Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than to find in the English-speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev’s complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference1 in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in the Preface to Smoke “to all time.”
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity2 of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of A Sportsman’s Sketches— those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev’s art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for “all time” it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity3 of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently4 and so passionately5 — they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national. But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook6 and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant7 in their perplexed8 lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy9 darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future.
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “cleverness” must be fatal to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly10, I don’t want to appear as qualified11 to judge of things Russian. It wouldn’t be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives12 and the peace of his conscience — no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy13 hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers14 and curses from which that impartial15 lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony16 to the fatal absence of callousness17 in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene18 Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity19 and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating20 insight and unfailing generosity21 of judgment22, an exquisite23 perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects24 of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world’s fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn’t get one per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double-headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.
J. C.
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1
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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lucidity
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| n.明朗，清晰，透明 | |
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3
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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reverently
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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7
poignant
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| adj.令人痛苦的，辛酸的，惨痛的 | |
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8
perplexed
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| adj.不知所措的 | |
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9
stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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11
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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12
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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13
autocracy
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| n.独裁政治，独裁政府 | |
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14
jeers
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| n.操纵帆桁下部（使其上下的）索具；嘲讽( jeer的名词复数 )v.嘲笑( jeer的第三人称单数 ) | |
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15
impartial
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| adj.(in,to)公正的，无偏见的 | |
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16
testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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17
callousness
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18
serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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19
sanity
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| n.心智健全，神智正常，判断正确 | |
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20
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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21
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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22
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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23
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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