August 18, 2025 • 34 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)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter nine, Part two of Partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritabutro's Chapter nine, Part two Ivan Turgenieff. When I made
his acquaintance, he had been living since his removal from Badenbaden,
(00:23):
which took place in consequence of the Franco Prussian War,
in a large detached house on the hill of montmart
with his friends of many years, Madame Pauline Viardot and
her husband as his fellow tenants. He occupied the upper floor,
and I like to recall, for the sake of certain
delightful talks, the aspect of his little green sitting room,
(00:47):
which has in memory the consecration of irrecoverable hours. It
was almost entirely green, and the walls were not covered
with paper, but draped and stuff. The portier were green,
and there was one of those immense divans so indispensable
to Russians, which had apparently been fashioned for the great
(01:10):
person of the Master, so that smaller folk had to
lie upon it rather than sit. I remember the white
light of the Paris street, which came in through windows
more or less blinded in their lower part, like those
of a studio. It rested during the first years that
I went to see Turgenev upon several choice pictures of
(01:34):
the modern French school, especially upon a very fine specimen
of Theodore Rousseau, which he valued exceedingly. He had a
great love of painting, and was an excellent critic of
a picture. The last time I saw him, it was
at his house in the country. He showed me half
a dozen large copies of Italian works made by a
(01:58):
young Russian in whom he was interested it, which he had,
with characteristic kindness, taken into his own apartments in order
that he might bring them to the knowledge of his friends.
He thought them as copies remarkable, and they were so, indeed,
especially when one perceived that the original work of the
(02:19):
artist had little value. Turgenief warmed to the work of
praising them, as he was very apt to do. Like
all men of imagination, he had frequent and zealous admirations.
As a matter of course, there was almost always some
young Russian in whom he was interested, and refugees and
(02:40):
pilgrims of both sexes were his natural clients. I have
heard it said by persons who had known him long
and well that these enthusiasms sometimes led him into error,
that he was apt to simonte la tete on behalf
of his proteges. He was prone to believed that he
(03:00):
had discovered the coming Russian genius. He talked about his
discovery for a month, and then suddenly one heard no
more of it. I remember his once telling me of
a young woman who had come to see him on
her return from America, where she had been studying obstetrics
at some medical college, and who, without means and without friends,
(03:25):
was in want of help and of work. He accidentally
learned that she had written something and asked her to
let him see it. She sent it to him, and
it proved to be a tale in which certain phases
of rural life were described with striking truthfulness. He perceived
in the young lady a great natural talent. He sent
(03:48):
her story off to Russia to be printed, with the
conviction that it would make a great impression, and he
expressed the hope of being able to introduce her to
French reacs. When I mentioned this to an old friend
of Turgeniev, he smiled and said that we should not
hear of her again. That Ivan Sergoyitch had already discovered
(04:12):
a great many surprising talents, which, as a general thing,
had not borne the test. There was apparently some truth
in this, and Turgeniev's liability to be deceived was too
generous a weakness for me to hesitate to allude to it,
even after I have insisted on the usual certainty of
(04:34):
his taste. He was deeply interested in his young Russians.
They were what interested him most in the world. They
were almost always unhappy in want and in rebellion against
an order of things which he himself detested. The study
of the Russian character absorbed and fascinated him, as all
(04:57):
readers of his stories know, which, unformed, undeveloped with all
sorts of adumbrations of qualities, in a state of fusion,
it stretched itself out as a mysterious expanse in which
it was impossible as yet to perceive the relation between
gifts and weaknesses. Of its weaknesses, he was keenly conscious,
(05:22):
and I once heard him express himself with an energy
that did him honor, and a frankness that even surprised me,
considering that it was of his countrymen that he spoke
in regard to a weakness which he deemed the greatest
of all, a weakness for which a man whose love
of veracity was his strongest feeling would have least toleration.
(05:48):
His young compatriots, seeking their fortune in foreign lands, touched
his imagination and his pity, and it is easy to
conceive that, under the circumstances the impression they often made
upon him may have had great intensity. The Parisian background,
with its brilliant sameness, its absence of surprises for those
(06:12):
who have known it long, threw them into relief and
made him see them as he saw the figures in
his tales, in relations, in situations which brought them out.
There passed before him in the course of time, many
wonderful Russian types. He told me once of his having
been visited by a religious sect. The sect consisted of
(06:36):
but two persons, one of whom was the object of worship,
and the other the worshiper. The Divinity, apparently was traveling
about Europe in company with his prophet. They were intensely serious,
but it was very handy, as the term is, for
each The God had always his altar, and the altar had,
(06:59):
unlike some altars, always its God. In his little green salon,
nothing was out of place. There were none of the
odds and ends of the usual man of letters, which
indeed Turgenief was not. And the case was the same
in his library at Bougival, of which I shall presently speak,
(07:21):
few books even were visible. It was as if everything
had been put away, the traces of work had been
carefully removed, an air of great comfort, an immeasurable divan,
and several valuable pictures. That was the effect of the place.
I know not exactly at what hours Turgenief did his work.
(07:44):
I think he had no regular times and seasons, being
in this respect as different as possible from Anthony Trollop,
whose autobiography, with its candid revelation of intellectual economies, is
so curious. It is my impression that in Paris Turgeniev
wrote little, his times of production being rather those weeks
(08:08):
of the summer that he spent at Bougievan and the
period of that visit to Russia which he supposed himself
to make every year. I say supposed himself, because it
was impossible to see much of him without discovering that
he was a man of delays. As on the part
(08:29):
of some other Russians whom I have known. There was
something asiatic in his faculty of procrastination. But even if
one suffered from it a little, one thought of it
with kindness, as a part of his general mildness and
want of rigidity. He went to Russia at any rate,
at intervals not infrequent, and he spoke of these visits
(08:53):
as his best time for production. He had an estate
far in the interior, and here, amid the stillness of
the country and the scenes and figures which give such
a charm to the memoirs of a sportsman, he drove
his pen without interruption. It is not out of place
(09:14):
to allude to the fact that he possessed considerable fortune.
This is too important in the life of a man
of letters. It had been of great value to Turgenief,
and I think that much of the fine quality of
his work is owing to it. He could write according
to his taste and his mood. He was never pressed
(09:37):
nor checked, putting the Russian censorship aside by considerations foreign
to his plan, and never was in danger of becoming
a hack. Indeed, taking into consideration the absence of a
pecuniary spur, and that complicated indolence, from which he was
(09:57):
not exempt. His industry is surprising, for his tales are
a long list. In Paris. At all events, he was
always open to proposals for the midday breakfast. He liked
to breakfast o cabaret, and freely consented to an appointment.
(10:17):
It is not unkind to add that at first he
never kept it. I may mention without reserve this idiosyncrasy
of Turgenievs, because in the first place it was so
inveterate as to be very amusing. It amused not only
his friends but himself. And in the second he was
(10:39):
as sure to come in the end as he was
sure not to come in the beginning. After the appointment
had been made or the invitation accepted, when the occasion
was at hand, there arrived a note or a telegram
in which Ivan Sorguyitch excused himself and begged that the
meeting might be deferred to another date, which he usually
(11:02):
himself proposed for this second date, still another was sometimes substituted.
But if I remember no appointment that he exactly kept,
I remember none that he completely missed. His friends waited
for him frequently, but they never lost him. He was
(11:23):
very fond of that wonderful Parisian de Junee. Fond of it,
I mean as a feast of reason. He was extremely temperate,
and often ate no breakfast at all, but he found
it a good hour for talk and little on general grounds.
As one might be prepared to agree with him. If
(11:44):
he was at the table, one was speedily convinced. I
call it wonderful, the Dejunee of Paris, on account of
the assurance with which it plants itself in the very
middle of the morning. It divides the day between rising
in dinner so unequally, and opposes such barriers of repletion
(12:05):
to any prospect of ulterior labors that the unacclimated stranger
wonders when the fertile French people do their work. Not
the least wonderful part of it is that the stranger
himself likes it at last, and manages to piece together
his day with the shattered fragments that survive. It was
(12:28):
not at any rate, when one had the good fortune
to breakfast at twelve o'clock with Turgenieff, that one was
struck with its being an inconvenient hour. Any hour was
convenient for meeting a human being who conformed so completely
to one's idea of the best that human nature is
(12:48):
capable of. There are places in Paris which I can
think of only in relation to some occasion on which
he was present, and when I pass them, the particular
thing I heard him say, there, come back to me.
There is a cafe in the Avenue de la Prais,
a new sumptuous establishment with very deep settees on the
(13:11):
right as you leave the boulevard, where I once had
a talk with him over an order singularly moderate, which
was prolonged far into the afternoon, and in the course
of which he was extraordinarily suggestive and interesting, so that
my memory now reverts affectionately to all the circumstances. It
(13:33):
evokes the gray damp of a Parisian December, which made
the dark interior of the cafe look more and more
rich and hospitable. While the light faded, the lamps were lit,
the habitues came in to drink absinthe and play their
afternoon game of dominoes, and we still lingered over our
(13:55):
morning meal. Turgeniev talked almost exclusively about Usha the Nihilis,
the remarkable figures that came to light, among them the
curious visits he received, the dark prospects of his native
land when he was in the vein. No man could
speak more to the imagination of his auditor. For myself,
(14:19):
at least at such times, there was something extraordinarily vivifying
and stimulating in his talk, and I always left him
in a state of intimate excitement, with a feeling that
all sorts of valuable things had been suggested to me.
The condition in which a man swings his cane as
he walks, leaps lightly over gutters, and then stops, for
(14:43):
no reason at all, to look with an air of
being struck into a shop window where he sees nothing.
I remember another symposium at a restaurant on one of
the corners of the Little Plus, in front of the
Opera Comique, where we were four, including Ivan Serguyitch, and
(15:04):
the two other guests were also Russian, one of them
uniting to the charm of this nationality, the merit of
a sex that makes the combination irresistible. The establishment had
been a discovery of Turgeniev's, a discovery at least as
far as our particular needs were concerned, And I remember
(15:25):
that we hardly congratulated him on it. The dinner in
a low chos soul was not what it had been
intended to be, but the talk was better even than
our expectations. It was not about nihilism, but about some
more agreeable features of life. And I have no recollection
(15:45):
of Turgeniev in a mood more spontaneous and charming. One
of our friends had when he spoke French, a peculiar
way of sounding the word adorab, which was frequently on
his lips. And I remember well his expressive prolongation of
the a when, in speaking of the occasion afterwards, he
(16:08):
applied this term to ivan Seguyitch. I scarcely know, however,
why I should drop into the detail of such reminiscences.
And my excuse is but the desire that we all
have when a human relationship is closed, to save a
little of it from the past, to make a mark
(16:29):
which may stand for some of the happy moments of it.
Nothing that Turgenev had to say could be more interesting
than his talk about his own work. His manner of
writing what I have heard him tell of these things
was worthy of the beautiful results he produced, of the
(16:49):
deep purpose pervading them all to show us life itself.
The germ of a story with him was never an
affair of plot. That was the last thing he thought of.
It was the representation of certain persons. The first form
in which a tale appeared to him was as the
(17:09):
figure of an individual or a combination of individuals, whom
he wished to see in action, being sure that such
people must do something very special and interesting. They stood
before him, definite, vivid, and he wished to know and
to show as much as possible of their nature. The
(17:32):
first thing was to make clear to himself what he
did know to begin with, and to this end he
wrote out a sort of biography of each of his
characters and everything that they had done and that had
happened to them up to the opening of the story.
He had there dossier, as the French say, and as
(17:53):
the police has of that of every conspicuous criminal. With
this material in his hand, he was able to proceed
the story. All lay in the question what shall I
make them do? He always made them do things that
showed them completely. But as he said, the defect of
(18:14):
his manner and the reproach that was made him was
his want of architecture. In other words, of composition. The
great thing, of course, is to have architecture as well
as precious material, as Walter Scott had them, as Balzac
had them. If one reads Turgeniev's stories with the knowledge
(18:35):
that they were composed, or rather that they came into
being in this way, one can trace the process in
every line story in the conventional sense of the word,
a fable constructed like Wordsworth's phantom to startle and waylay,
there is as little as possible. The thing consists of
(18:58):
the motions of a group of select creatures, which are
not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence
of the qualities of the actors. Works of art are
produced from every possible point of view, and stories, and
very good ones, will continue to be written in which
(19:18):
the evolution is that of a dance, a series of steps,
the more complicated and lively, the better, of course, determined
from without and forming a figure. This figure will always
probably find favor with many readers, because it reminds them
enough without reminding them too much of life. On this opposition,
(19:42):
many young talents in France are ready to rend each other,
for there is a numerous school on either side. We
have not yet in England and America arrived at the
point of treating such questions with passion. For we have
not yet a at the point of feeling them intensely,
(20:03):
or indeed, for that matter, of understanding them very well.
It is not open to us as yet to discuss
whether a novel had better be an excision from life
or a structure built up of picture cards, For we
have not made up our mind as to whether life
in general may be described. There is evidence of a
(20:25):
good deal of shyness on this point, a tendency rather
to put up fences than to jump over them among us. Therefore,
even a certain ridicule attaches to the consideration of such alternatives.
But individuals may feel their way, and perhaps even pass unchallenged,
(20:48):
if they remark that for them the manner in which
Turgenief worked will always seem the most fruitful. It has
the immense recommendation that, in relation to any human occurrence
it begins, as it were further back, it lies in
its power to tell us the most about men and women.
(21:10):
Of course, it will but slenderly satisfy those numerous readers
among whom the answer to this would be hang it
we don't care a straw about men and women. We
want a good story. And yet, after all, Elena is
a good story, and Lisa and Virgin Soil are good stories.
(21:32):
Reading over lately several of Turgenev's novels and tales, I
was struck afresh with their combination of beauty and reality.
One must never forget in speaking of him, that he
was both an observer and a poet. The poetic element
was constant, and it had great strangeness and power. It
(21:56):
inspired most of the short things that he wrote during
the last few years of his life. Since the publication
of Virgin Soil, things that are in the highest degree
fanciful and exotic, it pervades the frequent little reveries, visions,
epigrams of the Senilia. It was no part of my
(22:18):
intention here to criticize his writings, having said my say
about them so far as possible, some years ago. But
I may mention that in rereading them I find in
them all that I formerly found of two other elements,
their richness and their sadness. They give one the impression
(22:39):
of life itself, and not of an arrangement, a rechauffe
of life. I remember Turgenev's once saying, in regard to Home,
the little Norman country Apothecary, with his pedantry of enlightened
opinions in Madame Bovary, that the great strength of such
a portrait consisted in its being at once an individual
(23:03):
of the most concrete sort and a type. This is
the great strength of his own representations of character. They
are so strangely, fascinatingly particular, and yet they are so
recognizably general. Such a remark as that about HOMEI makes
(23:23):
me wonder why it was that Turgenief should have rated
Dickens so high, the weakness of Dickens being in regard
to just that point. If Dickens fail to live long,
it will be because his figures are particular without being general,
because they are individuals without being types, because we do
(23:45):
not feel their continuity with the rest of humanity. See
the matching of the pattern with the piece out of
which all the creations of the novelist and the dramatist
are cut. I often meant, but accidentally neglected, to put
Turgenief on the subject of Dickens again and ask him
(24:06):
to explain his opinion. I suspect that his opinion was
in a large measure merely that Dickens diverted him as
well he might. That complexity of the pattern was in
itself fascinating. I have mentioned Flaubert, and I will return
to him simply to say that there was something very
(24:29):
touching in the nature of the friendship that united these
two men. It is much to the honor of Flaubert,
to my sense, that he appreciated Ivonne Turgenief. There was
a partial similarity between them. Both were large, massive men,
though the Russian reached to a greater height than the Norman.
(24:51):
Both were completely honest and sincere, and both had the
pessimistic element in their composition. Each had a tender regard
for the other. And I think that I am neither
incorrect nor indiscreet in saying that on Turgenev's part this
regard had in it a strain of compassion. There was
(25:14):
something in Gustave Flaubert that appealed to such a feeling.
He had failed on the whole more than he had succeeded,
and the great machinery of erudition, the great polishing process,
which he brought to bear upon his productions, was not
accompanied with proportionate results. He had talent without having cleverness,
(25:39):
and imagination without having fancy. His effort was heroic. But
except in the case of Madame Bovary, a masterpiece, he
imparted something to his works. It was as if he
had covered them with metallic plates, which made them sink
rather than sail. He had a passion for perfection of
(26:02):
form and for a certain splendid suggestiveness of style. He
wished to produce perfect phrases, perfectly interrelated and as closely
woven together as a suit of chain mail. He looked
at life altogether as an artist, and took his work
(26:22):
with a seriousness that never belied itself. To write an
admirable page, and his idea of what constituted an admirable
page was transcendent, seemed to him something to live for.
He tried it again and again, and he came very
near it more than once he touched it. For Madame
(26:45):
Bovarie surely will live. But there was something ungenerous in
his genius. He was cold, and he would have given
everything he had to be able to glow. There is
nothing in his novels like the Passion of Lae for Insarov,
like the purity of Lisa, like the anguish of the
parents of bazarof like the hidden wound of Tatiana. And
(27:10):
yet Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary
to touch the chord of Pathos. There were some parts
of his mind that did not give, that did not
render a sound. He had had too much of some
sorts of experience, and not enough of others. And yet
this failure of an organ, as I may call it,
(27:33):
inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert
was powerful and limited, there was something human after all,
and even rather auguste in a strong man who has
not been able completely to express himself. After the first
year of my acquaintance with Turgeniev, I saw him much
(27:54):
less often. I was seldom in Paris, and sometimes when
I was there, he was absent, But I neglected no
opportunity of seeing him, and fortune frequently assisted me. He
came two or three times to London for visits, provokingly brief.
He went to shoot in Cambridgeshire, and he passed through
(28:16):
town in arriving and departing. He liked the English, but
I am not sure that he liked London, where he
had passed a lugubrious winter in eighteen seventy to eighteen
seventy one. I remember some of his impressions of that period,
especially a visit that he paid to a bishopess surrounded
(28:37):
by her daughters, and a description of the cookery at
the lodgings which he occupied. After eighteen seventy six, I
frequently saw him as an invalid. He was tormented by
gout and sometimes terribly besieged, but his account of what
he suffered was as charming I can apply no other
(28:58):
word to it, as his description of everything else. He
had so the habit of observation, that he perceived in
excruciating sensations all sorts of curious images and analogies, and
to analyze them to an extraordinary fineness. Several times I
found him at Bougival, above the Seine, in a very
(29:22):
spacious and handsome chalet, a little unsunned, it is true,
which he had built alongside of the villa occupied by
the family to which for years his life had been devoted.
The place is delightful. The two houses are midway up
a long slope which descends with the softest inclination to
(29:44):
the river, and behind them The hill rises to a
wooded crest on the left. In the distance, high up
and above a horizon of woods stretches the romantic aqueduct
of Marly. It is a very pretty dom. The last
time I saw him in November eighteen eighty two, it
(30:05):
was at Bougival. He had been very ill with strange
and tolerable symptoms, but he was better, and he had
good hopes. They were not justified by the event he
got worse again, and the months that followed were cruel.
His beautiful, serene mind should not have been darkened and
(30:26):
made acquaintance with violence. It should have been able to
the last to take part as it had always done
in the decrees and mysteries of fate. At the moment
I saw him, however, he was, as they say in London,
in very good form, and my last impression of him
was almost bright. He was to drive into Paris, not
(30:50):
being able to bear the railway, and he gave me
a seat in the carriage for an hour and a half.
He constantly talked, and never better. When we got into
the city, I alighted on the Boulevard Exterieur. As we
were to go in different directions. I bade him good
bye at the carriage window, and never saw him again.
(31:13):
There was a kind of fare going on near by,
in the chill November air, beneath the denuded little trees
of the boulevard, and a punch and judy show, from
which nasal sounds proceeded. I almost regret having accidentally to
mix up so much of Paris with this perhaps too
complaisant enumeration of occasions, for the effect of it may
(31:37):
be to suggest that ivan Tergeniev had been Gallicized. But
this was not the case. The French capital was an
accident for him, not a necessity. It touched him at
many points, but it left him alone at many others,
And he had, with that great tradition of ventilation of
(31:57):
the Russian mind, windows open into distances which stretched far
beyond the Banlieux. I have spoken of him from the
limited point of view of my own acquaintance with him,
and unfortunately left myself little space to allude to a
matter which filled his existence a good deal more than
(32:19):
the consideration of how a story should be written, his
hopes and fears on behalf of his native land. He
wrote fictions and dramas, but the great drama of his
life was the struggle for a better state of things
in Russia. In this drama he played a distinguished part,
and the splendid obsequies that simple and modest as he was,
(32:43):
have unfolded themselves over his grave sufficiently attests the recognition
of it by his countrymen. His funeral, restricted and officialized,
was none the less a magnificent manifestation. I have read
the counts of it, however, with a kind of chill,
a feeling in which assent to the honors paid him
(33:06):
bore less part than it ought. All this pomp and
ceremony seemed to lift him out of the range of
familiar recollection, of valued reciprocity, into the majestic position of
a national glory. And yet it is in the presence
of this obstacle to social contact that those who knew
(33:27):
and loved him must address their farewell to him. Now,
after all, it is difficult to see how the obstacle
can be removed. He was the most generous, the most tender,
the most delightful of men. His large nature overflowed with
the love of justice. But he also was of the
(33:48):
stuff of which glories are made. Eighteen eighty four, end
of Chapter nine, Part two, Ivan Turgenev
Chapter nine, Part two of Partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritabutro's Chapter nine, Part two Ivan Turgenieff. When I made
his acquaintance, he had been living since his removal from Badenbaden,
(00:23):
which took place in consequence of the Franco Prussian War,
in a large detached house on the hill of montmart
with his friends of many years, Madame Pauline Viardot and
her husband as his fellow tenants. He occupied the upper floor,
and I like to recall, for the sake of certain
delightful talks, the aspect of his little green sitting room,
(00:47):
which has in memory the consecration of irrecoverable hours. It
was almost entirely green, and the walls were not covered
with paper, but draped and stuff. The portier were green,
and there was one of those immense divans so indispensable
to Russians, which had apparently been fashioned for the great
(01:10):
person of the Master, so that smaller folk had to
lie upon it rather than sit. I remember the white
light of the Paris street, which came in through windows
more or less blinded in their lower part, like those
of a studio. It rested during the first years that
I went to see Turgenev upon several choice pictures of
(01:34):
the modern French school, especially upon a very fine specimen
of Theodore Rousseau, which he valued exceedingly. He had a
great love of painting, and was an excellent critic of
a picture. The last time I saw him, it was
at his house in the country. He showed me half
a dozen large copies of Italian works made by a
(01:58):
young Russian in whom he was interested it, which he had,
with characteristic kindness, taken into his own apartments in order
that he might bring them to the knowledge of his friends.
He thought them as copies remarkable, and they were so, indeed,
especially when one perceived that the original work of the
(02:19):
artist had little value. Turgenief warmed to the work of
praising them, as he was very apt to do. Like
all men of imagination, he had frequent and zealous admirations.
As a matter of course, there was almost always some
young Russian in whom he was interested, and refugees and
(02:40):
pilgrims of both sexes were his natural clients. I have
heard it said by persons who had known him long
and well that these enthusiasms sometimes led him into error,
that he was apt to simonte la tete on behalf
of his proteges. He was prone to believed that he
(03:00):
had discovered the coming Russian genius. He talked about his
discovery for a month, and then suddenly one heard no
more of it. I remember his once telling me of
a young woman who had come to see him on
her return from America, where she had been studying obstetrics
at some medical college, and who, without means and without friends,
(03:25):
was in want of help and of work. He accidentally
learned that she had written something and asked her to
let him see it. She sent it to him, and
it proved to be a tale in which certain phases
of rural life were described with striking truthfulness. He perceived
in the young lady a great natural talent. He sent
(03:48):
her story off to Russia to be printed, with the
conviction that it would make a great impression, and he
expressed the hope of being able to introduce her to
French reacs. When I mentioned this to an old friend
of Turgeniev, he smiled and said that we should not
hear of her again. That Ivan Sergoyitch had already discovered
(04:12):
a great many surprising talents, which, as a general thing,
had not borne the test. There was apparently some truth
in this, and Turgeniev's liability to be deceived was too
generous a weakness for me to hesitate to allude to it,
even after I have insisted on the usual certainty of
(04:34):
his taste. He was deeply interested in his young Russians.
They were what interested him most in the world. They
were almost always unhappy in want and in rebellion against
an order of things which he himself detested. The study
of the Russian character absorbed and fascinated him, as all
(04:57):
readers of his stories know, which, unformed, undeveloped with all
sorts of adumbrations of qualities, in a state of fusion,
it stretched itself out as a mysterious expanse in which
it was impossible as yet to perceive the relation between
gifts and weaknesses. Of its weaknesses, he was keenly conscious,
(05:22):
and I once heard him express himself with an energy
that did him honor, and a frankness that even surprised me,
considering that it was of his countrymen that he spoke
in regard to a weakness which he deemed the greatest
of all, a weakness for which a man whose love
of veracity was his strongest feeling would have least toleration.
(05:48):
His young compatriots, seeking their fortune in foreign lands, touched
his imagination and his pity, and it is easy to
conceive that, under the circumstances the impression they often made
upon him may have had great intensity. The Parisian background,
with its brilliant sameness, its absence of surprises for those
(06:12):
who have known it long, threw them into relief and
made him see them as he saw the figures in
his tales, in relations, in situations which brought them out.
There passed before him in the course of time, many
wonderful Russian types. He told me once of his having
been visited by a religious sect. The sect consisted of
(06:36):
but two persons, one of whom was the object of worship,
and the other the worshiper. The Divinity, apparently was traveling
about Europe in company with his prophet. They were intensely serious,
but it was very handy, as the term is, for
each The God had always his altar, and the altar had,
(06:59):
unlike some altars, always its God. In his little green salon,
nothing was out of place. There were none of the
odds and ends of the usual man of letters, which
indeed Turgenief was not. And the case was the same
in his library at Bougival, of which I shall presently speak,
(07:21):
few books even were visible. It was as if everything
had been put away, the traces of work had been
carefully removed, an air of great comfort, an immeasurable divan,
and several valuable pictures. That was the effect of the place.
I know not exactly at what hours Turgenief did his work.
(07:44):
I think he had no regular times and seasons, being
in this respect as different as possible from Anthony Trollop,
whose autobiography, with its candid revelation of intellectual economies, is
so curious. It is my impression that in Paris Turgeniev
wrote little, his times of production being rather those weeks
(08:08):
of the summer that he spent at Bougievan and the
period of that visit to Russia which he supposed himself
to make every year. I say supposed himself, because it
was impossible to see much of him without discovering that
he was a man of delays. As on the part
(08:29):
of some other Russians whom I have known. There was
something asiatic in his faculty of procrastination. But even if
one suffered from it a little, one thought of it
with kindness, as a part of his general mildness and
want of rigidity. He went to Russia at any rate,
at intervals not infrequent, and he spoke of these visits
(08:53):
as his best time for production. He had an estate
far in the interior, and here, amid the stillness of
the country and the scenes and figures which give such
a charm to the memoirs of a sportsman, he drove
his pen without interruption. It is not out of place
(09:14):
to allude to the fact that he possessed considerable fortune.
This is too important in the life of a man
of letters. It had been of great value to Turgenief,
and I think that much of the fine quality of
his work is owing to it. He could write according
to his taste and his mood. He was never pressed
(09:37):
nor checked, putting the Russian censorship aside by considerations foreign
to his plan, and never was in danger of becoming
a hack. Indeed, taking into consideration the absence of a
pecuniary spur, and that complicated indolence, from which he was
(09:57):
not exempt. His industry is surprising, for his tales are
a long list. In Paris. At all events, he was
always open to proposals for the midday breakfast. He liked
to breakfast o cabaret, and freely consented to an appointment.
(10:17):
It is not unkind to add that at first he
never kept it. I may mention without reserve this idiosyncrasy
of Turgenievs, because in the first place it was so
inveterate as to be very amusing. It amused not only
his friends but himself. And in the second he was
(10:39):
as sure to come in the end as he was
sure not to come in the beginning. After the appointment
had been made or the invitation accepted, when the occasion
was at hand, there arrived a note or a telegram
in which Ivan Sorguyitch excused himself and begged that the
meeting might be deferred to another date, which he usually
(11:02):
himself proposed for this second date, still another was sometimes substituted.
But if I remember no appointment that he exactly kept,
I remember none that he completely missed. His friends waited
for him frequently, but they never lost him. He was
(11:23):
very fond of that wonderful Parisian de Junee. Fond of it,
I mean as a feast of reason. He was extremely temperate,
and often ate no breakfast at all, but he found
it a good hour for talk and little on general grounds.
As one might be prepared to agree with him. If
(11:44):
he was at the table, one was speedily convinced. I
call it wonderful, the Dejunee of Paris, on account of
the assurance with which it plants itself in the very
middle of the morning. It divides the day between rising
in dinner so unequally, and opposes such barriers of repletion
(12:05):
to any prospect of ulterior labors that the unacclimated stranger
wonders when the fertile French people do their work. Not
the least wonderful part of it is that the stranger
himself likes it at last, and manages to piece together
his day with the shattered fragments that survive. It was
(12:28):
not at any rate, when one had the good fortune
to breakfast at twelve o'clock with Turgenieff, that one was
struck with its being an inconvenient hour. Any hour was
convenient for meeting a human being who conformed so completely
to one's idea of the best that human nature is
(12:48):
capable of. There are places in Paris which I can
think of only in relation to some occasion on which
he was present, and when I pass them, the particular
thing I heard him say, there, come back to me.
There is a cafe in the Avenue de la Prais,
a new sumptuous establishment with very deep settees on the
(13:11):
right as you leave the boulevard, where I once had
a talk with him over an order singularly moderate, which
was prolonged far into the afternoon, and in the course
of which he was extraordinarily suggestive and interesting, so that
my memory now reverts affectionately to all the circumstances. It
(13:33):
evokes the gray damp of a Parisian December, which made
the dark interior of the cafe look more and more
rich and hospitable. While the light faded, the lamps were lit,
the habitues came in to drink absinthe and play their
afternoon game of dominoes, and we still lingered over our
(13:55):
morning meal. Turgeniev talked almost exclusively about Usha the Nihilis,
the remarkable figures that came to light, among them the
curious visits he received, the dark prospects of his native
land when he was in the vein. No man could
speak more to the imagination of his auditor. For myself,
(14:19):
at least at such times, there was something extraordinarily vivifying
and stimulating in his talk, and I always left him
in a state of intimate excitement, with a feeling that
all sorts of valuable things had been suggested to me.
The condition in which a man swings his cane as
he walks, leaps lightly over gutters, and then stops, for
(14:43):
no reason at all, to look with an air of
being struck into a shop window where he sees nothing.
I remember another symposium at a restaurant on one of
the corners of the Little Plus, in front of the
Opera Comique, where we were four, including Ivan Serguyitch, and
(15:04):
the two other guests were also Russian, one of them
uniting to the charm of this nationality, the merit of
a sex that makes the combination irresistible. The establishment had
been a discovery of Turgeniev's, a discovery at least as
far as our particular needs were concerned, And I remember
(15:25):
that we hardly congratulated him on it. The dinner in
a low chos soul was not what it had been
intended to be, but the talk was better even than
our expectations. It was not about nihilism, but about some
more agreeable features of life. And I have no recollection
(15:45):
of Turgeniev in a mood more spontaneous and charming. One
of our friends had when he spoke French, a peculiar
way of sounding the word adorab, which was frequently on
his lips. And I remember well his expressive prolongation of
the a when, in speaking of the occasion afterwards, he
(16:08):
applied this term to ivan Seguyitch. I scarcely know, however,
why I should drop into the detail of such reminiscences.
And my excuse is but the desire that we all
have when a human relationship is closed, to save a
little of it from the past, to make a mark
(16:29):
which may stand for some of the happy moments of it.
Nothing that Turgenev had to say could be more interesting
than his talk about his own work. His manner of
writing what I have heard him tell of these things
was worthy of the beautiful results he produced, of the
(16:49):
deep purpose pervading them all to show us life itself.
The germ of a story with him was never an
affair of plot. That was the last thing he thought of.
It was the representation of certain persons. The first form
in which a tale appeared to him was as the
(17:09):
figure of an individual or a combination of individuals, whom
he wished to see in action, being sure that such
people must do something very special and interesting. They stood
before him, definite, vivid, and he wished to know and
to show as much as possible of their nature. The
(17:32):
first thing was to make clear to himself what he
did know to begin with, and to this end he
wrote out a sort of biography of each of his
characters and everything that they had done and that had
happened to them up to the opening of the story.
He had there dossier, as the French say, and as
(17:53):
the police has of that of every conspicuous criminal. With
this material in his hand, he was able to proceed
the story. All lay in the question what shall I
make them do? He always made them do things that
showed them completely. But as he said, the defect of
(18:14):
his manner and the reproach that was made him was
his want of architecture. In other words, of composition. The
great thing, of course, is to have architecture as well
as precious material, as Walter Scott had them, as Balzac
had them. If one reads Turgeniev's stories with the knowledge
(18:35):
that they were composed, or rather that they came into
being in this way, one can trace the process in
every line story in the conventional sense of the word,
a fable constructed like Wordsworth's phantom to startle and waylay,
there is as little as possible. The thing consists of
(18:58):
the motions of a group of select creatures, which are
not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence
of the qualities of the actors. Works of art are
produced from every possible point of view, and stories, and
very good ones, will continue to be written in which
(19:18):
the evolution is that of a dance, a series of steps,
the more complicated and lively, the better, of course, determined
from without and forming a figure. This figure will always
probably find favor with many readers, because it reminds them
enough without reminding them too much of life. On this opposition,
(19:42):
many young talents in France are ready to rend each other,
for there is a numerous school on either side. We
have not yet in England and America arrived at the
point of treating such questions with passion. For we have
not yet a at the point of feeling them intensely,
(20:03):
or indeed, for that matter, of understanding them very well.
It is not open to us as yet to discuss
whether a novel had better be an excision from life
or a structure built up of picture cards, For we
have not made up our mind as to whether life
in general may be described. There is evidence of a
(20:25):
good deal of shyness on this point, a tendency rather
to put up fences than to jump over them among us. Therefore,
even a certain ridicule attaches to the consideration of such alternatives.
But individuals may feel their way, and perhaps even pass unchallenged,
(20:48):
if they remark that for them the manner in which
Turgenief worked will always seem the most fruitful. It has
the immense recommendation that, in relation to any human occurrence
it begins, as it were further back, it lies in
its power to tell us the most about men and women.
(21:10):
Of course, it will but slenderly satisfy those numerous readers
among whom the answer to this would be hang it
we don't care a straw about men and women. We
want a good story. And yet, after all, Elena is
a good story, and Lisa and Virgin Soil are good stories.
(21:32):
Reading over lately several of Turgenev's novels and tales, I
was struck afresh with their combination of beauty and reality.
One must never forget in speaking of him, that he
was both an observer and a poet. The poetic element
was constant, and it had great strangeness and power. It
(21:56):
inspired most of the short things that he wrote during
the last few years of his life. Since the publication
of Virgin Soil, things that are in the highest degree
fanciful and exotic, it pervades the frequent little reveries, visions,
epigrams of the Senilia. It was no part of my
(22:18):
intention here to criticize his writings, having said my say
about them so far as possible, some years ago. But
I may mention that in rereading them I find in
them all that I formerly found of two other elements,
their richness and their sadness. They give one the impression
(22:39):
of life itself, and not of an arrangement, a rechauffe
of life. I remember Turgenev's once saying, in regard to Home,
the little Norman country Apothecary, with his pedantry of enlightened
opinions in Madame Bovary, that the great strength of such
a portrait consisted in its being at once an individual
(23:03):
of the most concrete sort and a type. This is
the great strength of his own representations of character. They
are so strangely, fascinatingly particular, and yet they are so
recognizably general. Such a remark as that about HOMEI makes
(23:23):
me wonder why it was that Turgenief should have rated
Dickens so high, the weakness of Dickens being in regard
to just that point. If Dickens fail to live long,
it will be because his figures are particular without being general,
because they are individuals without being types, because we do
(23:45):
not feel their continuity with the rest of humanity. See
the matching of the pattern with the piece out of
which all the creations of the novelist and the dramatist
are cut. I often meant, but accidentally neglected, to put
Turgenief on the subject of Dickens again and ask him
(24:06):
to explain his opinion. I suspect that his opinion was
in a large measure merely that Dickens diverted him as
well he might. That complexity of the pattern was in
itself fascinating. I have mentioned Flaubert, and I will return
to him simply to say that there was something very
(24:29):
touching in the nature of the friendship that united these
two men. It is much to the honor of Flaubert,
to my sense, that he appreciated Ivonne Turgenief. There was
a partial similarity between them. Both were large, massive men,
though the Russian reached to a greater height than the Norman.
(24:51):
Both were completely honest and sincere, and both had the
pessimistic element in their composition. Each had a tender regard
for the other. And I think that I am neither
incorrect nor indiscreet in saying that on Turgenev's part this
regard had in it a strain of compassion. There was
(25:14):
something in Gustave Flaubert that appealed to such a feeling.
He had failed on the whole more than he had succeeded,
and the great machinery of erudition, the great polishing process,
which he brought to bear upon his productions, was not
accompanied with proportionate results. He had talent without having cleverness,
(25:39):
and imagination without having fancy. His effort was heroic. But
except in the case of Madame Bovary, a masterpiece, he
imparted something to his works. It was as if he
had covered them with metallic plates, which made them sink
rather than sail. He had a passion for perfection of
(26:02):
form and for a certain splendid suggestiveness of style. He
wished to produce perfect phrases, perfectly interrelated and as closely
woven together as a suit of chain mail. He looked
at life altogether as an artist, and took his work
(26:22):
with a seriousness that never belied itself. To write an
admirable page, and his idea of what constituted an admirable
page was transcendent, seemed to him something to live for.
He tried it again and again, and he came very
near it more than once he touched it. For Madame
(26:45):
Bovarie surely will live. But there was something ungenerous in
his genius. He was cold, and he would have given
everything he had to be able to glow. There is
nothing in his novels like the Passion of Lae for Insarov,
like the purity of Lisa, like the anguish of the
parents of bazarof like the hidden wound of Tatiana. And
(27:10):
yet Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary
to touch the chord of Pathos. There were some parts
of his mind that did not give, that did not
render a sound. He had had too much of some
sorts of experience, and not enough of others. And yet
this failure of an organ, as I may call it,
(27:33):
inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert
was powerful and limited, there was something human after all,
and even rather auguste in a strong man who has
not been able completely to express himself. After the first
year of my acquaintance with Turgeniev, I saw him much
(27:54):
less often. I was seldom in Paris, and sometimes when
I was there, he was absent, But I neglected no
opportunity of seeing him, and fortune frequently assisted me. He
came two or three times to London for visits, provokingly brief.
He went to shoot in Cambridgeshire, and he passed through
(28:16):
town in arriving and departing. He liked the English, but
I am not sure that he liked London, where he
had passed a lugubrious winter in eighteen seventy to eighteen
seventy one. I remember some of his impressions of that period,
especially a visit that he paid to a bishopess surrounded
(28:37):
by her daughters, and a description of the cookery at
the lodgings which he occupied. After eighteen seventy six, I
frequently saw him as an invalid. He was tormented by
gout and sometimes terribly besieged, but his account of what
he suffered was as charming I can apply no other
(28:58):
word to it, as his description of everything else. He
had so the habit of observation, that he perceived in
excruciating sensations all sorts of curious images and analogies, and
to analyze them to an extraordinary fineness. Several times I
found him at Bougival, above the Seine, in a very
(29:22):
spacious and handsome chalet, a little unsunned, it is true,
which he had built alongside of the villa occupied by
the family to which for years his life had been devoted.
The place is delightful. The two houses are midway up
a long slope which descends with the softest inclination to
(29:44):
the river, and behind them The hill rises to a
wooded crest on the left. In the distance, high up
and above a horizon of woods stretches the romantic aqueduct
of Marly. It is a very pretty dom. The last
time I saw him in November eighteen eighty two, it
(30:05):
was at Bougival. He had been very ill with strange
and tolerable symptoms, but he was better, and he had
good hopes. They were not justified by the event he
got worse again, and the months that followed were cruel.
His beautiful, serene mind should not have been darkened and
(30:26):
made acquaintance with violence. It should have been able to
the last to take part as it had always done
in the decrees and mysteries of fate. At the moment
I saw him, however, he was, as they say in London,
in very good form, and my last impression of him
was almost bright. He was to drive into Paris, not
(30:50):
being able to bear the railway, and he gave me
a seat in the carriage for an hour and a half.
He constantly talked, and never better. When we got into
the city, I alighted on the Boulevard Exterieur. As we
were to go in different directions. I bade him good
bye at the carriage window, and never saw him again.
(31:13):
There was a kind of fare going on near by,
in the chill November air, beneath the denuded little trees
of the boulevard, and a punch and judy show, from
which nasal sounds proceeded. I almost regret having accidentally to
mix up so much of Paris with this perhaps too
complaisant enumeration of occasions, for the effect of it may
(31:37):
be to suggest that ivan Tergeniev had been Gallicized. But
this was not the case. The French capital was an
accident for him, not a necessity. It touched him at
many points, but it left him alone at many others,
And he had, with that great tradition of ventilation of
(31:57):
the Russian mind, windows open into distances which stretched far
beyond the Banlieux. I have spoken of him from the
limited point of view of my own acquaintance with him,
and unfortunately left myself little space to allude to a
matter which filled his existence a good deal more than
(32:19):
the consideration of how a story should be written, his
hopes and fears on behalf of his native land. He
wrote fictions and dramas, but the great drama of his
life was the struggle for a better state of things
in Russia. In this drama he played a distinguished part,
and the splendid obsequies that simple and modest as he was,
(32:43):
have unfolded themselves over his grave sufficiently attests the recognition
of it by his countrymen. His funeral, restricted and officialized,
was none the less a magnificent manifestation. I have read
the counts of it, however, with a kind of chill,
a feeling in which assent to the honors paid him
(33:06):
bore less part than it ought. All this pomp and
ceremony seemed to lift him out of the range of
familiar recollection, of valued reciprocity, into the majestic position of
a national glory. And yet it is in the presence
of this obstacle to social contact that those who knew
(33:27):
and loved him must address their farewell to him. Now,
after all, it is difficult to see how the obstacle
can be removed. He was the most generous, the most tender,
the most delightful of men. His large nature overflowed with
the love of justice. But he also was of the
(33:48):
stuff of which glories are made. Eighteen eighty four, end
of Chapter nine, Part two, Ivan Turgenev
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2
Season Two Out Now! Law & Order: Criminal Justice System tells the real stories behind the landmark cases that have shaped how the most dangerous and influential criminals in America are prosecuted. In its second season, the series tackles the threat of terrorism in the United States. From the rise of extremist political groups in the 60s to domestic lone wolves in the modern day, we explore how organizations like the FBI and Joint Terrorism Take Force have evolved to fight back against a multitude of terrorist threats.