A Writer's Notebook (51 page)

Sometimes he used this method in a purely mechanical way, and then his characters are agitated for no reason at all, and the thunderclap with which the scene ends is merely a ball rolled over a piece of tin. His people then are distorted like the figures of the School of Bologna. It is empty gesture.

I do not think there is great subtlety of characterisation in Dostoievsky. His people are all of a piece. The greatest novelists have at least indicated the diversity that is in every human breast. But his men are always themselves. They are like the ‘characters' which were fashionable exercises of the seventeenth century: there is the man of iron, all iron, the flipperty-gibbet, all flightiness, the saint, all saintliness; they are passions, qualities, defects personified and seen with extraordinary vividness, but they are seldom human beings. The world of Western Europe has naively accepted them as Russians, but the Russians I have met are not very different after all from the rest of mankind. The man of iron has his weakness, the flipperty-gibbet has a kind heart, the saint has his faults. You do not get in Dostoievsky the supreme delight the novelist can give of showing you in one person the heroism and abjectness,
the infinite contrariety and the disordered richness of man. Dostoievsky has never drawn a character of so intricate a complexity as Julien Sorel.

Man is so complex, he is a fit symbol of that Absolute which we are told contains all pain and pleasure, change, time and space, in its infinite incomprehensibility. But Dostoievsky's characters are like the persons in a morality play. They give you the impression that they are complicated because they do things that you do not understand, but a closer acquaintance shows you that in fact they are excessively simple and they always act really according to standard.

Dostoievsky reminds me of El Greco, and if El Greco seems the greater artist it is perhaps only because the time at which he lived and his environment were more favourable to the full flowering of the peculiar genius which was common to both. Both had the same faculty for making the unseen visible; both had the same violence of emotion, the same passion. Both give the effect of having walked in unknown ways of the spirit in countries where men do not breathe the air of common day. Both are tortured by the desire to express some tremendous secret, which they divine with some sense other than our five senses and which they struggle in vain to convey by use of them. Both are in anguish as they try to remember a dream which it imports tremendously for them to remember and yet which lingers always just at the rim of consciousness so that they cannot reach it. With Dostoievsky too the persons who people his vast canvases are more than life-size, and they too express themselves with strange and beautiful gestures which seem pregnant of a meaning which constantly escapes you. Both are masters of that great art, the art of significant gesture. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew somewhat of the matter, vowed it was the portrait-painter's greatest gift.

Resurrection
is a book which owes its reputation to its author's. The moral purpose has obscured the art, and it is a tract rather than a novel. The scenes in prison, the account of the convicts' journey to Siberia, give the unfortunate impression of having been mugged up for the occasion; but Tolstoi had great gifts and even here they are not missing. Effects of nature are described with a happy touch, at once realistic and poetic, and he can give as no one else in Russian literature the scents of the country night, the heat of midday and the mystery of dawn. His power of characterisation is extraordinary, and in Achludof, though perhaps he has not drawn quite the character he intended, with his sensuality and mysticism, his ineffectualness, his sentimentality, his muddle-headedness, his timidity and obstinacy, he has created a type in which most Russians can recognise themselves. But perhaps from a technical point of view the most remarkable thing about the book is the immense gallery of subordinate characters, some of whom appear but on a single page, who are drawn, often in three or four lines, with a distinctness and individuality which any writer must find amazing. Most of the small characters in Shakespeare's plays are not characterised at all: they are merely names with a certain number of lines to say, and actors, who have often an accurate instinct in this matter, will tell you how great an effort it requires to put individuality into such puppets; but Tolstoi gives each man his own life and character. An ingenious commentator might devise the past and suggest the future of the most summarily sketched.

I have been reading Turgenev. I think it would be hard to find another writer who has achieved a greater reputation on such slender qualities. No other writer is so beholden for his celebrity to the exaggerated estimation in which Russian literature is held. He is a writer of the school of Octave Feuillet or Cherbuliez, and his chief merits are theirs, a well-bred sentimentality and the facile optimism of a contented mind. It
would be interesting to know what was the opinion held of him in those literary circles in Paris where his size and origin seem to have made him a remarkable object. He knew Flaubert and Maupassant, the Goncourts, Huysmans, and the circle that gathered in the drawing-room of the Princesse Mathilde. He makes soothing reading. Curiosity will never impel you to look at the last page of one of his books, and you reach it without regret. To read him is like travelling by river, a calm and steady transit, without adventure or emotion. It is said that he indicated themes which the perils of Russian politics forbade him to touch (though he wrote from the safe distance of Paris and he need not have lagged so far behind the boldness of Herzen or Bakunin) and it appears that when he talked of one of his heroes cultivating the land his Russian readers, seeing in this a veiled way of indicating revolutionary movement, were vastly thrilled; but that of course is neither here nor there, and the political situation can no more make a poor book a good one than the needs of a wife and family make a pot-boiler a work of art. The merits of Turgenev consist chiefly in his love of nature, and he should not be blamed because he describes it in the manner of his generation, by means of cataloguing the various sounds and scents and sights, rather than by giving the emotion which nature has given him; and his descriptions are graceful and charming. His descriptions also of provincial life in a noble family in the reign of Alexander II have a pleasing flavour, and changing times have given it a humorous grace and an historical interest. His character-drawing is stereotyped and the gallery of his creatures is small. There is in every book the same young girl, serious, dignified and energetic, the same vapid mother, the same talkative, ineffectual hero; and his subsidiary characters are vague and colourless. In all his books the only person who lives with a life of his own after you have turned the last page is that ponderous mass of flesh, Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov, who snaps his fingers and is plethorically inarticulate in the novel called
On the Eve
. But what must chiefly amaze the reader of Turgenev is the extreme
triviality of his stories.
A House of Gentlefolk
is the story of an unhappily-married man who falls in love with a girl, and hearing that his wife is dead proposes to her. His wife turns up and the lovers separate.
On the Eve
is the story of a girl who falls in love with a young Bulgarian. He falls ill, they are married; he develops consumption and dies. In the one case if the hero had taken the elementary precaution of writing to his solicitor to find out if his wife was really dead, in the other if he had taken that of putting on a greatcoat when he went to get his passport, there would have been no story. An instructive parallel might be drawn between Turgenev and Anthony Trollope; in every point but style the comparison would be in favour of the English writer. He had more knowledge of the world, a greater variety, more humour, his range was wider and his characters were more diverse. Turgenev never wrote a scene that remains in the memory as that in which Bishop Proudie kneels at the bedside of his dead wife and prays God that he may not be thankful for her death.

This shows very poor judgment. It is true that Turgenev has neither the tortured passion of Dostoievsky nor the scope and the broad humanity of Tolstoy; but he has other qualities, charm and grace and tenderness. He has elegance and distinction—admirable qualities both—reasonableness, and a lovely feeling for the countryside. Even in a translation you can tell how beautifully he wrote. He is never excessive, never false, never boring. He is neither a preacher nor a prophet; he is content to be a novelist pure and simple. It may well be that a future generation will come to the conclusion that he was the greatest of the three
.

The grave of Dostoievsky. It is surrounded by a neat iron railing and the plot of ground is neatly laid with sand. In one corner stands a huge round case with a glass front, containing an enormous wreath of artificial flowers, prim white roses and
lilies of the valley larger than life; it is tied with a great bow and there is a long silk streamer on which is an inscription in gold letters. I wish the grave were as neglected, covered with fallen leaves, as are those which surround it. Its tidiness is distressingly vulgar. The bust is placed against a granite stele, a shapeless thing carved with meaningless emblems, and it gives you an uncomfortable feeling that it is on the point of toppling over.

It is a face devastated by passion. The dome of the head is stupendous and evokes irresistibly the thought of a world great enough to contain the terrible throng of his creatures. The ears are large, protruding, with the heavy lobes of the sensualist; the mouth is sensual too, with a cruel pout, but a pout like that of a sorrowful child; the cheeks are hollow, the temples deeply sunken; beard and moustache are long, bedraggled and unkempt; the long hair is lank; there is a great mole on the forehead and another on the cheek. There is agony in that face, something terrible that makes you want to turn away and that yet holds you fascinated. His aspect is more terrifying than all his works. He has the look of a man who has been in hell and seen there, not a hopeless suffering, but meanness and frippery.