro's Chapter nine Part one Ivan Turgenief. When the mortal
remains of Ivan Turgeniev were about to be transported from
(00:24):
Paris for interment in his own country, a short commemorative
service was held at the guer du nord Ernest Renan,
and Edmond d About, standing beside the train in which
his coffin had been placed, bade farewell in the name
of the French people to the illustrious stranger who for
(00:45):
so many years had been their honored and grateful guest.
Monsieur Renon made a beautiful speech, and Monsieur about a
very clever one, and each of them characterized with ingenuity
the genius and the moral nature of the most touching
of writers, the most lovable of men. Turgeniev said, Monsieur
(01:09):
noun received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations,
the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was
born essentially impersonal. The passage is so eloquent that one
must repeat the whole of it. His conscience was not
(01:29):
that of an individual to whom nature had been more
or less generous. It was, in some sort the conscience
of a people. Before he was born, he had lived
for thousands of years, infinite successions of reveries had amassed
themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has
(01:50):
been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race.
Generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries speechless,
came through him to life and utterance. I quote these
lines for the pleasure of quoting them, For while I
see what Monsieur Reynand means by calling turgeneef impersonal, it
(02:14):
has been my wish to devote to his delightful memory
a few pages written under the impression of contact and intercourse.
He seems to us impersonal, because it is from his
writings almost alone, that we of English, French and German
speech have derived our notions. Even yet, I fear rather
(02:38):
meager and erroneous of the Russian people. His genius for
us is the slav genius. His voice, the voice of
those vaguely imagined multitudes whom we think of more and
more to day as waiting their turn in the arena
of civilization. In the gray expanses of the Norse. There
(03:01):
is much in his writings to encourage this view, and
it is certain that he interpreted with wonderful vividness the
temperament of his fellow countrymen cosmopolite, that he had become
by the force of circumstances. His roots had never been
loosened in his native soil. The ignorance with regard to
(03:24):
Russia and the Russians, which he found in abundance in
the rest of Europe, and not least in the country
he inhabited for ten years before his death, had indeed
the effect to a certain degree, to throw him back
upon the deep feelings which so many of his companions
were unable to share with him, the memories of his
(03:48):
early years, the sense of wide Russian horizons, the joy
and pride of his mother tongue. In the collection of
short pieces so deeply interesting, written during the last few
years of his life, and translated into German under the
name of Senilia, I find a passage. It is the
(04:10):
last in a little book, which illustrates perfectly this reactionary impulse.
In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought, on
the destiny of my native land. Thou alone art, my
support and my staff, O great powerful Russian tongue, truthful
(04:31):
and free. If it were not for thee, how should
man not despair at the sight of what is going
on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a
language has not been given to a great people. This
Muscovite home loving note pervades his productions. Though it is
(04:52):
between the lines, as it were, that we must listen
for it. None the less does it remain true that
he he was not a simple conduit or mouthpiece. The
inspiration was his own as well as the voice. He
was an individual, in other words, of the most unmistakable kind,
(05:13):
and those who had the happiness to know him have
no difficulty to day in thinking of him as an eminent,
responsible figure. This pleasure for the writer of these lines
was as great as the pleasure of reading the admirable
tales into which he put such a world of life
(05:33):
and feeling. It was perhaps even greater, for it was
not only with the pen that nature had given Turgenev
the power to express himself. He was the richest, the
most delightful of talkers, and his face, his person, his temper,
the thoroughness with which he had been equipped for human intercourse,
(05:57):
make in the memory of his friends, an image which
is completed, but not thrown into the shade by his
literary distinction. The whole image is tinted with sadness, partly
because the element of melancholy in his nature was deep
and constant. Readers of his novels have no need to
(06:19):
be told of that, and partly because during the last
years of his life he had been condemned to suffer
atrociously intolerable pain had been his portion for too many
months before he died. His end was not a soft decline,
but a deepening distress, but of brightness of the faculty
(06:42):
of enjoyment. He had also the large allowance usually made
to first rate men, and he was a singularly complete
human being. The author of these pages had greatly admired
his writings before having the fortune to make his acquaintance,
and this privilege, when it presented itself, was highly illuminating.
(07:07):
The man and the writer together occupied from that moment
a very high place in his affection. Some time before
knowing him, I committed to print certain reflections which his
tales had led me to make, and I may perhaps therefore,
without impropriety, give them a supplement which shall have a
(07:30):
more vivifying reference. It is almost irresistible to attempt to
say from one's own point of view what manner of
man he was. It was in consequence of the article
I just mentioned that I found reason to meet him
in Paris, where he was then living, in eighteen seventy five.
(07:52):
I shall never forget the impression he made upon me
at that first interview. I found him adorable. I could
scarcely believe that he would prove that any man could
prove on nearer acquaintance, so delightful as that nearer acquaintance
only confirmed my hope, and he remained the most approachable,
(08:14):
the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius. It
had been my fortune to meet. He was so simple,
so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension, and
of what is called the consciousness of powers, that one
almost doubted at moments whether he were a man of genius.
(08:37):
After all, everything good and fruitful lay near to him.
He was interested in everything, and he was absolutely without
that eagerness of self reference which sometimes accompanies great and
even small reputations. He had not a particle of vanity,
(08:58):
nothing whatever of the of having a part to play
or a reputation to keep up. His humor exercised itself
as freely upon himself as upon other subjects, and he
told stories at his own expense, with a sweetness of hilarity,
which made his peculiarities really sacred in the eyes of
(09:21):
a friend. I remember vividly the smile and tone of
voice with which he once repeated to me a figurative
epithet which Gustave Flaubert, of whom he was extremely fond,
had applied to him, an epithet intended to characterize a
certain expansive softness, a comprehensive indecision, which pervaded his nature,
(09:47):
just as it pervades so many of the characters he
has painted. He enjoyed Flaubert's use of this term good
naturedly opprobrious, more even than Flaubert himself, and recognized perfectly
the element of truth in it. He was natural to
(10:07):
an extraordinary degree. I do not think I have ever
seen his match in this respect, certainly not among people
who bear as he did. At the same time, the
stamp of the highest cultivation, Like all men of a
large pattern. He was composed of many different pieces, and
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what was always striking in him was the mixture of
simplicity with the fruit of the most various observation. In
the little article in which I had attempted to express
my admiration for his works, I had been moved to
say of him that he had the aristocratic temperament, a
(10:49):
remark which, in the light of further knowledge, seemed to
me singularly inane. He was not subject to any definition
of that sort, and to say that he was democratic
would be though his political ideal was a democracy, to
give an equally superficial account of him, He felt and
(11:11):
understood the opposite sides of life. He was imaginative, speculative,
anything but literal. He had not in his mind a
grain of prejudice as large as the point of a needle.
And people, there are many who think this a defect,
would have missed it immensely. In Ivan Sergoyitch, I give
(11:35):
his name without attempting the Russian orthography, as it was
uttered by his friends when they addressed him. In French,
Our Anglo Saxon Protestant moralistic conventional standards were far away
from him, and he judged things with a freedom and
spontaneity in which I found a perpetual refreshment. His sense
(12:00):
of beauty, his love of truth and right were the
foundation of his nature. But half the charm of conversation
with him was that one breathed an air in which
cant phrases and arbitrary measurements simply sounded ridiculous. I may
add that it was not because I had written a
(12:21):
laudatory article about his books that he gave me a
friendly welcome, For in the first place, my article could
have very little importance for him, and in the second
it had never been either his habit or his hope
to bask in the light of criticism. Supremely modest as
(12:41):
he was, I think he attached no great weight to
what might happen to be said about him, for he
felt that he was destined to encounter a very small
amount of intelligent appreciation, especially in foreign countries. I never
heard him even alone to any judgment which might have
(13:02):
been passed upon his productions in England. In France, he
knew that he was read very moderately. The demand for
his volumes was small, and he had no illusions whatever
on the subject of his popularity. He had heard with
pleasure that many intelligent persons in the United States were
(13:25):
impatient for everything that might come from his pen. But
I think he was never convinced, as one or two
of the more zealous of these persons had endeavored to
convince him that he could boast of a public in America.
He gave me the impression of thinking of criticism as
(13:46):
most serious workers think of it, that it is the amusement,
the exercise the subsistence of the critic, and so far
as this goes of immense use. But that though it
may often concern other readers, it does not much concern
the artist himself in comparison with all those things which
(14:08):
the production of a considered work forces the artist little
by little to say to himself. The remarks of the
critic are vague and of the moment, and yet owing
to the large publicity of the proceeding, they have a
power to irritate or discourage, which is quite out of
proportion to their use to the person criticized. It was
(14:33):
not moreover, if this explanation be not more gross than
the specter, it is meant to conjure away on account
of any esteem which he accorded to my own productions.
I used regularly to send them to him that I
found him so agreeable, for to the best of my belief,
(14:53):
he was unable to read them. As regards one of
the first that I had offered him, he wrote me
a little note to tell me that a distinguished friend
who was his constant companion, had read three or four
chapters aloud to him the evening before, and that one
of them was written demand d'emete. This gave me great pleasure,
(15:17):
but it was my first and last pleasure of the kind.
I continued, as I say, to send him my fictions,
because they were the only thing I had to give.
But he never alluded to the rest of the work
in question, which he evidently did not finish, and never
gave any sign of having read its successors. Presently, I
(15:40):
quite ceased to expect this, and saw why it was.
It interested me much that my writings could not appeal
to him. He cared more than anything else for the
air of reality, and my reality was not to the purpose.
I do not think my story struck him as quite
(16:01):
meet for men. The manner was more apparent than the matter.
They were too. Tarabiscote as I once heard him say,
of the style of a book had on the surface
too many little flowers and knots of ribbon. He had
read a great deal of English, and knew the language
remarkably well, too well, I used often to think, for
(16:25):
he liked to speak it with those to whom it
was native, and successful, as the effort always was, it
deprived him of the facility and raciness with which he
expressed himself in French. I have said that he had
no prejudices, but perhaps after all he had won. I
(16:46):
think he imagined it to be impossible to a person
of English speech to converse in French with complete correctness.
He knew Shakespeare thoroughly, and at one time had wandered
far and wide in English literature. His opportunities for speaking
English were not at all frequent, so that when the necessity,
(17:09):
or at least the occasion, presented itself, he remembered the
phrases he had encountered in books. This often gave a
charming quaintness and an unexpected literary turn to what he
said in Russia in spring, if you enter a beechen grove,
those words come back to me from the last time
(17:31):
I saw him. He continued to read English books and
was not incapable of attacking the usual talknitz Novel. The
English writer of our day, of whom I remember to
have heard him speak with most admiration, was Dickens, of
whose faults he was conscious, but whose power of presenting
(17:53):
to the eye a vivid, salient figure he rated very high.
In the young French school. He was much interested, I mean,
in the new votaries of Realism, the grandsons of Balzac.
He was a good friend of most of them, and
with Gustave Flaubert, the most singular and most original of
(18:16):
the group, he was altogether intimate. He had his reservations
and discriminations, and he had above all the great back
garden of his slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into
which the door constantly stood open. And the grandsons of
Balzac were not, I think particularly free to accompany him,
(18:41):
but he had much sympathy with their experiment, their general movement,
and it was on the side of the careful study
of life as the best line of the novelist, that,
as may easily be supposed, he ranged himself for some
of the manifestations of the opposite tradition. He had a
(19:02):
great contempt. This was a kind of emotion he rarely expressed,
save in regard to certain public wrongs and iniquities. Bitterness
and denunciation seldom passed his mild lips. But I remember
well the little flush of conviction, the seriousness with which
(19:23):
he once said, in allusion to a novel which had
just been running through the Revue de dumand if I
had written anything so bad as that, I should blush
for it all my life. His was not, I should say, predominantly,
or even in a high degree, the artistic nature, though
(19:45):
it was deeply, if I may make the distinction, the poetic.
But during the last twelve years of his life he
lived much with artists and men of letters, and he
was eminently capable of kindling in the glow of discussion.
He cared for questions of form, though not in the
degree in which Flaubert and Edmond de jan Corts cared
(20:08):
for them, and he had very lively sympathies. He had
a great regard for Madame George Sand, the head in
front of the old romantic tradition, but this was on
general grounds, quite independent of her novels, which he never read,
and which she never expected him, or apparently any one
(20:30):
else to read. He thought her character remarkably noble and sincere.
He had, as I have said, a great affection for
Gustave Flaubert, who returned it, and he was much interested
in Flaubert's extraordinary attempts at bravery of form and of matter,
knowing perfectly well when they failed. During those months which
(20:54):
it was Flaubert's habit to spend in Paris, Turgeniev went
almost regularly to see him on Sunday afternoon, and was
so good as to introduce me to the author of
Madame Bovary, in whom I saw many reasons for Turgeniev's regard.
It was on these Sundays in Flaubert's little salon, which
(21:17):
at the top of a house at the end of
the Faubourg Saint Honorey, looked rather bare and provisional, that
in the company of the other familiars of the spot,
more than one of whom have commemorated these occasions, Turgeniev's
beautiful faculty of talk showed at its best. He was easy, natural, abundant,
(21:41):
more than I can describe, and everything that he said
was touched with the exquisite quality of his imagination. What
was discussed in that little smoke clouded room was chiefly
questions of taste, questions of art and form, and the speaker,
for the most part, were in esthetic matters, radicals of
(22:04):
the deepest dye. It would have been late in the
day to propose among them any discussion of the relation
of art to morality, any question as to the degree
in which a novel might or might not concern itself
with the teaching of a lesson. They had settled these
preliminaries long ago, and it would have been primitive and
(22:28):
incongruous to recur to them. The conviction that held them
together was the conviction that art and morality are two
perfectly different things, and that the former has no more
to do with the latter than it has with astronomy
or embryology. The only duty of a novel was to
(22:49):
be well written, that merit included every other of which
it was capable. This state of mind was never more
apparent than one afternoon, when sey Monsieur delivered themselves on
the subject of an incident which had just befallen one
of them. Lest some nois of Emil Zola had been
(23:11):
discontinued in the journal through which it was running as
a serial, in consequence of repeated protests from the subscribers.
The subscriber, as a type of human imbecility, received a
wonderful dressing, and the philistine in general was roughly handled.
There were gulfs of difference between Turgenief and Zola, but Turgeniev,
(23:37):
who as I say, understood everything, understood Zola too, and
rendered perfect justice to the high solidity of much of
his work. His attitude at such times was admirable, and
I could imagine nothing more genial or more fitted to
give an idea of light, easy human intelligence. No one
(24:00):
could desire more than he that art should be art, always,
ever incorruptibly art. To him, this proposition would have seemed
as little in need of proof or susceptible of refutation
as the axiom that law should always be law, or
medicine always medicine. As much as any one, he was
(24:25):
prepared to take note of the fact that the demand
for abdications and concessions never comes from artists themselves, but
always from purchasers, editors, subscribers. I am pretty sure that
his word about all this would have been that he
could not quite see what was meant by the talk
(24:46):
about novels being moral or the reverse, that a novel
could no more propose to itself to be moral than
a painting or a symphony, and that it was arbitrary
to lay down a distinction between the numerous forms of art.
He was the last man to be blind to their unity.
(25:08):
I suspect that he would have said, in short, that
distinctions were demanded in the interest of the moralists, and
that the demand was indelicate, owing to their want of jurisdiction.
Yet at the same time that I make this suggestion
as to his state of mind, I remember how little
(25:28):
he struck me as bound by mere neatness of formula,
how little there was in him of the partisan or
the pleader what he thought of the relation of art
to life. His stories, after all, show better than anything else,
the immense variety of life was ever present to his mind,
(25:50):
and he would never have argued the question I have
just hinted at in the interest of particular liberties, the
liberties that were apparently the dearest to his French confrere.
It was this air that he carried about with him,
of feeling all the variety of life, of knowing strange
(26:10):
and far off things, of having an horizon in which
the Parisian horizon, so familiar, so wanting in mystery, so
perpetually exploitais easily lost itself. That distinguished him from these companions.
He was not all there, as the phrase is. He
(26:30):
had something behind in reserve. It was Russia, of course,
in a large measure, and especially before the spectacle of
what is going on there to day, that was a
large quantity. But so far as he was on the spot,
he was an element of pure sociability. I did not
(26:51):
intend to go into these details immediately, for I had
only begun to say what an impression of magnificent man
he made upon me when I first knew him. That
impression indeed always remained with me even after it had
been brought home to me how much there was in
him of the quality of genius. He was a beautiful intellect,
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of course, but above all he was a delightful, mild,
masculine figure. The combination of his deep, soft, lovable spirit,
in which one felt all the tender parts of genius,
with his immense, fair Russian physique, was one of the
most attractive things conceivable. He had a frame which would
(27:37):
have made it perfectly lawful and even becoming for him
to be brutal, But there was not a grain of
brutality in his composition. He had always been a passionate sportsman.
To wander in the woods or the steps with his
dog and gun was the pleasure of his heart. Late
(27:58):
in life he continued to shoot, and he had a
friend in Cambridgeshire, for the sake of whose partridges, which
were famous, he used sometimes to cross the Channel. It
would have been impossible to imagine a better representation of
a Nimrod of the North. He was exceedingly tall and
(28:18):
broad and robust in proportion. His head was one of
the finest, and though the line of his features was irregular,
there was a great deal of beauty in his face.
It was eminently of the Russian type. Almost everything in
it was wide. His expression had a singular sweetness with
(28:38):
a touch of slav languor, and his eye, the kindest
of eyes, was deep and melancholy. His hair, abundant and straight,
was as white as silver, and his beard, which he
wore trimmed rather short, was of the color of his
hair in all his tall person, which was very striking.
(29:00):
Wherever it appeared, there was an air of neglected strength,
as if it had been a part of his modesty.
Never to remind himself that he was strong, he used
sometimes to blush like a boy of sixteen. He had
very few forms and ceremonies, and almost as little manner
(29:20):
as was possible to a man of his natural preestincts.
His noble appearance was in itself a manner. But whatever
he did he did very simply, and he had not
the slightest pretension to not being subject to rectification. I
never saw anyone receive it with less irritation, friendly, candid,
(29:44):
unaffectedly benign it. The impression that he produced, most strongly
and most generally was I think simply that of goodness.
End of Chapter nine, Part one, ivan Tergeniev
Chapter nine, Part one of partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritobutro's Chapter nine Part one Ivan Turgenief. When the mortal
remains of Ivan Turgeniev were about to be transported from
(00:24):
Paris for interment in his own country, a short commemorative
service was held at the guer du nord Ernest Renan,
and Edmond d About, standing beside the train in which
his coffin had been placed, bade farewell in the name
of the French people to the illustrious stranger who for
(00:45):
so many years had been their honored and grateful guest.
Monsieur Renon made a beautiful speech, and Monsieur about a
very clever one, and each of them characterized with ingenuity
the genius and the moral nature of the most touching
of writers, the most lovable of men. Turgeniev said, Monsieur
(01:09):
noun received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations,
the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was
born essentially impersonal. The passage is so eloquent that one
must repeat the whole of it. His conscience was not
(01:29):
that of an individual to whom nature had been more
or less generous. It was, in some sort the conscience
of a people. Before he was born, he had lived
for thousands of years, infinite successions of reveries had amassed
themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has
(01:50):
been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race.
Generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries speechless,
came through him to life and utterance. I quote these
lines for the pleasure of quoting them, For while I
see what Monsieur Reynand means by calling turgeneef impersonal, it
(02:14):
has been my wish to devote to his delightful memory
a few pages written under the impression of contact and intercourse.
He seems to us impersonal, because it is from his
writings almost alone, that we of English, French and German
speech have derived our notions. Even yet, I fear rather
(02:38):
meager and erroneous of the Russian people. His genius for
us is the slav genius. His voice, the voice of
those vaguely imagined multitudes whom we think of more and
more to day as waiting their turn in the arena
of civilization. In the gray expanses of the Norse. There
(03:01):
is much in his writings to encourage this view, and
it is certain that he interpreted with wonderful vividness the
temperament of his fellow countrymen cosmopolite, that he had become
by the force of circumstances. His roots had never been
loosened in his native soil. The ignorance with regard to
(03:24):
Russia and the Russians, which he found in abundance in
the rest of Europe, and not least in the country
he inhabited for ten years before his death, had indeed
the effect to a certain degree, to throw him back
upon the deep feelings which so many of his companions
were unable to share with him, the memories of his
(03:48):
early years, the sense of wide Russian horizons, the joy
and pride of his mother tongue. In the collection of
short pieces so deeply interesting, written during the last few
years of his life, and translated into German under the
name of Senilia, I find a passage. It is the
(04:10):
last in a little book, which illustrates perfectly this reactionary impulse.
In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought, on
the destiny of my native land. Thou alone art, my
support and my staff, O great powerful Russian tongue, truthful
(04:31):
and free. If it were not for thee, how should
man not despair at the sight of what is going
on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a
language has not been given to a great people. This
Muscovite home loving note pervades his productions. Though it is
(04:52):
between the lines, as it were, that we must listen
for it. None the less does it remain true that
he he was not a simple conduit or mouthpiece. The
inspiration was his own as well as the voice. He
was an individual, in other words, of the most unmistakable kind,
(05:13):
and those who had the happiness to know him have
no difficulty to day in thinking of him as an eminent,
responsible figure. This pleasure for the writer of these lines
was as great as the pleasure of reading the admirable
tales into which he put such a world of life
(05:33):
and feeling. It was perhaps even greater, for it was
not only with the pen that nature had given Turgenev
the power to express himself. He was the richest, the
most delightful of talkers, and his face, his person, his temper,
the thoroughness with which he had been equipped for human intercourse,
(05:57):
make in the memory of his friends, an image which
is completed, but not thrown into the shade by his
literary distinction. The whole image is tinted with sadness, partly
because the element of melancholy in his nature was deep
and constant. Readers of his novels have no need to
(06:19):
be told of that, and partly because during the last
years of his life he had been condemned to suffer
atrociously intolerable pain had been his portion for too many
months before he died. His end was not a soft decline,
but a deepening distress, but of brightness of the faculty
(06:42):
of enjoyment. He had also the large allowance usually made
to first rate men, and he was a singularly complete
human being. The author of these pages had greatly admired
his writings before having the fortune to make his acquaintance,
and this privilege, when it presented itself, was highly illuminating.
(07:07):
The man and the writer together occupied from that moment
a very high place in his affection. Some time before
knowing him, I committed to print certain reflections which his
tales had led me to make, and I may perhaps therefore,
without impropriety, give them a supplement which shall have a
(07:30):
more vivifying reference. It is almost irresistible to attempt to
say from one's own point of view what manner of
man he was. It was in consequence of the article
I just mentioned that I found reason to meet him
in Paris, where he was then living, in eighteen seventy five.
(07:52):
I shall never forget the impression he made upon me
at that first interview. I found him adorable. I could
scarcely believe that he would prove that any man could
prove on nearer acquaintance, so delightful as that nearer acquaintance
only confirmed my hope, and he remained the most approachable,
(08:14):
the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius. It
had been my fortune to meet. He was so simple,
so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension, and
of what is called the consciousness of powers, that one
almost doubted at moments whether he were a man of genius.
(08:37):
After all, everything good and fruitful lay near to him.
He was interested in everything, and he was absolutely without
that eagerness of self reference which sometimes accompanies great and
even small reputations. He had not a particle of vanity,
(08:58):
nothing whatever of the of having a part to play
or a reputation to keep up. His humor exercised itself
as freely upon himself as upon other subjects, and he
told stories at his own expense, with a sweetness of hilarity,
which made his peculiarities really sacred in the eyes of
(09:21):
a friend. I remember vividly the smile and tone of
voice with which he once repeated to me a figurative
epithet which Gustave Flaubert, of whom he was extremely fond,
had applied to him, an epithet intended to characterize a
certain expansive softness, a comprehensive indecision, which pervaded his nature,
(09:47):
just as it pervades so many of the characters he
has painted. He enjoyed Flaubert's use of this term good
naturedly opprobrious, more even than Flaubert himself, and recognized perfectly
the element of truth in it. He was natural to
(10:07):
an extraordinary degree. I do not think I have ever
seen his match in this respect, certainly not among people
who bear as he did. At the same time, the
stamp of the highest cultivation, Like all men of a
large pattern. He was composed of many different pieces, and
(10:28):
what was always striking in him was the mixture of
simplicity with the fruit of the most various observation. In
the little article in which I had attempted to express
my admiration for his works, I had been moved to
say of him that he had the aristocratic temperament, a
(10:49):
remark which, in the light of further knowledge, seemed to
me singularly inane. He was not subject to any definition
of that sort, and to say that he was democratic
would be though his political ideal was a democracy, to
give an equally superficial account of him, He felt and
(11:11):
understood the opposite sides of life. He was imaginative, speculative,
anything but literal. He had not in his mind a
grain of prejudice as large as the point of a needle.
And people, there are many who think this a defect,
would have missed it immensely. In Ivan Sergoyitch, I give
(11:35):
his name without attempting the Russian orthography, as it was
uttered by his friends when they addressed him. In French,
Our Anglo Saxon Protestant moralistic conventional standards were far away
from him, and he judged things with a freedom and
spontaneity in which I found a perpetual refreshment. His sense
(12:00):
of beauty, his love of truth and right were the
foundation of his nature. But half the charm of conversation
with him was that one breathed an air in which
cant phrases and arbitrary measurements simply sounded ridiculous. I may
add that it was not because I had written a
(12:21):
laudatory article about his books that he gave me a
friendly welcome, For in the first place, my article could
have very little importance for him, and in the second
it had never been either his habit or his hope
to bask in the light of criticism. Supremely modest as
(12:41):
he was, I think he attached no great weight to
what might happen to be said about him, for he
felt that he was destined to encounter a very small
amount of intelligent appreciation, especially in foreign countries. I never
heard him even alone to any judgment which might have
(13:02):
been passed upon his productions in England. In France, he
knew that he was read very moderately. The demand for
his volumes was small, and he had no illusions whatever
on the subject of his popularity. He had heard with
pleasure that many intelligent persons in the United States were
(13:25):
impatient for everything that might come from his pen. But
I think he was never convinced, as one or two
of the more zealous of these persons had endeavored to
convince him that he could boast of a public in America.
He gave me the impression of thinking of criticism as
(13:46):
most serious workers think of it, that it is the amusement,
the exercise the subsistence of the critic, and so far
as this goes of immense use. But that though it
may often concern other readers, it does not much concern
the artist himself in comparison with all those things which
(14:08):
the production of a considered work forces the artist little
by little to say to himself. The remarks of the
critic are vague and of the moment, and yet owing
to the large publicity of the proceeding, they have a
power to irritate or discourage, which is quite out of
proportion to their use to the person criticized. It was
(14:33):
not moreover, if this explanation be not more gross than
the specter, it is meant to conjure away on account
of any esteem which he accorded to my own productions.
I used regularly to send them to him that I
found him so agreeable, for to the best of my belief,
(14:53):
he was unable to read them. As regards one of
the first that I had offered him, he wrote me
a little note to tell me that a distinguished friend
who was his constant companion, had read three or four
chapters aloud to him the evening before, and that one
of them was written demand d'emete. This gave me great pleasure,
(15:17):
but it was my first and last pleasure of the kind.
I continued, as I say, to send him my fictions,
because they were the only thing I had to give.
But he never alluded to the rest of the work
in question, which he evidently did not finish, and never
gave any sign of having read its successors. Presently, I
(15:40):
quite ceased to expect this, and saw why it was.
It interested me much that my writings could not appeal
to him. He cared more than anything else for the
air of reality, and my reality was not to the purpose.
I do not think my story struck him as quite
(16:01):
meet for men. The manner was more apparent than the matter.
They were too. Tarabiscote as I once heard him say,
of the style of a book had on the surface
too many little flowers and knots of ribbon. He had
read a great deal of English, and knew the language
remarkably well, too well, I used often to think, for
(16:25):
he liked to speak it with those to whom it
was native, and successful, as the effort always was, it
deprived him of the facility and raciness with which he
expressed himself in French. I have said that he had
no prejudices, but perhaps after all he had won. I
(16:46):
think he imagined it to be impossible to a person
of English speech to converse in French with complete correctness.
He knew Shakespeare thoroughly, and at one time had wandered
far and wide in English literature. His opportunities for speaking
English were not at all frequent, so that when the necessity,
(17:09):
or at least the occasion, presented itself, he remembered the
phrases he had encountered in books. This often gave a
charming quaintness and an unexpected literary turn to what he
said in Russia in spring, if you enter a beechen grove,
those words come back to me from the last time
(17:31):
I saw him. He continued to read English books and
was not incapable of attacking the usual talknitz Novel. The
English writer of our day, of whom I remember to
have heard him speak with most admiration, was Dickens, of
whose faults he was conscious, but whose power of presenting
(17:53):
to the eye a vivid, salient figure he rated very high.
In the young French school. He was much interested, I mean,
in the new votaries of Realism, the grandsons of Balzac.
He was a good friend of most of them, and
with Gustave Flaubert, the most singular and most original of
(18:16):
the group, he was altogether intimate. He had his reservations
and discriminations, and he had above all the great back
garden of his slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into
which the door constantly stood open. And the grandsons of
Balzac were not, I think particularly free to accompany him,
(18:41):
but he had much sympathy with their experiment, their general movement,
and it was on the side of the careful study
of life as the best line of the novelist, that,
as may easily be supposed, he ranged himself for some
of the manifestations of the opposite tradition. He had a
(19:02):
great contempt. This was a kind of emotion he rarely expressed,
save in regard to certain public wrongs and iniquities. Bitterness
and denunciation seldom passed his mild lips. But I remember
well the little flush of conviction, the seriousness with which
(19:23):
he once said, in allusion to a novel which had
just been running through the Revue de dumand if I
had written anything so bad as that, I should blush
for it all my life. His was not, I should say, predominantly,
or even in a high degree, the artistic nature, though
(19:45):
it was deeply, if I may make the distinction, the poetic.
But during the last twelve years of his life he
lived much with artists and men of letters, and he
was eminently capable of kindling in the glow of discussion.
He cared for questions of form, though not in the
degree in which Flaubert and Edmond de jan Corts cared
(20:08):
for them, and he had very lively sympathies. He had
a great regard for Madame George Sand, the head in
front of the old romantic tradition, but this was on
general grounds, quite independent of her novels, which he never read,
and which she never expected him, or apparently any one
(20:30):
else to read. He thought her character remarkably noble and sincere.
He had, as I have said, a great affection for
Gustave Flaubert, who returned it, and he was much interested
in Flaubert's extraordinary attempts at bravery of form and of matter,
knowing perfectly well when they failed. During those months which
(20:54):
it was Flaubert's habit to spend in Paris, Turgeniev went
almost regularly to see him on Sunday afternoon, and was
so good as to introduce me to the author of
Madame Bovary, in whom I saw many reasons for Turgeniev's regard.
It was on these Sundays in Flaubert's little salon, which
(21:17):
at the top of a house at the end of
the Faubourg Saint Honorey, looked rather bare and provisional, that
in the company of the other familiars of the spot,
more than one of whom have commemorated these occasions, Turgeniev's
beautiful faculty of talk showed at its best. He was easy, natural, abundant,
(21:41):
more than I can describe, and everything that he said
was touched with the exquisite quality of his imagination. What
was discussed in that little smoke clouded room was chiefly
questions of taste, questions of art and form, and the speaker,
for the most part, were in esthetic matters, radicals of
(22:04):
the deepest dye. It would have been late in the
day to propose among them any discussion of the relation
of art to morality, any question as to the degree
in which a novel might or might not concern itself
with the teaching of a lesson. They had settled these
preliminaries long ago, and it would have been primitive and
(22:28):
incongruous to recur to them. The conviction that held them
together was the conviction that art and morality are two
perfectly different things, and that the former has no more
to do with the latter than it has with astronomy
or embryology. The only duty of a novel was to
(22:49):
be well written, that merit included every other of which
it was capable. This state of mind was never more
apparent than one afternoon, when sey Monsieur delivered themselves on
the subject of an incident which had just befallen one
of them. Lest some nois of Emil Zola had been
(23:11):
discontinued in the journal through which it was running as
a serial, in consequence of repeated protests from the subscribers.
The subscriber, as a type of human imbecility, received a
wonderful dressing, and the philistine in general was roughly handled.
There were gulfs of difference between Turgenief and Zola, but Turgeniev,
(23:37):
who as I say, understood everything, understood Zola too, and
rendered perfect justice to the high solidity of much of
his work. His attitude at such times was admirable, and
I could imagine nothing more genial or more fitted to
give an idea of light, easy human intelligence. No one
(24:00):
could desire more than he that art should be art, always,
ever incorruptibly art. To him, this proposition would have seemed
as little in need of proof or susceptible of refutation
as the axiom that law should always be law, or
medicine always medicine. As much as any one, he was
(24:25):
prepared to take note of the fact that the demand
for abdications and concessions never comes from artists themselves, but
always from purchasers, editors, subscribers. I am pretty sure that
his word about all this would have been that he
could not quite see what was meant by the talk
(24:46):
about novels being moral or the reverse, that a novel
could no more propose to itself to be moral than
a painting or a symphony, and that it was arbitrary
to lay down a distinction between the numerous forms of art.
He was the last man to be blind to their unity.
(25:08):
I suspect that he would have said, in short, that
distinctions were demanded in the interest of the moralists, and
that the demand was indelicate, owing to their want of jurisdiction.
Yet at the same time that I make this suggestion
as to his state of mind, I remember how little
(25:28):
he struck me as bound by mere neatness of formula,
how little there was in him of the partisan or
the pleader what he thought of the relation of art
to life. His stories, after all, show better than anything else,
the immense variety of life was ever present to his mind,
(25:50):
and he would never have argued the question I have
just hinted at in the interest of particular liberties, the
liberties that were apparently the dearest to his French confrere.
It was this air that he carried about with him,
of feeling all the variety of life, of knowing strange
(26:10):
and far off things, of having an horizon in which
the Parisian horizon, so familiar, so wanting in mystery, so
perpetually exploitais easily lost itself. That distinguished him from these companions.
He was not all there, as the phrase is. He
(26:30):
had something behind in reserve. It was Russia, of course,
in a large measure, and especially before the spectacle of
what is going on there to day, that was a
large quantity. But so far as he was on the spot,
he was an element of pure sociability. I did not
(26:51):
intend to go into these details immediately, for I had
only begun to say what an impression of magnificent man
he made upon me when I first knew him. That
impression indeed always remained with me even after it had
been brought home to me how much there was in
him of the quality of genius. He was a beautiful intellect,
(27:15):
of course, but above all he was a delightful, mild,
masculine figure. The combination of his deep, soft, lovable spirit,
in which one felt all the tender parts of genius,
with his immense, fair Russian physique, was one of the
most attractive things conceivable. He had a frame which would
(27:37):
have made it perfectly lawful and even becoming for him
to be brutal, But there was not a grain of
brutality in his composition. He had always been a passionate sportsman.
To wander in the woods or the steps with his
dog and gun was the pleasure of his heart. Late
(27:58):
in life he continued to shoot, and he had a
friend in Cambridgeshire, for the sake of whose partridges, which
were famous, he used sometimes to cross the Channel. It
would have been impossible to imagine a better representation of
a Nimrod of the North. He was exceedingly tall and
(28:18):
broad and robust in proportion. His head was one of
the finest, and though the line of his features was irregular,
there was a great deal of beauty in his face.
It was eminently of the Russian type. Almost everything in
it was wide. His expression had a singular sweetness with
(28:38):
a touch of slav languor, and his eye, the kindest
of eyes, was deep and melancholy. His hair, abundant and straight,
was as white as silver, and his beard, which he
wore trimmed rather short, was of the color of his
hair in all his tall person, which was very striking.
(29:00):
Wherever it appeared, there was an air of neglected strength,
as if it had been a part of his modesty.
Never to remind himself that he was strong, he used
sometimes to blush like a boy of sixteen. He had
very few forms and ceremonies, and almost as little manner
(29:20):
as was possible to a man of his natural preestincts.
His noble appearance was in itself a manner. But whatever
he did he did very simply, and he had not
the slightest pretension to not being subject to rectification. I
never saw anyone receive it with less irritation, friendly, candid,
(29:44):
unaffectedly benign it. The impression that he produced, most strongly
and most generally was I think simply that of goodness.
End of Chapter nine, Part one, ivan Tergeniev
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