Book IV.

MODERN RUSSIAN REALISM.

I.

Turguenief, Poet and Artist.

In reviewing the development of the School of Realists founded by Nicholas Gogol, I shall begin with the one among his followers and descendants who is not merely the first in chronological order, but the most intelligible and sympathetic of the Russian novelists, Ivan Turguenief.

The name of Turguenief has long been well known in Russia. In 1854, before the novelist made his appearance, Humboldt said to a member of this family, "The name you bear commands the highest respect and esteem in this country." Alexander Turguenief was a savant, and the originator of a new style of historiography, in which he revealed traces of the communicative and cosmopolitan instincts that distinguish his nephew beyond other novelists of his country, for he--the uncle--courted acquaintance with many of the most eminent men of Europe, among them Walter Scott. Another member of the family, Nicholaï Turguenief, was a statesman who found himself obliged to reside in foreign lands on account of political vicissitudes; he had the honor of preceding his nephew Ivan in the advocacy of serf-emancipation.

Ivan was the son of a country gentleman, and his real education began among the heathery hills and in the company of indefatigable hunters, whose stories, colored by the blaze of the camp-fire, were transcribed afterward by Ivan's wonderful pen. His intellect was awakened and formed in Berlin, where he ranged through the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and, as he expresses it, threw himself head-first into the ocean of German thought and came out purified and regenerated for the rest of his life. Is it not wonderful,--the power of this German philosophy, which, though it seems but a chilly and lugubrious labyrinth, gives a new temper to a mind of fine and artistic quality, like the Toledo blade thrust into the cold bath, or Achilles after washing in the waters of the Styx? As scholasticism gave a strange power to the poetry of Dante, so German metaphysics seems to give wings to the imagination in our times. Those artist writers (like Zola, for example) who have not wandered through this dark forest seem to lack a certain tension in their mental vigor, a certain tone in their artistic spectrum!

Russian youth, about the year 1838, had their Mecca in the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin, of which Hegel held one chair; and there the future celebrities of Russia were wont to meet. On leaving that radiant atmosphere of ideas and returning to his country home in Russia, Turguenief was overcome by the inevitable melancholy which attacks the man who leaves civilization behind with its intellectual brightness and activity, and enters a land where, according to the words of the hero of "Virgin Soil," "everything sleeps but the wine-shop." This feeling of nostalgia the novelist has analyzed with a master hand in the pages of "The Nobles' Nest."[1]

Hungry for wider horizons and for a literary life and atmosphere, Turguenief went to St. Petersburg. All the intellect of the time was grouped about Bielinsky, who was a rare critic, and its sentiments were voiced by a periodical called the "Contemporary." Bielinsky, who had adopted the pessimist theory that Russian art could never exist until there was political emancipation, was obliged to acknowledge the indisputable worth of Turguenief's first efforts, and encouraged him to publish some excellent sketches in a collection entitled "Papers of a Sportsman." Contrary to Bielinsky's prediction, Turguenief's success was the greater because, with that exquisite artistic intuition which he alone of all Russian writers possesses, he preached no moral and taught no lesson in it, which was the fashion or rather the pest of the novel in those days.

Turguenief again went abroad soon after and spent some time in Paris, where he finished the "Diary" and wrote "The Nobles' Nest." On his return to Russia he wrote a clever criticism on the "Dead Souls," of Gogol, whom he ventured to call a great man; and this called down upon his head the ire of the police and banishment to his estates, which punishment was not reprieved until the death of Nicholas and the war of the Crimea changed the aspect of everything in Russia.

Notwithstanding the unjustifiable severity with which he was treated on this occasion, Turguenief cherished no grievance or thought of revenge in his heart. It is one of the most beautiful and attractive traits in the amiable character of this man, that he could always preserve his serenity of soul in the midst of the distractions occasioned him by two equally violent parties each equally determined to embitter his life if he did not consent to embrace it. He stood in the gulf that separates the two halves of Russia, yet he maintained that contemplative and thoughtful attitude which Victor Hugo ascribes to all true thinkers and poets. Urged by family traditions and by the natural equilibrium of his mind to give the preference (in comparing Russia with the rest of Europe) to Western civilization, he protested, with the courage born of conviction, against the blind vanity of the so-called National Party of Moscow, which, while it demanded the liberation of the serfs, was determined to create a new national condition which should be wholly Sclavonic, and would tread under foot every vestige of foreign culture. With equal vigor, but with a fine tact and nothing of effeminacy or æsthetic repugnance, he protested also against the vandalism of the nihilists, whose propositions were set forth in a clever caricature in a satirical paper shortly after the explosion in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. It represented the meeting of two nihilists amid a heap of ruins. One asks, "Is everything gone up?" "No," replies the other, "the planet still exists." "Blow it to pieces, then!" exclaims the first. Yet Turguenief, who was by no means what we should call a conservative, seeing that he lent his aid to the emancipation of the serfs, was far from approving the new revolutionary barbarism.

Those of Turguenief's works which are best known and most discussed are consequently those which attack the ignominy of serfdom or the threats of revolutionary terror. In the first category may be mentioned "The Diary of a Hunter" and most of his exquisite short stories; in the second, "Fathers and Sons," a view of speculative nihilism, "Virgin Soil," the active side of the same, and "Smoke," a harsh satire on the exclusiveness and fanaticism of the Nationals, which cost him his popularity and made him innumerable enemies. I will speak more at length of each of these, and it is in no sense a digression from Turguenief's biography to do so; for the life of this amiable dreamer and delicate poet is to be found in his books, and in the trials which he endured on their account.

The first lengthy novel of Turguenief is "Demetrius Rudine," a type which might have served as the model for Alphonse Daudet's "Numa Roumestan," a study of one of those complex characters, endowed with great aspirations and apparently rich faculties, but who lack force of will, and have no definite aim or career in view. "The Nobles' Nest" is to the rest of Turguenief's works what the hour of supreme and tenderest emotion that even the hardest hearts must bow to some time is to human life as a whole; in none of his works, save perhaps in "Living Relics," has Turguenief shown more depth of sentiment. The latter is a tear of compassion crystallized and set in gold; the former is a tragedy of happiness held before the eyes and then lost sight of, like the blue sky seen through a rent in the clouds and then covered over with a leaden and interminable veil. The hero is a Russian gentleman or small proprietary nobleman, named Lawretsky, who, deceived and betrayed by his wife, returns to his patrimonial estates, there to hide his dejection and loneliness. Amid these scenes of honest, simple provincial life he meets with a cousin who is young, beautiful, and open-hearted, and who captures his heart. There is a rumor that his wife has died, and a hope of future happiness begins to revive in him; but the aforesaid deceased lady resuscitates, and makes her appearance, demanding with hypocritical humility her place beneath the conjugal roof, and the other poor girl retires to a convent. It is almost a sacrilege to extract the bare plot of the story in this way, for it is thus made to seem a mere vulgar complication, feeble and colorless. But the charm lies in the manner of presenting this simple drama; the novelist seems to hold a glass before our eyes through which we see the palpitations of these bruised and suffering hearts. The background is worthy of the figures on it. The description of provincial customs, the country, and the last chapter especially, are the perfection of art in the way of novel-writing. It is said that "The Nobles' Nest" produced in Russia an effect comparable only to that of "Paul and Virginia" in France.

Then came the great change in Russia: serfdom was no more! and Turguenief, leaving these touching love-stories, threw himself into the new turmoil, and gave himself up to the study of the struggle between the new state of society and the old, which resulted in the novel, "Fathers and Sons." This book contains the pictures of two generations, and each one, says Mérimée, shrewdly, found the portrait of the other well drawn, but called Heaven to witness that that of himself was a caricature; and the cry of the fathers was exceeded by that of the sons, personified in the character of the positivist, Bazarof.

Two old country gentlefolk, a physician and his wife, represent the elder generation, the society of yesterday, and two students the society and generation of to-day. Bazarof is the leader, the ruling spirit of the two latter; the novelist has given him so much vivacity that we seem to hear him, to see his long, withered face, his broad brows, his great greenish eyes, and the prominent bulges on his heavy skull. I have seen such types as this many a time in the streets and alleys of the Latin Quarter, which is the lurking-place of Russian refugees in Paris, and I have said to myself, "There goes a Bazarof, exiled and half dead with hunger, and yet perhaps more eager to set off a few pounds of dynamite under the Grand Opera-House than to breakfast!"

Bazarof, however, is not yet the nihilist who wishes to make a political system out of robbery and assassination, and to defend his theory in learned treatises; he is a young fellow smarting and burning under the contemplation of his country's sad state, and whom the knowledge got by his studies in medicine, natural sciences, and German materialist dogmas has made the bitterest and most intolerable of mortals, throwing away his gifts of intellect and his heart's best and most generous impulses. By reason of his energy of character and intellectual force, he takes the lead over his companion Arcadio, an enthusiastic and unsophisticated boy; and the novel begins with the return of the latter to his father's country-house in company with his adored leader. The two generations then find themselves face to face, two atheistical and demagogic young students, and Arcadio's father and uncle, conservative and ceremonious old men; the shock is immediate and terrible. Bazarof, with his mania for dissecting frogs, his negligent dress, his harsh and dogmatic replies, his coarse frankness, and his odor of drugs and cheap tobacco, inspires antipathy from the first moment, and he is himself made more captious than usual by the appearance of the uncle, Paul, an elegant and distinguished-looking man, who preserves the traditions of French culture, dresses with the utmost care, has a taste for all that is refined and poetical, and wears such finger-nails as, says Bazarof, "would be worth sending to the Exposition." The contrast is as lively as it is curious; every motion, every breath, produces conflict and augments the discord. Arcadio, under his friend's influence, finds a thousand ways to annoy his elders; he sees his father reading a volume of Puchkine, and snatches it out of his hands, giving him instead the ninth edition of "Force and Matter." And after all the poor boy really cannot follow the hard, harsh ideas of Bazarof; but he is so completely under the latter's control, and looks upon him with so much respect and awe, and stands in such fear of his ridicule, that he hides his most innocent and natural sentiments as though they were sinful, and dares not even confess the pleasure he feels at sight of the country and his native village.

"What sort of fellow is your friend Bazarof?" Arcadio's father and uncle inquire of him.

"He is a nihilist," is the response.

"That word must come from the Latin _nihil_," says the father, "and must mean a man that acknowledges and respects nothing."

"It means a man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," says Arcadio, proudly.

Criticism, pitiless analysis, barren and overwhelming,--this is an epitome of Bazarof, the spirit of absolute negation, the contemporary Mephistopheles who begins by taking himself off to the Inferno.

The punishment falls in the right place. Consistently with his physiological theories, Bazarof denies the existence of love, calls it a mere natural instinct, and women _females_; but scarcely does he find himself in contact with a beautiful, interesting, clever woman--somewhat of a coquette too, perhaps--than he falls into her net like a clumsy idealogue that he is, and suffers and curses his fate like the most ardent romanticist. Quite as curious as the antithesis of the two generations in the house of Arcadio's aristocratic father, is the contrast shown in that of the more humble village physician, the father of Bazarof, who is an altogether pathetic personage. He, too, is possessed of a certain pedantic and antiquated culture, and an excellent, kind heart; he adores his son, thinks him a demi-god, and yet cannot by any means understand him. Arcadio's father, on hearing an exposition of the new theories, shrugs his shoulders and exclaims, "You turn everything inside out nowadays. God give you health and a general's position!" The physician, quite non-plussed, murmurs sadly, "I confess that I idolize my son, but I dare not tell him so, for he would be displeased;" and he adds with ridiculous pathos, "What comforts me most is to think that some day men will read in the biography of my son these lines: 'He was the son of an obscure regiment physician who nevertheless had the wisdom to discern his talents from the first, and spared no pains to give him an excellent education.' Here the voice of the old man died away," says the writer. Such details bespeak the great poet. Again when Bazarof is seized with typhus fever and dies, it is not his fate which affects us, but the grief of his old father and mother, who believe that one light of their country has been put out, and that they have lost the best treasure of their uncontaminated and tender old hearts. The death of this atheist makes an admirable page. When, as he is losing consciousness, extreme unction is administered to him, the shudder of horror that passes over his face at sight of the priest in his robes, the smoking incense, the candles burning before the images, is communicated to our own souls.

From 1860 Turguenief remained in France, bound by ties that shaped his course of life. He enjoyed there a reputation not inferior to that which he possessed in his own country; his works were all translated, and his soul was soothed by an almost fraternal intimacy with the greatest French writers, notably Gustave Flaubert and George Sand; and yet his thoughts were never absent from his far-away fatherland, and as a reproof to his fruitless longings he wrote "Smoke," which put the capital of Russia almost in revolt. But Turguenief was no bilious satirist after the style of Gogol, much less a habitual vilifier of existing classes and institutions like Tchedrine; on the contrary, he had a keen observation like Alphonse Daudet, and the sweeping artist-glance which takes in the moral weaknesses as well as physical deformities. The scene of "Smoke" is laid in Baden-Baden, the resort of rich people who go there to enjoy themselves, to gossip, to intrigue, and to throw themselves aimlessly into the maelstrom of frivolous and idle life. The Russian world passes rapidly before our eyes, and last of all the hero, weary and blasé, who with bitter words compares his country to the thin, feathery smoke that rises in the distance. Everything in Russia is smoke,--smoke, and nothing more!

Turguenief was one of those who loved his country well enough to tell her the truth, and to warn her--in an indirect and artistic manner, of course--persistently and incessantly. His was the jealous love of the master for the favorite pupil, of the confessor for the soul under his guidance, of the ardent patriot for his too backward and unambitious nation. Turguenief compared himself, away from his country, to a dead fish kept sound in the snow, but spoiling in time of thaw. He said that in a strange land one lives isolated, without any real props or profound relation to anything whatever, and that he felt his own creative faculties decay for lack of inspiration from his native air; he complained of feeling the chill of old age upon him, and an incurable vacuity of soul. While he thus pined with homesickness, in Russia his books wrought a wholesome change in criticism; the new generation turned its back upon him, and after a general scandal followed an oblivious silence, of the two perhaps the harder to bear.

In 1876 the novel "Virgin Soil" appeared, first in French in the columns of "Le Temps," and then in Russian. It dealt with the same ideas as "Fathers and Sons," save that the nihilism described in it was of the active rather than the speculative sort. It was said at the time that as Turguenief had been fifteen years away from his own country, he was not capable of seeing the nihilist world in its true aspect, a thing to be felt rather than seen, difficult enough to describe near at hand, and much more difficult at a distance; but one must not expect of the novelist what would be impossible even to the political student. To us who are not too learned in revolutionary mysteries, Turguenief's novel is delightful. I believe that there is more or less of political warmth in the judgments expressed upon this "Virgin Soil," and that if the book errs in any particular, it is on the side of the truthfulness of its representative and symbolic qualities. Otherwise, how explain the fact that certain nihilists thought themselves personally portrayed in the character of the hero, or that Turguenief was accused of having received notices and information provided by the police? Yet it seems to me that this book, which gave such offence to the nihilists, shows a lively sympathy with them. All the revolutionary characters are grand, interesting, sincere, and poetic; on the other hand, the official world is made up of egoists, hypocrites, knaves, and fools. In reality, "Virgin Soil," like all the other writings of Turguenief, is the product of a gentle and serene mind, independent of political bias, although both his artistic and his Sclavonic nature weigh the balance in favor of the visionaries who represent the spirit rather than the letter.

"Virgin Soil" was the last of Turguenief's long novels. Another Russian novelist, Isaac Paulowsky, who knew him intimately, has given us some curious information concerning one he had in project, and which he believed would be found among his papers; but it has not yet come to light, and there remains only to speak of his short stories. Perhaps his best claim to reputation and glory rests upon these admirable sketches; and it is Zola's opinion that Turguenief depreciated and wasted his proper talent when he left off making these fine cameo-like studies. Perhaps this is true, as it is certainly undeniable that Turguenief had a master touch in delicate work of this sort, and it suited his intensity of sentiment, his graceful style, and his skill in shading, which distinguish him above his contemporaries. Of his short stories, his episodes of Russian life, I know not which to select; they are filigree and jewels, wrought by the Benvenuto of his trade; brass is gold in his hands, and his chisel excels at every point. But I must mention a few of the most important.

"The Knight of the Steppes," in which the horse tells the story of the love and disappointment which leads his master to despair and suicide, is one of my favorites. The hero resembles Taras Boulba, perhaps, in his savage grandeur; he is a remnant of Asiatic times, brave, proud, generous, uncultured; ruined, thirsting for battle, and perhaps for pillage, bloodshed, and violence.

Beside this I would put the first one in the collection translated and published under the title of "Strange Stories." It is a sketch of mysticism and religious mania peculiar, though not too common, to the Russian temperament. Sophia, a young girl at a ball, while dancing the mazurka with a stranger, speaks to him seriously concerning miracles, ghosts, the immortality of the soul, and the theory of Quietism, and manifests a wish to mortify and subdue her nature and taste martyrdom; next day she carries out her desires by running away,--not with her partner in the dance, but with a demented fanatic, a man of the lowest condition, with whom she lives in chastity, and to whose infirmities she ministers like a mother, and serves him like a slave. Such a picture could only have been conceived in a land that cradled the heroine of "The Threshold," and many another enthusiastic nihilist girl who was ready to lay down her life for her ideals.

The whole volume of "Strange Stories" fascinates us with a superstitious horror. Elias Teglevo, the hero of one of the best of these tales, although a pronounced sceptic, yet believes in the influence of his star, thinks he is predestined to a tragic death, and under this persuasion works himself into a state of mind and body that becomes a hallucination strong enough to lead to suicide, in obedience to what he considers a supernatural mandate. In another tale, "King Lear of the Steppes," the gigantic Karlof has a presentiment of his death on seeing a black colt in his dreams. The great artist reproduced the souls of his characters with laudable fidelity. If supernatural terror is a real and genuine sentiment, the novel should not overlook it in its delineations of the truth.

But perhaps the jewel of Turguenief's narratives is that entitled "Living Relics." In this simple story he excels himself. The novel has no plot, and is nothing more than a silver lake which reflects a beautiful soul, calm and clear as the moon; and the crippled form of Lukeria is only the pretext for the detention of such a soul in this world. Who has not sometimes entered a convent church on leaving a ball-room,--in the early morning hours of Ash-Wednesday, for instance? The ears still echo the voluptuous and stirring sounds of the military band; one is ready to drop with fatigue, dizziness, glare of lights, and the unseasonable hour. But the church is dark and empty; the nuns in the choir are chanting the psalms; above the altar flickers a dim light, by whose aid one discerns a picture or a statue, though at a distance one cannot make out details of face or figure, only an expression of vague sweetness and mysterious peace. After a moment's contemplation of it, the body forgets its weariness and the soul is rocked in tranquillity. Read some novel of the world's life, and then read "Living Relics": it is like going from the ball-room to the chapel of a convent.

This faculty of putting the reader in contact with the invisible world is not the talent of Turguenief exclusively, for all the great Russian novelists possess it in some degree; but Turguenief uses it with such exquisite tact and poetic charm that he seems to look serenely upon the strange psychical phenomenon he has produced in the soul of the reader, who is roused to a state of excitement that reflects the vision evoked by the artist's words. Other instances of his power in this direction are "The Dog," "Apparitions," and "Clara Militch," a confession from beyond the tomb.

The last page written by Turguenief bore the title of "Despair,"--the voice of the Russian soul whose depths he had searched for forty years, says Voguié. He was then laboring under an incurable disease, cancer of the brain, which, after causing him horrible sufferings, ended his life. But though worn-out, dying, and stupefied by doses of opium and injections of morphine, his artistic faculties died hard; and he related his dreams and hallucinations with wonderful vividness, only regretting his lack of strength to put them on paper. It is said that some of these feverish visions are preserved in his "Prose Poems," which are examples of the adaptability of Turguenief's talent to miniature, condensed, bird's-eye pictures. Like Meissonier, Turguenief saw the light upon small surfaces, enhanced rather than lessened in brilliancy. I will translate one of these prose-poems, so that the reader may see how Turguenief cuts his medallions. This one is entitled "Macha":--

"When I was living in St. Petersburg, some time ago, I was in the habit of entering into conversation with the sleigh-driver, whenever I hired one.

"I particularly liked to chat with those who were engaged at night,--poor peasants from the surrounding country, who came to town with their old-fashioned rattling vehicles, besmeared with yellow mud and drawn by one poor horse, to earn enough for bread and taxes.

"On a certain day I called one of these to me. He was a lad of perhaps twenty years, strong and robust-looking, with blue eyes and red cheeks. Ringlets of reddish hair escaped from under his patched cap, which was pressed down over his eyebrows, and a torn caftan, too small for him, barely covered his broad shoulders.

"It seemed to me that this handsome, beardless young driver's face was sad and gloomy; we fell to chatting, and I noticed that his voice had a sorrowful tone.

"Why so sad, brother?' I asked. 'Are you in trouble?'

"At first he did not reply.

"'Yes, barino, I am in trouble,' he said at last,--'a trouble so great that there is no other like it,--my wife is dead.'

"'By this I judge that you were very fond of her.'

"The lad, without turning, nodded his head.

"'Barino, I loved her. It is now eight months, and I cannot get my thoughts away from her. There is something gnawing here at my heart continually. I do not understand why she died; she was young and healthy. In twenty-four hours she was carried off by the cholera.'

"'And was she good?'

"'Ah, barino!' the poor fellow sighed deeply, 'we were such good friends! And she died while I was away. As soon as I heard up here that--that they had buried her--that very moment I started on foot to my village, to my home. I arrived; it was past midnight. I entered my _isba_; I stood still in the middle of it, and called very low, "Macha, oh Macha!" No answer,--nothing but the chirp of a cricket in a corner. Then I burst into tears; I sat down on the ground and beat it with my hand, saying, "O thou greedy earth, thou hast swallowed her! thou must swallow me too! Macha, oh Macha!" I repeated hoarsely.'

"Without loosening his hold on the reins, he caught a falling tear on his leather glove, shook it off at one side, shrugged his shoulders, and said not another word.

"On alighting from the sleigh I gave him a good fee; he bowed himself to the ground before me, taking off his cap with both hands, turned again to his sleigh, and started off at a weary trot down the frozen and deserted street, which was fast filling with a cold, gray, January fog."

Is it a mistake to say that in this commonplace little episode there is more of poetry than in many elegies and innumerable sonnets? I believe there is no Spanish or French writer who would know how to gather up and thread like a pearl the tear of a common coachman. There is something in the Latin character that makes us hard toward the lower classes and the vulgar professions.

Like many another author, Turguenief was not a good judge of his own merits, and gave great importance to his longer novels in preference to his admirable shorter ones, in which he scarcely has a rival. He had great expectations of "Smoke," and the dislike it met with in Russia surprised him painfully. So keen was his disappointment that he determined to write no more original novels, but devote himself to his early cherished plan of translating "Don Quixote." He also suffered in one way like most souls who hang upon the lips of public opinion,--the slightest censure hurt him like a mortal wound. The cordial and enthusiastic reception which, in spite of past indignation, he was accorded in Russia in 1878, and the homage and attentions of the students of Moscow, renewed his courage and reanimated his soul.... But his strong constitution failed him at last, and his physical and mental abilities weakened. "The saddest thing that has happened to me," he said to Paulowsky, "is that I take no more pleasure in my work. I used to love literary labor, as one loves to caress a woman; now I detest it. I have many plans in my head, but I can do nothing at all with them." But after all, what posthumous work of Turguenief would bear with a deeper meaning on his literary life than the admirable words of his letter to Count Léon Tolstoï:--

"It is time I wrote you; for, be it said without the least exaggeration, I have been, I am, on my death-bed. I have no false hopes. I know there is no cure. Let this serve to tell you that I rejoice to have been your contemporary, and to make of you one supreme last request to which you must not turn a deaf ear. Go back, dear friend, to your literary work. The gift you have is from above, whence comes every good gift we possess. How happy I should be if I could believe that my entreaty would have the effect I desire!

"As for myself, I am a drowning man. The physicians have not come to any conclusion about my disease. They say it may be gouty neuralgia of the stomach. I cannot walk, nor eat, nor sleep; but it would be tiresome to enter into details. My friend, great and beloved writer in Russian lands, hear my prayer. With these few lines receive a warm embrace for yourself, your wife, and all your family. I can write no more. I am tired."

This pathetic document contains the essence of the writer's life, the synthesis of a soul that loved art above all things else, and believed that of the three divine attributes, truth, goodness, and beauty, the last is the one especially revealed to the artist, and the one it is his especial duty to show forth; and that he who allows his sacred flame to go out, commits a sin which is great in proportion to his talents, and a sin incalculable when commensurate with the genius of Tolstoï.

Turguenief is the supreme type of the artist, for he had the tranquillity and equipoise of soul, the bright serenity, and the æsthetic sensibility which should distinguish it. According to able critics, such as Taine, Turguenief was one of the most artistic natures that has been born among men since classic times. Those who can read his works in the Russian sing marvellous praises of his style, and even through the haze of translation we are caught by its charms. Let me quote some lines of Melchior de Voguié:

"Turguenief's periods flow on with a voluptuous languor, like the broad expanse of the Russian rivers beneath the shadows of the trees athwart them, slipping melodiously between the reeds and rushes, laden with floating blossoms and fallen bird's-nests, perfumed by wandering odors, reflecting sky and landscape, or suddenly darkened by a lowering cloud. It catches all, and gives each a place; and its melody is blended with the hum of bees, the cawing of the crows, and the sighing of the breeze. The most fugitive sounds of Nature's great organ he can echo in the infinite variety of the tones of the Russian speech,--flexible and comprehensive epithets, words strung together to please a poet's fancy, and bold popular sallies."

Such is the effect produced by a thorough reading of Turguenief's works; it is a symphony, a sweet and solemn music like the sounds of the forest. Turguenief is, without exaggeration, the best word-painter of landscape that ever wrote. His descriptions are neither very long nor very highly colored; there is a charming sobriety about them that reminds one of the saving strokes with which the skilful painter puts life into his trees and skies without stopping over the careful delineation of leaf and cloud after the manner of the Japanese. The details are not visible, but felt. He rarely lays stress on minor points; but if he does so, it is with the same sense of congruity that a great composer reiterates a motive in music. Turguenief's enemies make ground of this very dexterity, which is displayed in all his works, for denying him originality,--as though originality must need be independent of the eternal laws of proportion and harmony which are the natural measures of beauty.

Ernest Renan pronounced quite another opinion, however, when, according to the custom of the French, he delivered a discourse over the tomb that was about to receive the mortal remains of Turguenief, on the 1st of October, 1883. He said that Turguenief was not the conscience of one individual, but in a certain sense that of a whole people,--the incarnation of a race, the voice of past generations that slept the sleep of ages until he evoked them. For the multitude is silent, and the poet or the prophet must serve as its interpreter; and Turguenief holds this attitude to the great Sclavonic race, whose entrance upon the world's stage is the most astounding event of our century. Divided by its own magnitude, the Sclav race is united in the great soul and the conciliatory spirit of Turguenief, Genius having accomplished in a day that which Time could not do in ages. He has created an atmosphere of beautiful peace, wherein those who fought as mortal enemies may meet and clasp each other by the hand.

It was just this impartiality and universality, which Renan praises so highly, that alienated from Turguenief many of his contemporaries and compatriots. Where ideas are at war, whoever takes a neutral position makes himself the enemy to both parties. Turguenief knew this, and he used sometimes to say, on hearing the bitter judgments passed upon him, "Let them do what they like: my soul is not in their hands." Not only the revolutionaries took it ill that he did not explicitly cast his adhesion with them, but the country at large, whose national pride spurned foreign civilization, was offended at the candor and realism of his observations. And Turguenief, though Russian every inch of him, loved Latin culture, and had developed and perfected by association with French writers, such as Prosper Mérimée and Gustave Flaubert, those qualities of precision, clearness, and skill in composition, which distinguish him above all his countrymen; yet this was a serious offence to the most of these latter.

Among modern French novelists, those who, to my mind, most resemble Turguenief in the nature of their talents, are, first, Daudet, for intensity of emotion and richness of design, and then the brothers Goncourt in some, though not very many, pages. Yet there is a notable difference in all. Daudet is less the epic poet than Turguenief, because he devotes himself to the study of certain special aspects of Parisian fife, while Turguenief takes in the whole physiognomy of his immense country. From the laboring peasants and the nihilist students to the generals and government clerks, he depicts every condition,--except the highest society, which has been reserved for Léon Tolstoï. And everything is vivid, interesting, fascinating,--the poor paralytic of "Living Relics," as well as the courageous heroine of "Virgin Soil,"--everything is real as well as poetical. Truth and poetry are united in him as closely as soul and body. Though he is an indefatigable observer, he never tires the reader; his heart overflowed with sentiment, yet his good taste never permitted him to utter a false note either of brutality or cant; he was a most eloquent advocate of emancipation, moderation, and peace, yet no diatribe of either a social or political character ever ruffled the celestial calm of his muse. Puchkine and Turguenief are, to my mind, the two Russian spirits worthy to be called _classic_.

Those who knew him and associated with him speak of his goodness as one speaks of a mountain's height when gazing upward from its foot. Voguié calls him a heavenly soul, one of the poor in spirit burning with the fire of inspiration, one who seemed, amid the hard and selfish world, the vain and jealous world of French letters, a visionary with gaze distraught and heart unsullied, a member of some shepherd tribe or patriarchal family. Every Russian that arrived penniless in Paris went straight to his house for protection and assistance.

[1] This work is better known to American readers in a translation entitled "Lisa."--Tr.

II.

Gontcharof and Oblomovism.

The rival and competitor of Turguenief--not in Europe, but in Russia--was a novelist of whom I must say something at least, though I do not consider that he holds a place among the great masters; I mean Gontcharof. This author's talents were fostered under the influence of the famous critic Bielinsky, who professed and taught the principles promulgated by Gogol,--demanded that art should be a faithful representation of life, and its principal object the study of the people.

Ivan Gontcharof was not of the nobility, like Turguenief, but came of a family of traders, and was born in the critical year of 1812. His life was humble and laborious; he was a tutor, and then a government employee, and made a tour of the world aboard the frigate "Pallas." He began his literary career in the middle of that most glorious decade for Russian letters known as "the forties." His first novel, entitled "A Vulgar History," attracted public attention, and it is said that a secret notice from the imperial censor in consequence was the cause of the long silence of twelve years which the author maintained until the time when he wrote "Oblomof," which is, to my mind, one of the most pleasing and characteristic Russian novels. I must admit that I am acquainted with only the first volume of it, for the simple reason that it is the only one translated; and I must add that this volume begins with the moment when the hero awakes from sleep, and ends with his resolve to get up and dress and go out into the street! Yet this odd little volume has an indescribable charm, an intensity of feeling which takes the place of action, and incidents as easily invented by the idealist as observed by the realist. In these days the art of story-telling has undergone a great change; the hero no longer keeps a dagger, a cup of poison, rope-ladders, and rivals at hand, but he runs to the other extreme, not less trivial and puerile perhaps, of exaggerating small incidents that are uninteresting, and irrelevant to the subject or the essential thought of the work from an artistic point of view. But in "Oblomof," whose hero does nothing but lie still in bed, there is not a detail or a line that is superfluous to the harmonious effect of the whole. Of course I can only speak of the one volume I have read. One may imagine that the author would like to portray the state of enervation and disorganization to which the essence of autocratic despotism had brought Russian society; or perhaps it is one aspect of the Russian soul, the dreamy indolence and insuperable apathy of the body, which weighs down the active work of the imagination. It is only a study of a psychical condition, yet what intense life throbs in its pages!

Perhaps this admirable and original novel was not translated in its entirety for fear of offending French taste, which demands more excitement, and could not stand a long analytical narrative full of detail, mere intellectual filigree. Turguenief was undeniably a greater artist than his rival; but he never attained to the precision, lucidity, and singular strength of "Oblomof" in any of his novels.

As the character of the hero was drawn to the life, the nation recognized it at once, and the word _oblomovism_ became incorporated into the language, implying the typical indolence of the Sclav. On some accounts I find Turguenief's "Living Relics" more comparable to this novel than any others of his. Both present one single phase or state of the soul; both are purely psychological studies; the chief character of both does not change position, the position in which he has been fixed by the will of the novelist,--I had almost said the dissecting surgeon.

"Oblomof" is in reality a type of the Sclav who chases the butterfly of his dreams through the still air. Study he regards, from his pessimist point of view, as useless, because it will not lead him to earthly happiness; and yet his soul is full of poetry and his heart of tenderness; he reaches out toward illimitable horizons, and his imagination is hard at work, but all his other faculties are asleep.

III.

Dostoiëwsky, Psychologist and Visionary.

Now let us turn to that visionary novelist whom Voguié introduces to his readers in these words:

"Here comes the Scythian, the true Scythian, who puts off the habiliments of our modern intellect, and leads us by the hand to the centre of Moscow, to the monstrous Cathedral of St. Basil, wrought and painted like a Chinese pagoda, built by Tartar architects, and yet consecrated to the God whom the Christians adore. Dostoiëwsky was educated at the same school, led by the same current of thought, and made his first appearance in the same year as Turguenief and Tolstoï; but the latter are opposite poles, and have but one ground in common, which is the sympathy for humanity, which was incarnate and expanded in Dostoiëwsky to the highest degree of piety, to pious despair, if such a phrase is possible."

Dostoiëwsky is really the barbarian, the primitive type, whose heart-strings still reverberate certain motive tones of the Russian soul that were incompatible with the harmonious and tranquil spirit of Turguenief. Dostoiëwsky has the feverish, unreasoning, abnormal psychological intensity of the cultivated minds of his country. Let no one of tender heart and weak nerves read his books; and those who cling to classic serenity, harmony, and brightness should not so much as touch them. He leads us into a new region of æsthetics, where the horrible is beautiful, despair is consoling, and the ignoble has a halo of sublimity: where guilty women teach gospel truths, and men are regenerated by crimes; where the prison is the school of compassion, and fetters are a poetic element. Much against our will we are forced to admire a novelist whose pages almost excite to assassination and nightmare horrors, this Russian Dante who will not allow us to omit a single circle of the Inferno.

Feodor, son of Michael Dostoiëwsky, was born in Moscow in 1821, in a hospital at which his father was a medical attendant. There is frequently a strange connection between the environment of great writers and the development and direction of their genius, not always evident to the general public, but apparent to the careful critic; in Dostoiëwsky's case it seems plain enough to all, however. His family belonged to the country gentlefolk from whom the class of government employees are drawn; Feodor, with his brother Alexis, whom he dearly loved, entered the school of military engineers, though his tastes were rather for belles-lettres and the humanities than for dry and unartistic details. His literary education was therefore reduced to fitful readings of Balzac, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and especially of Gogol, whose works first inspired him with tenderness toward the humble, the outcast, and the miserable. Shortly after leaving college he abandoned his career for a literary life, and began the usual struggle with the difficulties of a young writer's precarious condition. The struggle lasted almost to the end of his life; for forty years he was never sure of any other than prison bread. Proud and suspicious by nature, the humiliations and bitterness of poverty must have contributed largely to unsettle his nerves, disconcert his mind, and undermine his health, which was so precarious that he used sometimes to leave on his table before going to sleep a paper with the words: "I may fall into a state of insensibility to-night; do not bury me until some days have passed." He was sometimes afflicted with epilepsy, cruelly aggravated later in Siberia under the lashes laid upon his bleeding shoulders.

Like one of his own heroes he dreamed of fame; and without having read or shown his manuscripts to any one, alone with his chimeras and vagaries, he passed whole nights in imaginary intercourse with the characters he created, loving them as though they had been his relatives or his friends, and weeping over their misfortunes as though they had been real. These were hours of pure emotion, ideal love, which every true artist experiences some time in his life. Dostoiëwsky was hen twenty-three years old. One day he begged a friend to take a few chapters of his first novel called "The Poor People" to the popular poet Nekrasof; his friend did so, and in the early hours of the morning the famous poet called at the door of the unknown writer and clasped him in his arms under the excitement of the emotion caused by perusal of the story. Nekrasof did not remit his attentions; he at once sought the dreaded critic Bielinsky, the intellectual chief and lawgiver of the glorious company of writers to which Turguenief, Tolstoï, and Gontcharof belonged, the Russian Lessing, who died of consumption at the age of thirty-eight years, just when others are beginning to acquire discernment and tranquillity,--the great Bielinsky, who had formed two generations of great artists and pushed forward the national literature to a complete development. A man in his position, more prone to meet with the sham than the genuine in art, would naturally be not over-delighted to receive people armed with rolls of manuscript. When Nekrasof entered his room exclaiming, "A new Gogol is born to us!" the critic replied in a bad humor, "Gogols are born nowadays as easily as mushrooms in a cellar." But when the author came in a tremor to learn the dictum of the judge, the latter cried out impetuously, "Young man, do you understand how much truth there is in what you have written? No, for you are scarcely more than twenty years old, and it is impossible that you should understand. It is a revelation of art, a gift of Heaven. Respect this gift, and you will be a great writer!" The success achieved by this novel on its publication in the columns of a review did not belie Bielinsky's prophecy.

It is easy to understand the surprise of the critic on reading this work of a scarcely grown man, who yet seemed to have observed life with a vivid and deep sense of realism, and an unequivocal minuteness that is generally learned only through the bitter experience of prosaic sufferings, and comes forth after the illusions and vague sentimentalities of youth have been dispelled and practical life has begun. I said once, and I repeat it, that a true artist under twenty-five would be a marvel; Dostoiëwsky was indeed such a marvel.

This first novel was the humble drama of two lonely souls, wounded and ground down by poverty, but not spoiled by it; a case such as one might meet with on turning the very next corner, and never think worthy of attention or study, and which, even in the midst of modern currents of thought, the novelist is quite likely to pass by. Yet the book is a work of art,--of the new and the old art compounded, classic art infused with the new warm blood of truth. This work of Dostoiëwsky, this touching, tearful story, had a model in Gogol's "The Cloak," but it goes beyond the latter in energy and depth of sadness. If Dostoiëwsky ever invoked a muse, it must have been the muse of Hypochondria.

It was not likely that Dostoiëwsky would escape the political fatality which pursued the generality of Russian writers. During those memorable _forties_ the students were wont to meet more or less secretly for the purpose of reading and discussing Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon. About 1847 these circles began to expand, and to admit public and military men; they were moved by one desire, and what began as an intellectual effervescence ended in a conspiracy. Dostoiëwsky was good material for any revolutionary cabal, being easily disposed thereto by his natural enmity to society, his continuous poverty, his nervous excitement, his Utopian dreams, and his inordinate and fanatical compassion for the outcast classes. The occasion was ill-timed, and the hour a dangerous one, being just at the time of the French outbreak, which seemed a menace to every throne in Europe. The police got wind of it, and on the 23rd of April, 1849, thirty-four suspected persons were arrested, the brothers Feodor and Alexis Dostoiëwsky among them. The novelist was thrown into a dungeon of the citadel, and when at last he came forth, it was to mount the scaffold in a public square with some of his companions. They stood there in shirt-sleeves, in an intense cold, expecting at first only to hear read the sentence of the Council of War. While they waited, Dostoiëwsky began to relate to a friend the plan of a new novel he had been thinking about in prison; but he suddenly exclaimed, as he heard the officer's voice, "Is it possible we are to be executed?" His friend pointed to a car-load of objects which, though covered with a cloth, were shaped much like coffins. The suspicion was soon confirmed; the prisoners were all tied to posts, and the soldiers formed in line ready to fire. Suddenly, as the order was about to be given, word arrived from the emperor commuting the death-sentence to exile to Siberia. The prisoners were untied. One of them had lost his reason.

Dostoiëwsky and the others then set out upon their sad journey; on arriving at Tobolsk they were each shaved, laden with chains, and sent to a different station. During this painful experience a pathetic incident occurred which engraved itself indelibly upon the mind of the novelist, and is said to have largely influenced his works. The wives of the "Decembrists" (conspirators of twenty-five years before), most of them women of high rank who had voluntarily exiled themselves in order to accompany their husbands, came to visit in prison the new generation of exiles, and having nothing of material value to offer them, they gave each one a copy of the Gospels. During his four years of imprisonment, Dostoiëwsky never slept without this book under his pillow; he read it incessantly, and taught his more ignorant fellow-prisoners to read it also.

He now found himself among outcasts and convicts, and his ears were filled with the sounds of unknown languages and dialects, and speech which, when understood, was profane and abhorrent, and mixed with yells and curses more dreadful than all complaints. What horrible martyrdom for a man of talent and literary vocation,--reckoned with evil-doers, compelled to grind gypsum, and deprived of every means of satisfying the hunger and activity of his mind! Why did he not go mad? Some may answer, because he was that already,--and perhaps they would not be far wrong; for no writer in Russia, not excepting even Gogol and Tolstoï, so closely approaches the mysterious dividing line, thin as a hair, which separates insanity and genius. The least that can be said is, that if Dostoiëwsky was not subject to mental aberration from childhood, he had a violent form of neurosis. He was a bundle of nerves, a harp with strings too tense; he was a victim of epilepsy and hallucinations, and the results are apparent in his life and in his books. But it is a strange fact that he himself said that had it not been for the terrible trials he endured, for the sufferings of the prison and the scaffold, he certainly _would have gone mad_, and he believed that these experiences fortified his mind; for, the year previous to his captivity, he declared that he suffered a terrible temptation of the Devil, was a victim to chimerical infirmities, and overwhelmed with an inexplicable terror which he calls _mystic fear_, and thus describes in one of his novels: "On the approach of twilight I was attacked by a state of soul which frequently comes upon me in the night; I will call it _mystic fear_. It is an overwhelming terror of _something_ which I can neither define nor imagine, which has no existence in the natural order of things, but which I feel may at any moment become real, and appear before me as an inexorable and horrible _thing_." It seems then quite possible that the writer was cured of his imaginary ills by real ones.

I have remarked that Gogol's "Dead Souls" reminded me of "Don Quixote" more than any book I know; let me add that the book inspired by the prison-life of Dostoiëwsky--"The Dead House"--reminds me most strongly of Dante's Inferno. There is no exact likeness or affinity of literary style; for "The Dead House" is not a poem, but a plain tale of the sufferings of a few prisoners in a miserable Siberian fort. And yet it is certainly _Dantesque_. Instead of the laurel-crowned poet in scholar's gown, led by the bright genius of antiquity, we see the wistful-eyed, tearful Sclav, his compressed lips, his attitude of resignation,--and in his hands a copy of the Gospels; but the Florentine and the Russian manifest the same melancholy energy, use the same burin to trace their burning words on plates of bronze, and unite a prophetic vision with a brutal realism of miserable and sinful humanity.

"The Dead House" also has the merit of being perhaps the most profound study written in Europe upon the penitentiary system and criminal physiology; it is a more powerful teacher of jurists and legislators than all didactic treatises. Dostoiëwsky shows especially, and with implacable clearness, the effect produced on the minds of the prisoners by the cruel penalty of the lash. The complacency of narration, the elaborateness of detail, the microscopic precision with which he notes every phase of this torture, inflict positive pain upon the nervous system of the reader. It is fascinating, it is the refinement of barbarism, but it was also a work of charity, for it finally brought about the abolition of that kind of punishment, and wiped out a foul stain upon the Russian Code. It makes one turn cold and shudder to read those pages which describe this torture,--so calmly and carefully related without one exclamation of pity or comment, and even sometimes painfully humorous. The trepidation of the condemned for days before it is inflicted, his frenzy after it is over, his subterfuges to avoid it, the blind fury with which sometimes he yields to it, throwing himself under the painful blows as a despairing man throws himself into the sea,--these are word-pictures never to be forgotten.

Voguié makes a striking comparison of the different fates awarded to certain books, and says that while "My Prisons," by Silvio Pellico, went all over the world, this autobiographical fragment by Dostoiëwsky was unknown to Europe until very recently; yet it is far superior in sincerity and energy to that of the Italian prisoner. The most interesting and moving stories of captivity that I know of are Russian, and chief among them I would mention "Memories of a Nihilist," by Paulowsky. The tone of resignation, of melancholy simplicity, in all these tales, however, is sure to touch all hearts. I will not quote a line from "The Dead House;" it must be read, attentively and patiently, and, like most Russian books, it has not the merit of brevity. But the style is so shorn of artifice and rhetorical pretension, and the story runs along so unaffectedly, that I cannot select any one page as an example of excellence; for the excellence of the book depends on the whole,--on the accumulated force of observation, on the complete aspect of a soul that feels deeply and sees clearly,--and we must not break the icy ring of Siberian winter which encloses it. It is enhanced by the apparent serenity of the writer, by his sweetness, his half-Christian, half-Buddhist resignation. With the Gospels in his hand, Dostoiëwsky at last leaves his house of pain, without rancor or hatred or choleric protests; more than this, he leaves it declaring that the trial has been beneficial to him, that it has regenerated body and soul; that in prison he has learned to love the brethren, and to find the spark of goodness and truth lighted by God's hand even in the souls of reprobates and criminals; to know the charity that passes understanding and the pity that is foolishness to the wise; he has learned, in fact, _to love_,--the only learning that can redeem the condemned.

Although he had been (at the time of writing this) four years released from prison, he delayed still six years longer before returning to Europe to publish his works. When he began his labors for the press, he did not unite himself to the liberal party, but, erratic as usual, he turned to the Sclavophiles,--the blind lovers of old usages and customs, the bitter enemies of the civilization of the Occident. Fate was not yet weary in persecuting him. After the death of his wife and brother he was obliged to flee the country on account of his creditors. His sorrows were not exactly of the sublime nature of Puchkine's and the melancholy poet's; they were on the contrary very prosaic,--lack of money, combined with terrible fits of epilepsy. To understand the mortifications of poverty to a proud and sensitive man, one must read Dostoiëwsky's correspondence,--so like Balzac's in its incessant complaints against pecuniary affairs. He exclaims, "The details of my poverty are shameful. I cannot relate them. Sometimes I spend the whole night walking my room like a caged beast, tearing my hair in despair. I must have such or such a sum to-morrow, without fail!" Gloomy and ill, he wandered through Germany, France, and Italy, caring nothing for the wonders of civilization, and impressed by no sights except the guillotine. He wrote during this time his three principal novels, whose very names are nightmares,--"Possessed with Devils," "The Idiot," and "Crime and Punishment."

I know by experience the diabolical power of Dostoiëwsky's psychological analysis. His books make one ill, although one appear to be well. No wonder that they exercise a perturbing influence on Russian imaginations, which are only too prone to hallucination and mental ecstasy. I will briefly mention his best and most widely known book, "Crime and Punishment," of which the following is the argument: A student commits a crime, and then voluntarily confesses it to the magistrate. This seems neither more nor less than an ordinary notice in the newspaper, but what an analysis is conveyed by means of it! It is horrible to think that the sentiments so studiously wrought out can be human, and that we all carry the germs of them hidden in some corner of the soul; and not only human, but possessed even by a person of great intellectual culture, like the hero, whose crime is the result of great reading reduced to horrible sophisms. Those two Parisian students who, after saturating their minds with Darwin and Haeckel, cut a woman to pieces with their histories, must have been prototypes of Rodion Romanovitch, the hero of this novel of Dostoiëwsky. This young man is not only clever, but possesses really refined sentiments; one of the motives that lead to his crime is that one of his sisters, the most dearly loved, may have to marry an unworthy man in order to insure the welfare of the family. Such a _sale_ as this poor girl's marriage would be seems to the student a greater wrong than the assassination of the old money-lender. The first seed of the crime falls upon his soul on overhearing at a wine-shop a dialogue between another student and an officer. "Here you have on the one hand," says the student, "an old woman, sick, stupid, wicked, useful to nobody, and only doing harm to all the world about her, who does not know what she lives for, and who, when you least expect it, will die a natural death; you have on the other hand a young creature whose strength is being wasted for lack of sustenance, a hundred lives that might be guided into a right path, dozens of families that might be saved from destitution, dissolution, ruin, and vice if that old woman's money were only available. If somebody were to kill her and use her fortune for the good of humanity, do you not think that a thousand good deeds would compensate for the crime? It is a mathematical question. What weight has a stupid, evil-minded old shrew in the social scale? About as much as a bed-bug."

"Without doubt," replies the officer, "the old woman does not deserve to live. But--what can you do? Nature--"

"My friend," the other replies, "Nature can be corrected and amended. If it were not so we should all be buried to the neck in prejudices, and there would not be a great man amongst us."

This atrocious ratiocination takes hold upon Rodion's mind, and he carries it out to terribly logical consequences. Napoleon sacrificed thousands of men on the altar of his genius; why had he not the right to sacrifice one ridiculous old woman to his own great needs? The ordinary man must not infringe the law; but the extraordinary man may authorize his conscience to do away with certain obstacles in his path.

It has been said that Dostoiëwsky's talents were influenced in some measure by the fascinating personality of Edgar Poe. The analogies are apparent; but the author of "The Gold Beetle," with all his suggestive intensity and his feverish imagination, never achieved any such tremendous psychological analyses as those of "Crime and Punishment." It is impossible to select an example from it; every page is full of it. The temptation that precedes the assassination, the horrible moment of committing it, the manner of disposing of the traces of it, the agonizing terror of being discovered, the instinct which leads him back to the scene of the crime with no motive but to yield to a desire as irresistible as inexplicable, his fearful visit to the place where he lives over again the moment when he plunged the knife into the old woman's skull,--examining all the furniture, laying his hand upon the bell again, with a fiendish enjoyment of the sound of it, and looking again for the marks of blood on the floor,--it is too well done; it makes one excited, nervous, and ill.

"Is this beautiful?" some will ask. All that Dostoiëwsky has written bears the same character; it wrings the soul, perverts the imagination, overturns one's ideas of right and wrong to an incredible degree. Sometimes one is lost in abysms of gloomy uncertainty, like Hamlet; again one sees the struggle of the evil genius against Providence, like Faust, or a soul lacerated by remorse like Macbeth; and all his heroes are fools, madmen, maniacs, and philosophers of hypochondria and desperation. And yet I say that this is beauty,--tortured, twisted, Satanic, but intense, grand, and powerful. Dostoiëwsky's are bad books to read during digestion, or on going to bed at night, when every dim object takes an unusual shape, and every breath stirs the window curtains; they are not good books to take to the country, where one sits under the spreading trees with a fresh and fragrant breeze and a soul expanded with contentment, and one thanks God only to be alive. But they are splendid books for the thinker who devours them with reflective attention,--his brow furrowed under the light of the student-lamp, and feeling all around him the stir and excitement of a great city like Paris or St. Petersburg.

But there is a drop of balm in the cup of absinthe to which we may liken Dostoiëwsky's books; it is the Christianity which appears in them when and where its consoling presence is least expected. Face to face with the student who becomes a criminal through pride and injudicious reading, we see the figure of a pure, modest, pious girl, who redeems him by her love. This unfortunate girl is a flower that fades before its time; it is she who, being sacrificed to provide bread for her family, comes in time to convince the criminal of his sin, enlightens his mind with the lamp of the Gospels, and brings him to repentance, resignation, and the joy of regeneration, in the expiation of his crime by chastisement and the dungeon.

There is one marked difference between "Crime and Punishment" and "The Dead House." The novel is feverish, the autobiography is calm. Dostoiëwsky is a madman who owes his lucid intervals to tribulations and torture. Suffering clears his mind and alleviates his pain; tears sweeten his bitterness, and sorrow is his supreme religion; like his student hero, he prostrates himself before human suffering.

The best way of taking the measure of Dostoiëwsky's personality is to compare him with his competitor and rival, and perhaps his enemy, Ivan Turguenief. There could be no greater contrast. Turguenief is above all an artist, almost classic in his serenity, master of the arts of form, delicate, refined, exquisite, a perfect scene-painter, an always interesting narrator, reasonable and temperately liberal in his opinions, optimist, or, if I may be allowed the word, Olympic, to the extent that he could boast of being able to die tranquilly because he had enjoyed all that was truly beautiful in life. Dostoiëwsky is a rabid psychologist, almost an enemy to Nature and the sensuous world, a furious and implacable painter of prisons, hospitals, public houses and by-streets of great cities, awkward in his style, taking only a one-sided view of character, a revolutionary and yet a reactionary in politics, and not only adverse to every sort of paganism, but hazily mystical,--the apostle of redemption through suffering, and of the compassion which seeks wounds to cure with its healing lips. Their two lives are correlative to their characters,--Turguenief in the Occident, famous and fortunate; Dostoiëwsky in the Orient, a barbarian, the plaything of destiny, fighting with poverty shoulder to shoulder. It was only natural that sooner or later the two novelists should know each other as enemies. It is sad to relate that Dostoiëwsky attacked Turguenief in so furious a manner that it can only be attributed to envy and malice.

In his own country, however, and in respect to his popularity and influence with young people, the author of "Crime and Punishment" ranked higher than the author of "Virgin Soil." Just in proportion as Turguenief was attractive to us in the West, Dostoiëwsky fascinated the people of his country. "Crime and Punishment" was an event in Russia. Dostoiëwsky had the honor--if honor it may be called--of dealing a blow upon the soul of his compatriots, and on this account, as he himself used sometimes to say, especially after his epileptic attacks, he felt himself to be a great criminal, and the guilt of a villanous act weighed upon his soul; and it happened that a certain student, after reading his book, thought himself possessed by the same impulses as the hero, and committed a murder with the same circumstances and details.

After writing "Crime and Punishment," Dostoiëwsky's talent declined; his defects became more marked, his psychology more and more involved and painful, his heroes more insensate, lunatic, epileptic, and overwrought, absorbed in inexplicable contemplations, or wandering, rapt in delirious dreams, through the streets. His novels are, in fact, the antechamber to the madhouse. But we may once more notice the influence of Cervantes on Russian minds; for the most important character created by Dostoiëwsky, after the hero of "Crime and Punishment," is a type, imitated after Quixote, in "The Idiot,"--a righter of wrongs, a fool, or rather a sublime innocent.

As much as Dostoiëwsky excels in originality, he lacks in rhythm and harmony. His way of looking at the world is the way of the fever-stricken. No one has carried realism so far; but his may be called a mystic realism. Neither he nor his heroes belong to our light-loving race or our temperate civilization; they are the outcome of Russian exuberance, to us almost incomprehensible. He is at one moment an apostle, at another a maniac, now a philosopher, then a fanatic. Voguié, in describing his physiognomy, says: "Never have I seen in any other face such an expression of accumulated suffering; all the agonies of flesh and spirit were stamped upon it; one read in it, better than in any book, the recollection of the prison, the long habits of terror, torture, and anguish. When he was angry, one seemed to see him in the prisoner's dock. At other times his countenance had the sad meekness of the aged saints in Russian sacred pictures."

In his last years Dostoiëwsky was the idol of the youth of Russia, who not only awaited his novels most eagerly, but ran to consult him as they would a spiritual director, entreating his advice or consolation. The prestige of Turguenief was for the moment eclipsed. Tolstoï found his audience chiefly among _the intelligence_, and Dostoiëwsky of the lacerated heart was the object of the love and devotion of the new generation. When the monument to Puchkine was unveiled, in 1880, the popularity of Dostoiëwsky was at its height; when he spoke, the people sobbed in sympathy; they carried him in triumph; the students assaulted the drawing-rooms that they might see him near by, and one even fainted with ecstasy on touching him.

He died, February 10, 1881, almost crazed with patriotic love and enthusiasm, like Gogol. The multitudes fought for the flowers that were strewn over his grave, as precious relics. His obsequies were an imposing manifestation. In a land without liberty this novelist was the Messiah of the new generations.

IV.

Tolstoï, Nihilist and Mystic.

The youngest of the four great Russian novelists, the only one living to-day, and in general opinion the most excellent, is Léon, son of Nicholas Count Tolstoï. His biography may be put into a few lines; it has no element of the dramatic or curious. He was born in 1828; he was brought up, like most Russian noblemen of his class, in the country, on his patrimonial estates; he pursued his studies at the University of Kazan, receiving the cosmopolitan education--half French, half German--which is the nursery of the Russian aristocracy; he entered the military career, spent some years in the Caucasus attached to a regiment of artillery, was transferred to Sevastopol at his own desire, and witnessed there the memorable siege, the heroes of which he has immortalized in three of his volumes; on the conclusion of the peace he dedicated some time to travel; he resided by turns at both Russian capitals, frequenting the best society, his congenial atmosphere, yet without being captivated by it; he finally renounced the life of the world, married in 1860, and retired to his possessions near Toula, where he has lived in his own way for twenty-five years or more, and where to-day the famous novelist, the gentleman, the scholar, the sceptic,--after falling like Saul on the road to Damascus, blinded by a heavenly vision, and being converted, as he himself says,--shows himself, to all who go to visit him, dressed in peasant's garb, swinging the scythe or drawing the sickle.

The more important biography of Count Tolstoï is that which pertains to his soul, always restless, always in pursuit of absolute truth and the divine essence,--a noble aspiration which ameliorates even error. There is no book of Tolstoï's but reveals himself, particularly so the autobiography entitled "My Memories," and certain passages of his novels, and lastly, his theologico-moral works. Tolstoï belongs to the class of souls that without God lose their hold on life; and yet, by his own confession, the novelist lived without any sort of faith or creed from his youth to maturity.

Ever since the time when Tolstoï saw the dreams of his childhood vanish,--began to think for himself, and to experience the religious crisis which usually arrives between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five,--his soul, like a storm-tossed bark, has oscillated between pantheism and the blackest pessimism. What depths of despair a soul like that of Tolstoï can know, unable to rest upon the pillow of doubt, when it abnegates the noblest of human faculties,--thought and intelligence,--and makes choice of a merely vegetative life in preference to that of the rational being! Lost in the gloom of this dark wilderness, he falls into the region of absolute nihilism. He admits this in his confessions ("My Religion") when he says: "For thirty-five years of my life I have been a nihilist in the rigorous acceptation of the term; that is to say, not merely a revolutionary socialist, but a man who believes in nothing whatever."

In fact, since the age of sixteen, as we read in his "Memoirs," his mind summoned to judgment all accepted and consecrated doctrines and philosophical opinions, and that which most suited the boy was scepticism, or rather a sort of transcendental egoism; he allows himself to think that nothing exists in the world but himself; that exterior objects are vain apparitions, no longer real to his mind; impressed and persuaded by this fixed idea, he believes he sees, materially, behind and all around him, the abyss of nothingness, and under the effect of this hallucination he falls into a state of mind that might be called truly motor madness, though it was transitory and momentary,--a state proper to the visionary peoples of the North, and to which they give an involved appellation difficult to pronounce; to translate it exactly, with all its shades of signification, I should have to mix and mingle together many words of ours, such as despair, fatalism, asceticism, intractability, brief delirium, lunacy, mania, hypochondria, and frenzy,--a species of dementia, in fine, which, snapping the mainspring of human will, induces inexplicable acts, such as throwing one's self into an abyss, setting fire to a house for the pleasure of it, holding the muzzle of a pistol to one's forehead and thinking, "Shall I pull the trigger?" or, on seeing a person of distinction, to pull him by the nose and shake him like a child. This momentary but real dementia--from which nobody is perhaps entirely exempt, and which Shakespeare has so admirably analyzed in some scenes of "Hamlet"--is to the individual what panic is to the multitude, or like _epidemia chorea_, or a suicidal monomania which sometimes seems to be in the air; its origin lies deep in the mysterious recesses of our moral being, where other strange psychical phenomena are hidden, such as, for example, the fascination of seeing blood flow, and the innate love of destruction and death.

But let us turn to the real literary work of Tolstoï before referring to the actual cause of his perturbed conscience. After the beautiful story called "The Cossacks," he prepared himself, by other short novels, for works of larger importance. Among the former should be mentioned the sweet story of "Katia," which already reveals the profound reader of the human heart and the great realist writer. For Tolstoï, who knows how to cover vast canvases with vivid colors, is no less successful in small pictures; and his short novels, "The Death of Ivan Illitch" and the first part of "The Horse's Romance," for example, are hardly to be excelled. But his fame was chiefly assured by two great works,--"War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina." The former is a sort of cosmorama of Russian society before and during the French invasion, a series of pictures that might be called Russian national episodes. Like our own Galdos, Tolstoï studied the formative epoch of modern society, the heroic age in which the Great Captain of the century awoke in the nations of Europe, while endeavoring to subjugate them, a national conscience, just as he transmitted to them, though unwittingly, the impetus of the French Revolution. Russia heroically resisting the outsider is Tolstoï's hero.

The action of the novel merely serves as a pretext to intertwine chapters of history, politics, and philosophy; it is rather a general panorama of Russian life than an artistic fiction. "War and Peace" is a complement to the poetic satire of Gogol, delineating the new society which was to rise upon the ruins of the past. If we apply the rules of composition in novel-writing, "War and Peace" cannot be defended; there is neither unity, nor hero, nor hardly plot; so loose and careless is the thread that binds the story together, and so slowly does the argument develop, that sometimes the reader has already forgotten the name of a character when he meets with it again ten chapters farther on. The vast incoherence of the Russian soul, its lack of mental discipline, its vagueness and liking for digressions, could have no more complete personification in literature.

One therefore needs resolution to plunge into the perusal of works in which art mimics Nature, copying the inimitable extension of the Russian plains. I once asked a very clever friend how she was occupying herself. She replied, "I have fallen to the bottom of a Russian novel, and I cannot get out!" But scarcely has one finished the first two hundred pages, as a first mouthful, when one's interest begins to awaken,--not a mere vulgar curiosity as to events, but a noble interest of mind and heart. It is the stream of life, grand and majestic, which passes before our eyes like the expanse of a mighty flowing river. Tolstoï--more than Turguenief, who is always and first of all the artist, and more than Dostoiëwsky, who sees humanity from the point of view of his own turbulent mind and confused soul--Tolstoï produces a supreme and absolute impression of the truth, although, in the light of his harmonious union of faculties, it is impossible to say whether he hits the mark by means of external or internal realism,--whether he is more perfect in his descriptions, his dialogues, or his studies of character. In reading Tolstoï, we feel as though we were looking at the spectacle of the universe where nothing seems to us unreal or invented.

Tolstoï's fictitious characters are not more vivid than his historical ones,--Napoleon or Alexander I., for example; he is as careful in the expression of a sublime sentiment as in a minute and vulgar detail. Every touch is wonderful. His description of a battle is amazing (and who else can describe a battle like Tolstoï!), but he is charming when he gives us the day-dreams and love-fancies of a child still playing with her dolls. And what a clear intuition he has of the motives of human actions! What a penetrating, unwavering, scrutinizing glance that "trieth the hearts and the reins," as saith the Scripture! Tolstoï does not exhaust his perspicacity in the study of instinct alone; with eagle eye he pierces the most complex souls, refined and enveloped in the veil of education,--courtiers, diplomats, princes, generals, ladies of high rank, and famous statesmen. No one else has described the drawing-room so exquisitely and so truly as Tolstoï; and it must be admitted that the picture of official good society is terribly embarrassing. Some chapters of "Anna Karénina" and "War and Peace" seem to exhale the warm soft air that greets us as we enter the door of a luxurious, aristocratic mansion. The master-painter controls the collectivity as well as the individual; he dissects the soul of the multitude, the spirit of the nation, with the same energy and dexterity as that of one man. The wonderful pictures of the invasion and burning of Moscow are continual examples of this.

Is "War and Peace" a historical novel in the limited, archæological, false, and conventional conception? Certainly not. Tolstoï's historical novel has realized the conjunction of the novel and the epic, with the good qualities of both. In this novel--so broad, so deep, so human, and at times so patriotic, as Tolstoï understands patriotism--there is a subtle breath of nihilism, an essence of euphorbia, a poison of _ourare_, which colors the whole drift of Russian literature. This tendency is personified in the hero (if the book may be said to have one at all), Pierre Besukof, a true Sclavonic soul, expansive, full of unrest and disquietude, passionate, unstable, the character of a child united to the investigating intelligence of a philosopher,--a pre-nihilist (to coin a word) who goes in search of certainty and repose, and finds them not until he meets at last with one "poor in spirit," a wretched common soldier, a type of meek resignation and inconsequent fatalism, who shows him how to attain to his desires through a mystic indifferentism, a voluntary abrogation of the body, and a vegetative form of existence, in fact, a form of quietism, of Indian Nirvana.

This same philosophical concept inspires all of Tolstoï's writings. Once a nihilist and now converted, culture and the exercise of reason are to him lamentable gifts; his ideal is not progression, but retrogression; the final word of human wisdom is to return to pure Nature, the eternal type of goodness, beauty, and truth. The Catholic Church has also honored the saintly lives of the poor in spirit, such as Pascual Bailon and Fray Junipero, _the Idiot_; but assuredly it has never presented them as models worthy of imitation in general, only as living examples of grace; and on the contrary, it is the intelligence of great thinkers, like Augustine, Thomas, and Buenaventura, that is revered and written about. In the whole catalogue of sins there is perhaps none more blasphemous than that of spurning the light given by the Creator to every creature. But to return to Tolstoï.

His literary testament is to be found in "Anna Karénina," a novel but little less prolix than "War and Peace," published in 1877. While "War and Peace" pictured society at the beginning of the century, "Anna Karénina" pictures contemporary society,--a more difficult task, because it lacks perspective, yet an easier one, because one can better understand the mode of thought of one's contemporaries; therefore in "Anna Karénina" the epic quality is inferior to the lyric. The principal character is amply developed, and the study of passion is complete and profound.

The argument in "Anna Karénina" is upon an illicit love, young, sincere, and overpowering. Tolstoï does not justify it; the whole tone of the book is austere. It would seem as though he proposed to demonstrate--indirectly, and according to the demands of art--that a generous soul cannot live outside the moral law; and that even when circumstances seem entirely favorable, and those obstacles which society and custom oppose to his passion have disappeared, the discord within him is enough to poison happiness and make life intolerable.

In both of Tolstoï's novels there is much insistence on the necessity of believing and contemplating religious matters, the thirst of faith. Although Tolstoï observes the canon of literary impersonality with a rigorous care that is equal to that of Flaubert himself, yet it is plainly to be seen that Pierre Besukof in "War and Peace," and Levine in "Anna Karénina" are one and the same with the author, with his doubts, his painful anxiety to get away from indifferentism and to solve the eternal problem whose explanation Heine demanded of the waves of the North Sea. Tolstoï cannot consent to the idea of dying an atheist and a nihilist, or to living without knowing why or for what.

Referring to the autobiography called "Memoirs," we see that from childhood he was troubled and tortured by the mystery of things about him and the hereafter. He tells there how his mind reasoned with, penetrated, and passed in review the diverse solutions offered to the great enigma; once he thought, like the Stoics, that happiness depends not upon circumstances, but upon our manner of accepting them, and that a man inured to suffering could not be afflicted by misfortunes; possessed with this idea he held a heavy dictionary upon his outstretched hand for five minutes, enduring frightful pains; he disciplined himself with a whip until his tears started. Then he turned to Epicurus; he remembered that life is short; that to man belongs only the disposition of the present; and under the influence of these ideas he abandoned his lessons for three days, and spent the time lying on his bed reading novels or eating sweets. He sees a horse, and at once inquires, "When this animal dies, where will his spirit go? Into the body of another horse? Into the body of a man?" And he wearies himself with questionings, with struggling over knotty problems, with thoughts upon thoughts, and all the while his ardent imagination conjures before him dreams of love, happiness, and fame.

Beneath the restless effervescence of fancy and youth the religious sentiment was pulsating,--the strongest and most deeply rooted sentiment in his soul. One episode from the "Memoirs" will prove to us the innate religious nature of the novelist. He tells us that once, when he was still a child in his father's country-house, a certain beggar came to the door, a poor vagabond, one-eyed and pock-marked, half idiot and foolish,--one of those coarse clay vessels in which, according to contemporaneous Russian literature, the divine light is wont to be enclosed. He was offered shelter and hospitality, though none knew whence he came, nor why he followed a mysterious wandering life, always going from place to place, barefooted and poor, visiting the convents, distributing religious objects, murmuring incoherent words, and sleeping wherever a handful of straw was thrown down for him. Within the house, at supper-time, they fall to discussing him. Tolstoï's mother pities him, his father abuses him; the latter thinks him little better than a cheat and a sluggard, the former reveres him as one inspired of God, a holy man, who earns glory and reward every minute by wearing around his body a chain sixty pounds in weight. Nevertheless, the vagabond obtains shelter and food, and the children, whose curiosity has been excited by the discussion, go and hide in a dark room next to his, so as "to see Gricha's chain." Tolstoï was filled with awe in his dark corner to hear the beggar pray, to see him throw himself upon the floor and writhe in mystic transports amid the clanking of his chain. "Many things have happened since then," he exclaims, "many other memories have lost all importance for me; Gricha, the wanderer, has long since reached the end of his last journey, but the impression which he produced upon me will never fade; I shall never forget the feelings that he awoke in my soul. O Gricha! O great Christian! Thy faith was so ardent that thou couldst feel God near; thy love was so great that the words flowed of themselves from thy lips, and thou hadst not to ask thy reason for an examination of them. And how magnificently didst thou praise the Almighty when, words failing to express the feelings of thy heart, thou threwest thyself weeping upon the floor!" This episode of childhood will indeed never fade from the memory or the heart of Tolstoï. After seeking conviction and repose in arrogant human science and in philosophy, Tolstoï, like his two heroes, finds them at last in the meekness and simplicity of the most abject classes. Like his own Pierre Besukof, who receives the mystic illumination at the mouth of a common soldier who is to be shot by the French, or like his own Levine, who gets the same from a poor laboring peasant stacking hay, Tolstoï was converted by one Sutayef, one of those innumerable _mujiks_ who go about the country announcing the good tidings of the day of communist fraternity. "Five years ago," says Tolstoï in "My Religion," "my faith was given to me; I believed in the teachings of Jesus, and my whole life suddenly changed; I abhorred what I had loved, and loved what I had abhorred; what before seemed bad to me, now seemed good, and _vice versa_."

It was a sad day for art when this change of spirit came upon Count Tolstoï. Its immediate effect was to suspend the publication of a novel he had begun, to make him despise his master-works, call them empty vanities, and accuse himself of having speculated with the public in arousing evil passions and fanning the fires of sensuality. A heretic and a rationalist (Tolstoï is clearly both; for what he calls his conversion is neither to Catholicism nor to the Greek Church), he now abuses the novel, like some persons nearer home with better intentions than intelligence, as being an incentive to loose actions, the Devil's bait, and agrees with Saint Francis de Sales that "novels are like mushrooms,--the best of them are good for nothing." Tolstoï has not cast aside the pen; he continues to write, but no more such superb pages as we find in "War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina," no more masterly silhouettes of fine society or the high ranks of the military, not the imperial profile of Alexander I. or the charming figure of the Princess Marie; he writes edifying apologies, Biblical parables dedicated to the enlightenment of village-folk; exegeses and religious controversies, professions of faith and dramas for the people. Has the great writer died? Nay, I believe that he still lives and breathes beneath the coarse tunic and rope girdle of the peasant-dress he wears, and which I have seen in his portraits; for in these same books, written with a moral and religious purpose, such as, for instance, that called "What to do?" in which he has endeavored to dispense with elegance and suppress beauty of rhetoric and style, the grace of the artist flows from his pen in spite of him; his descriptions are word-paintings, and the hand of the master is revealed in the admirable conciseness of diction; he controls every resource of art, and is inspired, will-he, nill-he. Tolstoï was right in reminding himself that genius is a divine gift, and there is no law that can annul it or cast it out.

I cannot believe that Count Tolstoï will persevere in his present path. In the first place, I have little confidence in conversion to a rationalist faith; in the second place, from what I have heard of the disposition of the incomparable novelist, I think it impossible that he should long remain stationary and satisfied. In his vigorous, passionate nature imagination has the strongest part; he is enthusiastic, and given to extremes, like Prince Besukof in "War and Peace;" he is like a fiery charger dashing on at full gallop, that leaps and plunges, and stays not even upon the edge of the precipice. To-day, under the influence of an unbridled sentiment of compassion, he is playing the part of redeemer and apostle; he imitates in his proprietary mansion and in the neighboring towns the primitive fraternal customs of the early Christians; he follows the plough and swings the scythe, and waits on himself, rejecting every offer of service and everything that refines life. To-morrow, perhaps, his lofty understanding will tell him that he was not born to make shoes but novels, and he will perhaps regret having thrown away his best years, the prime of life and creative activity.

At present, he has abandoned himself to the grace of God; and to those of us who are interested in intellectual phenomena, his religious ideas, which are closely interwoven with his imaginative creations, are extremely attractive. "My Religion" contains the fullest exposition of them. He states in it that the whole teaching of Jesus Christ is revealed in one single principle,--that of non-resistance to evil; it is to turn the other cheek, not to judge one's neighbor, not to be angry, not to kill. Tolstoï's experience with the Gospels is like that of the uninitiated who goes into a physical laboratory, and without having any previous instruction wishes to understand at once the management of this or that apparatus or machinery. The sublime and compendious message of the Son of Man has been for nineteen hundred years explained and defined by the loftiest minds in theology and philosophy, who have elucidated every real and profound phase of it as far as is compatible with human needs and laws; but Tolstoï, extracting at pleasure that passage from the sacred Book which most strikes his poetic imagination, deduces therefrom a social state impossible and superhuman; declares tribunals, prisons, authorities, riches, art, war, and armies, iniquitous and reprehensible.

In his earliest years Tolstoï dwelt much on thoughts of the tragedy of war, and in "War and Peace" he gives utterance to some very original and extraordinary, and sometimes even most ingenious opinions concerning it. No historian that I know of can be compared to Tolstoï on this point; none has succeeded in putting in relief the mysterious moral force, the blind and irresistible impulse which determines the great collisions between two peoples independently of the external and trivial causes to which history attributes them. Nor has any one else brought out as clearly as Tolstoï the part played in war by the army, the anonymous mass always sacrificed to the personality of two or three celebrated chiefs,--not only in the campaign bulletins but in the narratives of Clio herself. I believe it will be long before such another man as Tolstoï will arise, not only in the realms of the art of depicting great battle-scenes, but so rich in the gifts of military psychology and physiology; one who can describe the trembling fear in the recruit as well as the strategic calculations of the commander; one who can transfer the impression made upon the soul by the whistling of the bombs carrying death through the air, as well as the sudden impulse that at a certain decisive moment seizes upon thousands of souls that were before vacillating and unstable, lifts them up to a heroic temperature, and decides, in spite of all strategic combinations, the fate of the battle. Though the strenuous enemy of war, Tolstoï is perhaps the man who has written about it better than any other in the world; in every other respect I can compare him to some one else, but not in this. In French writings I recall only one page that could be placed beside Tolstoï's; it is the admirable description of the battle of Waterloo, by Stendhal.

In the name of his own gospel Tolstoï condemns not only human institutions in general, but the Church in particular (the Greek Church, of course), accusing it of having substituted the letter for the spirit, the word of the world for the word of God.

It is not to our purpose to point out Tolstoï's theological errors, but his artistic and social errors fall within the scope of our investigations. We know that, applying the principle of non-resistance in the most rigorous acceptation, he proscribes war, and, as a logical consequence, he disapproves the sacred love of country, which he qualifies as an absurd prejudice, and reproaches himself whenever his own instincts lead him to wish for the triumph of Russia over other nations. In the light of his theory of non-resistance he condemns the revolution, and yet he is forwarding it all the while by his own radical socialism. Tolstoï's social ideal is, not to lift up and instruct the ignorant, nor even to suppress pauperism, but to create a state entirely composed of the poor, to annihilate wealth, luxury, the arts, all delicacy and refinement of custom, and lastly--the lips almost refuse to utter it--even cleanliness and care of the body. Yes, cleanliness and instruction, to wash and to learn, are, in Tolstoï's eyes, great sins, the cause of separation and estrangement among mankind.

Besides this book in which he has set forth his religious ideas, he has written another called "My Confession" and "A Commentary on the Gospels." In "My Confession" he says that having lost faith when very young and given himself up for a time to the vanities of life, and to making literature in which he taught others what he himself knew nothing about, and then turning to science for light upon the enigma of life, he became at last inclined to suicide, when it suddenly occurred to him to look and see how the humbler classes lived, who suffer and toil and know the object of life; and it was borne in upon him that he must follow their example and embrace their simple faith.

Thus Tolstoï formulated the principle enunciated by Gogol, and which is dominant in Russian literature,--the principle of a return to Nature, for which the way was prepared by Schopenhauer, and the sort of modern Buddhism which leads to a subjection of the reason to the animal and the idiot, and a feeling of unbounded tenderness and reverence for inferior creatures.

I have devoted thus much attention to Tolstoï's social and religious ideas, not only because they are interlaced with his novels, and to a certain extent complement and explain them, but because Tolstoï, though he has allied himself with no political party, not even with the Sclavophiles, like Dostoiëwsky, is yet a representative of an order of ideas and sentiments common in his country and proper to it; he is the supreme artist of nihilism and pessimism, and at the same time the apostle of a Christian socialism newly derived from certain theories, dear to the Middle Ages, concerning the eternal Gospels; he is the interpreter, to the world of culture, society, letters, and arts, of that feverish mysticism which manifests itself in more violent forms among certain Russian sects, independent preachers, voluntary mortifiers of the body, the direct inheritors of those who, in dark ages past, declared themselves under the influence of spirits. The spectacle of the socialist fanatic united to the great writer, of the Quietist almost exceeding the limits of evangelical charity joined to the novelist of realism almost _à la_ Zola, is so interesting from an intellectual point of view, that it is hard to say which most attracts the attention, Tolstoï or his books.

He has made great mistakes, not the least of which is his renunciation of novel-writing, if indeed that be his intention, though I have heard some Russians affirm the contrary. By condemning the arts and luxuries of urban life, and admitting only the good of the agricultural, for the sake of its simplicity and laboriousness, instead of helping on the Golden Age, he compels a retrogression to the age of the animal, as described by the Roman poet,--"the troglodyte snores, being satisfied with acorns." By anathematizing letters, poetry, theatres, balls, banquets, and all the pleasures of intelligence and civilization, he condemns the most delicate instincts that we possess, sanctions barbarism, justifies a new irruption of Huns and Vandals, and endeavors to arrest the faculty of the perception of the Beautiful, which is a glorious attribute of God himself. And all this for what? To find at the end of this harsh penance not the love of Jesus Christ, who bids us lean on his breast and rest after our labors, but a pantheistic numen, a blind and deaf deity hidden behind a gray mist of abstractions. With sorrow we hear Tolstoï, the great artist, blaspheme when he would pray; hear him spurn the gifts of Heaven, condemn that form of art in which his name shone brightest and shed lustre on his country and all the world,--calling the novel oil poured upon the flames of sensual love, a licentious pastime, food for the senses, and a noxious diversion. We see him, under the hallucination of his mysticism, making shoes and drawing water with the hands that God gave him for weaving forms and designs of artistic beauty into the texture of his marvellous narratives.

V.

French Realism and Russian Realism.

The Russian naturalistic school seems to have reached its culmination in Tolstoï. Concerning Russian naturalism I would say a few words more before leaving the subject. The opinions expressed are impartial, though long confirmed in my own mind.

In recapitulating half a century of Russian literature, we see that this _natural school_ followed close upon an imitation of foreign style and an effervescence of romanticism; it was founded by Gogol, and defended by Bielinsky, the estimable critic who did for Russia what Lessing did for Germany. The _natural school_ professed the principle of adhering with strict fidelity to the reality, and of copying life exactly in all its humblest and most trivial details. And this new school, born before romanticism was well worn-out, grew and prospered quickly, producing a harvest of novelists even more fertile than the poets of the antecedent school. The date of its appearance was the period denominated _the forties_,--the decade between 1840 and 1850.

The general European political agitation, not being able to manifest itself in Russia by means of insurrections, tumults, and proclamations, took an intellectual form; and young Russia, returning from German universities intoxicated with metaphysics, saturated with liberalism and philanthropy, was eager to pour out its soul, and give vent to its plethora of ideas. A country without lecture-halls, free-press, or political liberty of any sort, had to recur to art as the only refuge. And making use of the sort of subterfuge that love employs when it hides itself under the veil of friendship, the political radical called himself in Russia a sort of left-handed Hegelian, to invent a phrase.

Thus Russian letters, in assuming a national character, showed a strong social and political bias, which contains the clew to its qualities and defects, and especially to its originality. The academic idea of literature as a gentle solace and noble recreation has been for the last half-century less applicable in Russia than anywhere else in the world; never has literature in Russia become a profession as in France, where the writer is prone to become more or less the skilful artisan, quick to observe the variations of public taste, what sort of condiment most tickles its palate, and straightway takes advantage of it,--an artisan satisfied, with honorable exceptions, to sell his wares, and to snap his fingers at the world, at humanity, at France, and even at Paris, exclusive of that strip of asphalt which runs from the Madeleine to the Porte St. Martin. Russian literature stands for more than this; persuaded of the importance of its task, and that it is charged with a great social work and the conduct of the progress of its country,--Holy Russia, which is itself called to regenerate the world,--neither glory nor gold will satisfy it; its object is to enlighten and to teach the generations. It is but a short step from this to an admonitory and directive literature; and the noblest Russian geniuses have stumbled over this propensity at the end of their literary career. Gogol finished by publishing edificatory epistles, believing them more advantageous than "Dead Souls;" an analogous condition has to-day befallen Tolstoï.

In spite of the severity of Nicholas I., literature enjoyed a relative ease and freedom under his sceptre, either because the Autocrat had a fondness for it, or was not afraid of it. Under the shelter afforded by literature, political Utopias, nihilistic germs, subversive philosophies, and dreams of social regeneration were fostered. The novel--more directly, actively, and efficaciously than the most careful treatises or occasional articles--propagated the seeds of revolution, and being filled with sociological ideas, was devoted to the study of the poor and humble classes, and was marked by realism and sincerity of design; while the flood of indignation consequent upon repressive and violent measures broke forth into copious satire.

In this development of a literature aspiring to transform society, the love of beauty for beauty's sake plays a secondary part, though it is the proper end and aim of all forms of art. Therefore that which receives least attention in the Russian novel is perfection of form,--plot and method best revealing the æsthetic conception. It abounds in superb pages, admirable passages, prodigies of observation, and truth; but, except in the case of Turguenief, the composition is always defective, and there is a sort of incoherence, of palpable and fearful obscurity, amid which we seem to discover gigantic shapes, vaguer but grander than those we are accustomed to see about us.

During a period of twenty or thirty years the novel and the critic were everything to Russia; the national intelligence lived in them, and within their precincts it elaborated a free world after its own heart. Like a maiden perpetually shut away from the outside world, dreaming of some romantic lover whom she has never known or seen, consoling herself with novels, and fancying that all the fine adventures in them have happened to herself, Russia has written into the national novel her own visionary nature, her thirst for political adventures, and her eagerness for transcendental reforms. One most important reform may be said to be directly the work of the novel, namely, the emancipation of the serfs.

When the more clement Alexander II. succeeded the austere Nicholas I., and the restraints laid upon the political press were loosened so that it could spread its wings, the novel suffered in consequence. The hope of great events to come, the approaching liberation of the serfs, the formation of a sort of liberal cabinet, the efflorescence of new illusions that bud under every new régime, concurred to infuse the literature with civic and social tendencies. Beautiful and bright and poetical is art for art's sake, and as Puchkine understood it; but at the hour of doubt and strife we ask even art for positive service and practical solutions. Who stops to see whether the life-preservers thrown to drowning men struggling with death are of elegant workmanship?

In speaking of nihilism I have mentioned the most important one of the directive Russian novels, called "What to Do?" by the martyr Tchernichewsky,--a work of no great literary merit, but which was the gospel of young Russia. In his wake followed a host of novelists of this tendency, but inferior, obscure, and without even the inventive power of their leader in dressing up their ideas as symbolic personages, like his ascetic socialist Rakmetof, who laid himself down upon a board stuck through with nail-points. In their turn came the reactionaries, or rather the conservatives, and in novels as absurd as those of their predecessors they clothed the nihilists in purple and gold; it finally resulted that everybody was as ready to produce a novel as to write a serious article, or to handle a gun at a barricade. If any one of the neophytes of the school of directive novels possessed genius, it was swallowed up in the froth of political passion.

As an accomplice in guilt, criticism did not weigh these works of art in the golden scales of Beauty, but in the leaden ones of Utility. There were critics who went so far as to declare war upon art, undertaking to ruin the fame of great authors, because they wrought not in the interests of transcendentalism; their motive was like that which impelled the early Christians to destroy the great works of paganism. The popular novelists condemned the verses of Puchkine and the music of Glinka, in the name of the down-trodden and suffering people, just as Tolstoï, in remembrance of the hungry family he had just visited, refused to partake of the appetizing meal offered him by servants in livery. As art had not achieved the amelioration of the people's condition, they considered it not merely a futile recreation, but actually an obnoxious thing. Bielinsky, with a taint of this same mania, at last entertained scruples against the pure pleasure enjoyed in contemplation of the beautiful, and was almost inclined to stop his ears and shut his eyes so as not to fall into æsthetic sins.

Are the authors and critics the only ones responsible for this directive character of most Russian novels? No. Two factors are requisite to the work of art,--the artist and the public. The Russians exact more of the novel than we; the Latins, at least, regard the novel as a means of beguiling a few evening hours, or a summer siesta,--a way to kill time. Not so the Russians. They demand that the novelist shall be a prophet, a seer of a better future, a guide of new generations, a liberator of the serf, able to face tyranny, to redeem the country, to reveal the ideal, in fine, an evangelist and an apostle. Given this conception, it ought not to astonish us that the students drag Turguenief's carriage through the streets, that they faint with emotion at Dostoiëwsky's touch, nor that the enthusiasm of the multitude--in itself contagious--should sometimes fill the heads of the novelists themselves. The novelists are, in reality and truth, a faithful echo of the aspirations and needs of the souls that feed upon their works. The Occidentalism of Turguenief, the mysticism of Dostoiëwsky, the pessimism of Tolstoï, the charity, the revolutionary spirit,--each is a manifestation of the national atmosphere condensed in the brains of two or three foremost geniuses. Who can doubt the reflex action which the anonymous multitude exercises on eminent persons, when he contemplates the great Russian novelists?

There is a difference, however, between the novel which is purposely directive, the novel with a moral, so to speak, and the novel which is guided by a social drift, by "the spirit of the times." The former is liable to mediocrity and flatness, the latter is the patrimony of the loftiest minds. This spirit, this social sympathy, issued from every pore of Ivan Turguenief, the most able and exquisite of them all, indirectly and without detriment to his impersonality, and with the full conviction that it ought to be so; and novel-writing is useful in this way and no other. He says as much in a sort of autobiographical fragment, in which he explains how and why he left his country: "I felt that I must at all costs get away from my enemy in order the better to deal him a telling blow. And my enemy bore a well-known name; it was serfdom, slavery. Under the name of slavery I included everything that I proposed to fight without truce and to the death. This was my oath, and I was not alone in subscribing thereto. And in order to be faithful to it I came to the Occident."

If I am not mistaken, the great difference between French and Russian naturalism lies in this predominant characteristic of social expression. The defects and merits of French naturalism are bound up with its condition as a purely literary insurrection and protest against the rhetoric of romanticism. In vain Zola exerts his Titanic energies to impress on his works this social significance, whose invigorating power is not unheeded by his perspicacious mind. He fights against egoism without and perhaps within; but only in the two which he conceives to be his master works, "L'Assommoir" and "Germinal," has he approached the desired mark.

The condition of France is diametrically opposed to that of Russia. I am only repeating the opinion of a large number of illustrious Frenchmen who have judged themselves without any great amount of optimism. They say, "We are an old people, depraved and worn-out, our illusions vanished, our hopes faded. We have proved all things, and now we cannot be moved either by military glory which has undone and ruined us, or by revolutions which have discredited us and made Europe look upon us with suspicion. We have no religious faith, nor even social faith. We desire peace, and, if possible, that industry and commerce may flourish; we are not yet bereft of patriotism, and we expect art to entertain us, which is difficult,--for what new thing remains for the artist to discover? Criticism, spread abroad among the multitudes, has killed inspiration; the generative forces are exhausted. We demand so much of the novelists that they are at a loss how to whet our appetites, and neither ugliness, nor unnatural crime, nor monstrous aberrations are sufficient to stimulate our cloyed palates. They are touched with our coldness, and, like ourselves, spiritless and inert, sick and disgusted, they feel beforehand the irremediable and fatal decadence that is coming upon us, and they believe that art in the Latin races will die with the century." Thus mourn some of the men of France, and to my mind they have a basis of truth.

The artist never goes beyond the line marked out by his epoch. And how should he? Of course there is, in every work of art, something that is the exclusive property of the individual, something of his own genius; but as the nature of the fish is to swim, but swim it cannot out of the water, and the nature of the bird is to fly, but lacking air it flies not, so, given a social atmosphere, the artist modifies and adapts himself to it. The novelist cannot have an ideal different from the society which reads him; and if one but perceives the rigor and inflexibility of this law, one may avoid many foolish sentiments expressed with the intent to censure the immorality of the novel. Take any one of them, Tolstoï's, Zola's, Goncourt's, Dostoiëwsky's, look at it well, study it closely, and you will find in it the exact expression and even the artistic interpretation of a tendency of his epoch, his nation, and his race. This is as evident as that two and two make four. Novelists are what they must be rather than what they would be, and it is not in their power to make a world after their own hearts or according to any ideal pattern.

Melchior de Voguié, it seems to me, has not recognized this truth in accusing French novelists of materialism, dryness, egoism, and paganism, and has not taken into account the fact that the reflex action of the public upon the novelist is greater than that of the latter upon the former, or at least that the novelist is the first to be influenced, although afterward his works have an influence in turn, and in lesser proportion.

"The French realists," says Voguié, "ignore the better part of humanity, which is the spirit." This is true; and I have said and thought for a long time that realism, to realize to the full its own program, must embrace matter and spirit, earth and heaven, human and superhuman. I entirely agree with Voguié in believing that naturalism--or to call it by a more comprehensive name, the School of Truth or Realism--should not close its eyes to the mystery that is beyond rational explanations, nor deny the divine as a known quantity. And so entirely is this my opinion, that I could never consent to the narrow and short-sighted idea of some who imagine that a Catholic, by the act of admitting the supernatural, the miraculous, and the verity of revelation, is incapacitated for writing a profound, serious, and good novel, a realistic novel, a novel that shall breathe a fragrant essence of truth. Aside from the fact that literary as well as scientific methods do not presuppose a negation of religion, when did it ever happen that Catholicism, in the days of liveliest faith, impeded the production of the best of realist novels, as for example "Don Quixote"? The truth is that the novel, given the epic element, will be neither Catholic nor religious in those societies which are neither one nor the other. The lyric element does not demand this harmony with society: a great Catholic poet may be found in a most agnostic country, but not a Catholic novelist.

The novel is a clear mirror, a faithful expression of society, and the actual conditions of the novel in Europe are a proof of it. I think I have shown that the Russian novel reflects the dreams, sentiments, and changes of that country; it appears revolutionary and subversive, because the spirit of both Russian _intelligence_ and Russian educated people is so. In France, where to-day, in spite of the efforts of the spiritual and eclectic school, the traditions of the Encyclopædia have prevailed together with a frivolous sensualist materialism, the novel follows this road also, and without meaning to strike up Béranger's famous refrain,--

"C'est la faute de Rousseau, C'est la faute de Voltaire,"

I affirm that _animalism_, determined materialism, pessimism, and _decadentism_ may be explained by the light of the great writers of the eighteenth century, not only through their literary influence, but because the society which pores over the novels of the present day is the daughter of the French Revolution, and the latter is the daughter of the Encyclopædia. Who does not know the relation which exists between the novel and the fashion in England, and how the former is conditioned, shaped, and limited exclusively by the latter? In Germany another curious phenomenon is apparent. The novel in vogue is historical,--a condition appropriate to a country where everybody is interested only in epic life and the contingency of war.

On account of this interdependence, or, in fact, unity, of the novel and society, I cannot agree with Voguié when he says that the books that are influencing and stimulating the multitudes, the general ideas that are transforming Europe, are proceeding nowadays not from France but from Russia. It may be true of the Northern races, but of Latin races it cannot be more than partially and indirectly so. Does Voguié find in the French novel as in the Russian the latent fermentation of the evangelical spirit, or are the currents of mysticism that impregnate Russia circulating through France?

Russia is Christian, in spite of German materialist philosophers who for a time set her brains in a whirl, but whom she has finally rejected, as the sea gives up a dead body; and if I have succeeded in showing clearly the forms adopted by the social revolution in Russia, and the strange analogies these sometimes bear to the actions of the early Christians, if I have shown the love of sacrifice, the ardent charity, the sympathetic pity and tenderness not only toward the oppressed but toward even the criminal, the despised, the idiot, and the outcast, which characterize this society and this literature; if I have shown the degrees of mystic fervor by which it is permeated and consumed,--no one need be surprised at my statement and conclusion that although Buddha and Schopenhauer have a goodly share in the present condition of Russian thought, the larger part is nevertheless Christian. It is my opinion that the world is more Christian now than in the Middle Ages, not as to faith, but as to sentiments and customs; and if in hours of despondency I were sometimes inclined to doubt the efficiency of the word of Christ, the sight of its prodigious effects in Russia would certainly correct my doubts. The heterodox nature of the Russian faith is not a nullification of it. The most heretical heretic, if he be a sincere Christian, has more of truth than error in his faith. But error is like sin: one drop of poison is enough to permeate a glass of pure water; yet it is certain that there is more water than poison in the glass.

To return to the literary question, the Russian novel demonstrates, if such demonstration be necessary, the futility of the censures directed against naturalism, and which confound general principles with the circumstances and social conditions which environ the novelist. The Russian novel proves that all the precepts of the art of naturalism may be realized and fulfilled without committing any of those sins of which it is accused by those who know it through the medium of half a dozen French novels. The charge that is oftenest made against the French realist is the having painted pictures of passion and vice too nakedly and with too much candor,--and the charge is certainly not without foundation; and it may be added that some novelists overload the canvas and go to the extreme of making humanity out to be more sinful than even physical possibilities admit; but they must not be made to bear the responsibility alone; the public that gloats and feeds on these comfits, and grumbles when they are not provided,--the public, I say, must share it. In Russia, where the readers do not ask the novelist for intricate plot or high-colored sketches, the novel is chaste: I do not mean in the English sense of being moral with an air of affectation, and frowns and false modesty; I mean chaste without effort, like an ancient marble statue. In "Anna Karénina" Tolstoï depicts an illicit passion, extravagant, vehement, full of youthful ardor; yet there is not a page of "Anna Karénina" which cannot be read aloud and without a blush. In "War and Peace" the most candid pages are models of decorum, of true decorum, such as education, reason, and the dignity of man approve. In "Crime and Punishment" Dostoiëwsky introduces the character of a prostitute; but this character is no such romantic creature as Marie Gautier or Nana. She is not made poetical, nor is she embellished or exaggerated; yet she produces an impression (let him read the novel who doubts) of purity, of suffering, of austerity. In Turguenief, by far the most sensual of the great Russian novelists, and in Pisemsky, of secondary rank, there is so much art in the disposition and harmony of detail and description, that the definitive impression, while less severe than in the case of the two others mentioned, is equally noble and lofty.

Are they any the less Realists for this? They are rather more so, in my opinion. In order to carry out the great precept of modern art, the novelist must copy life,--the life that we live and that unfolds about us every day. But life does not unfold as it is represented in many novels that are the product of French naturalism. The Zola school makes use of abstraction and accumulation in uniting in one scene and one character all the aberrations, abominations, and vices that only a collection of profligates could be capable of, with the result offered us in pictures such as the house in "Pot-Bouille," that should be handled with tongs for fear of soiling one's fingers. We turn to the reality, and we find that all these colors exist, that all these vices are actual,--yes, but one at a time, intermingled with a thousand good or commonplace things; then we are in a rage with the novelist, and ever after bear him a grudge for having a mania for ugliness. The impression which life makes upon us is quite different; the alternative of good is evil, of poetry is vulgarity; we demand a recognition of this from the novelist, and this the Russian novelists have given us, yet without leaving the firm ground of realist art. They present the material, the bestial, the trivial, the vile, the obscene, the passionate, as they appear in life, in due proportion and no more.

We have also to thank them for having recognized the psychical life, and the spiritual, moral, and religious needs of mankind. And I would make a distinction between the moral spirit of the English novel and the Russian. The English judge of human actions according to preconceived notions derived from a general standard accepted by society and officially imposed by custom and the Protestant religion. The Russian moralist feels deeper and thinks higher; morality is not for him a system of narrow and inalterable rules, but the aspiration of a creature advancing toward a higher plane, and learning his lessons in the hard school of truth and the great theatre of art.

The spiritual element in the Russian novel is to me one of its most singular merits. The novel should not teach the supernatural, nor be the instrument of any religious propaganda. But from this premise to a condition of mutilation and mere dry chronicle of physiological functions is a long way. There are countless facts of our existence that cannot be explained by the most determined materialist; it is not the duty of art to explain them, but art cannot justly ignore them. Émile Zola is both a thinker and an artist. As an artist he is admirable, and is hardly behind Tolstoï either in poetic or descriptive faculties; but with the artist he combines the philosopher--may I call it so?--the philosopher of the lowest and coarsest fibre, whose influence upon French naturalism has been most pernicious, and has greatly limited the scope of the novel in his country.

* * * * *

In conclusion, it is my opinion that the only way to understand the naturalistic movement is in connection with its social environment; the impulse of our age toward a representation of truth in art everywhere prevails, and everywhere the novel has become a result of observation, an analytical study, as we notice in a general view of European literature for the last forty years. The century which began with lyric poetry is closing with a triumphant novel.

But the great principle of reality is differently applied in different countries. Why was romanticism so much the same in England, Germany, Spain, and Russia? Because it was chiefly rhetoric,--a literary protest, an artistic insurrection. And why the differences between French naturalism, the Russian _natural school_, English and Spanish realism, and Italian _verismo_? Because each one of these phases of the religion of truth is adequate to the country that conceived it, and to the hour and the occasion upon which it is focused. It is no objection that between these various forms there is close communication and relation. Edmund de Goncourt once remarked to me that the Russian novel is not so original as people think, for besides the marked influence of Hoffmann and Edgar Poe upon the genius of Dostoiëwsky, it would not be difficult to trace in the other great writers the inspiration of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, and George Sand. Pie was right; and yet Russian literature is not the less indigenous.

I should always prefer the art that is disinterested, that carries within itself its aim and object, to the art that is directive, with a moral purpose; between the art that is pagan and the art that is imbecile, I should choose the pagan. If we Spaniards, who are like the Russians, at once an ancient and a young people, still ignorant of what the future may lead us to, and never able to make our traditions harmonize with our aspirations,--if we could succeed in incorporating in our novel not merely bits of fragmentary reality, artistic individualisms, but the spirit, the heart, the blood of our country, what we are doing, what we are feeling as a whole,--it would indeed be well. Yet I think this impossible, not for lack of talent but for lack of preparation on the part of the public, upon whom at present the novel exercises no influence at all. The novel is read neither quantitatively nor qualitatively in Spain. As to quantity, let the authors who publish, and the booksellers who sell, speak what they know; of the quality, let the numerous lovers of Montepin and the eager readers of the translations in the _feuilletines_ tell us. The serious and profound novel dies here without an echo; criticism makes no comment upon it, and the public ignores its appearance. Is there a single modern novel that is popular, in the true meaning of the word, among us? Has any novel had any influence at all in Spanish political, social, or moral life?

On coming from France, I have often noticed a significant fact, which is, that at the French station of Hendaye there is a stand for the sale of all the popular and celebrated novels; while at Irun, just across the frontier, only a few steps away, but Spanish, there is nothing to be had but a few miserable, trashy books, and not a sign of even our own best novelists' works. From the moment we set foot on Spanish soil the novel, as a social element, disappears. It is sad to say, but it is so true that it would be madness to build any illusions on this matter. And yet the instinct, the desire, the inexplicable anxiety of the artist to embody and transmit the great truths of life, the impulse that lifts men to great deeds, and to desire to be the voice of the people, is secretly stimulating the Spanish novelists to break the ice of general indifference, to put themselves in communication with the sixty million souls and intelligences that to-day speak our language. Is the goal which we desire to attain inaccessible? Perhaps; but as the immense difficulties in the way of penetrating to the Arctic regions and the discovery of the open Polar Sea are but an incentive to the explorer, so the impossible in this undertaking should incite and spur on the masters of the Iberian novel.

A few words of humble confession, and I have done.

I feel that there is a certain indecision and ambiguity running through these essays of mine. I could not quite condemn the revolution in Russia, nor could I altogether approve its doctrines and discoveries. A book must reflect an intellectual condition which, in my case, is one of uncertainty, vacillation, anxiety, surprise, and interest. My vision has not been perfectly clear, therefore I have offered no conclusive judgments,--for conviction and affirmation can only proceed from the mind they have mastered. Russia is an enigma; let those solve it who can,--I could not. The Sphinx called to me; I looked into the depths of her eyes, I felt the sweet and bewildering attraction of the unknown, I questioned her, and like the German poet I wait, with but moderate hope, for the answer to come to me, borne by voices of the ocean of Time.