Chapter II: A Conversation with a Landowner

In a small wooden house at the edge of a large wood, and within a stone’s-throw of a river which floods the whole of the neighbouring meadows in the spring-time, lives Feodor Petrovitch X----. He is what is called in Russia a small landowner. He is a Moderate Liberal. That is to say, for twenty years he has groaned and lamented at the foolish proceedings of the Russian Government, which he used to accuse of criminal levity. He is in favour of a policy of common sense. Therefore, in the rapid course of recent events he has veered, like many others, slightly to the Right; although he still calls himself a Constitutional Democrat. And this is not because his faith in the existing Government has increased or that his ideal, which consists in the carrying out of certain drastic reforms, has diminished, but because he is dissatisfied with the conduct of the Opposition. Nevertheless, he means to vote for the Constitutional Democrats at the coming election. He is a short, dark, middle-aged man, not scrupulously shaven, with a brown glittering eye and a great flow of talk. He has immense practical knowledge of farming, machinery, and manufactories. At the same time he likes talking literature and politics, and his opinions are worth listening to except when he tells shooting stories; in this region he is given to such gross exaggeration that many people cease to pay attention to what he says on other subjects which excite his interest but not his imagination.

I was drinking tea with him the other afternoon and talking over the Anglo-Russian Agreement. “This is the only sensible thing,” he said, “which the Russian Government has done for the last forty years.” And then the conversation veered on to the plays in Moscow and the latest productions in the world of literature.

Here I wish to make a long parenthesis. One of the most striking features among educated Russians of all classes, whether landowners, doctors, lawyers, or officials, is the prevalence of what is called “culture.” We consider “culture” as a luxury--something extra, a pleasant appendage to education. The Russians consider culture and education to be synonymous and “culture” to be indispensable. In their eyes what they call a “cultured” and we call an educated man must possess a certain wide general knowledge. He must be able to talk authoritatively on literature, science, and the arts, the European stage, etc. He is positively ashamed if he is caught ignorant of some one like Sudermann or Finsen or Grieg. I have often seen Russians amazed and aghast at the “unculturedness” of Englishmen who have taken their degree at a University. This is not surprising considering that for two or three generations boys in England no longer receive any kind of instruction at schools. To the educated Russian, a certain wide layer of general knowledge is considered absolutely indispensable. He is ashamed to be without it. You meet with extraordinary examples of this very often. For instance, I once knew a Cossack officer who was well known for the rows he made in restaurants, for letting off pistols at odd moments, and for fighting duels. He was what is called in Russia a “skandalist” (a row-maker). This same man, I afterwards found out, had written a most valuable work on the differential calculus, and was one of the most brilliant of modern mathematicians. Now this indispensable “culture” has its good sides, but it has its bad sides also. It is often exaggerated in Russia just as ignorance is exaggerated in England. In many cases what is called “culture” and what is considered to be indispensable, is not culture at all, but a terribly superficial smattering of thin-spread information, possessing which its owner considers he has the right and even the duty of pronouncing an arbitrary and final judgment on a subject of which he knows nothing. I once knew an official employed in business in Moscow who was perfectly aghast because he discovered I knew nothing, that I had not even the shadow of pretence to any kind or sort of knowledge of natural science, that I was ignorant and not ashamed of being ignorant, of the elementary principles of dynamics. This same official, secure of his position in what he considered a universal field of “culture,” told me that Browning’s “Ring and the Book” was an old-fashioned, milk-and-water poem, rather like one of Trollope’s novels, and that Browning was a writer who was all sound and no sense, a victim to a fatal fluency and an incredible facility of expression. The result, therefore, of this culture is that in some cases it makes the man genuinely many sided and widely appreciative, and in others, as in the case I have just quoted, it leads him to express opinions of the kind which the French call _saugrenu_.

To go back to Feodor Petrovitch. He is saturated with so-called “culture.” In his case it is in many respects not superficial at all. He knows exactly how to manage a starch factory, not only how to manage it, but how every part of the machine is made and worked. He has practical knowledge of agriculture; he is an excellent economist. Besides this he has travelled and understands English, German, and French; he is well acquainted with Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, with Beaumarchais and Ibsen, and, of course, it goes without saying, after what I have related, that a thorough knowledge of the Russian classics is an absolutely indispensable part of “culture.” I happened to mention to Feodor Petrovitch that a discussion had lately been raging in the _Morning Post_ as to the comparative merits of modern and ancient literature and I asked him on what side the balance of opinion would fall if a similar discussion were to be held in Russia. “Russian literature at the present moment,” he said, “is leaping along with the force of a strong stream, but it is impossible to point to any one author of the younger generation who is worthy to take his place side by side with the older giants.” “But,” I asked, “with regard to those same giants, is the general opinion the same as what it was thirty years ago? For instance, do the younger generation admire Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Gogol, and Dostoievski as much as their fathers did, or are there people who cannot read Gogol and Tourgenieff just as in England there are people who cannot read Dickens and Thackeray?” “The younger generation,” he answered, “have read all the classics; they find no difficulty in doing that, and of course it is difficult to generalise on subjects which are, after all, matters of taste; but I think you will find many Russians not only of the young generation who on reading or re-reading Tourgenieff are acutely disappointed.” “I have just read an interesting and admirably-written article in an English newspaper,” I answered, “in which it is said that as a psychologist pure and simple Tourgenieff is superior to Tolstoi--that he is a writer for the aristocracy of taste, not for the general public, and that not to know him is not to have penetrated into the best society. The author quotes Renan and George Sand to back him up, and says, moreover, that his artistic form is superior to that of Tolstoi, Daudet, and even Flaubert.”

“When the writer said that Tourgenieff was not for the general public, he meant, of course, the English or the French general public,” said Feodor Petrovitch. “In Russia his novels are read by every schoolboy; they are generally the first grown-up books to be read by young boys and girls at school. We have all read Tourgenieff in our youth, and we have all come under his spell as a writer. But to many of us, and certainly to me when I read him now, much of the glamour has gone. The beauty of style remains. And first and foremost, I consider Tourgenieff to be a poet. The books of his which give me the most pleasure are _The Poems in Prose_, _The Sportsmen’s Sketches_, and _Spring Waters_. These works seem to me incomparable for their harmony and many-sided beauty. Besides being a poet Tourgenieff was a chronicler of his time; but he has always seemed to be more a chronicler of the atmosphere of the epoch he deals with than a portrait painter of the human beings that crowded it--I mean a portrait painter like Velasquez and not a writer of _romans à clef_. Of course, his characters are living, but to me they are living as the characters in Trollope’s novels are living. They are people who existed in an imaginary world, and that imaginary world has the atmosphere of the Sixties. But with Tolstoi the case is different; he gives you the human beings who did actually exist. You know that what he described happened. I do not mean to say that he was a photographer, but an artist of the calibre of Velasquez; he recreated a world and made the human beings which he put into it breathe and live and speak as they actually did in real life. Tourgenieff’s novels at their best are novels. One knows quite well that _Smoke_ never happened. On the other hand, we know that the doings and sayings of Pierre, and Levin, and Natasha, and Dolly are as true as the doings of Dr. Johnson and Pepys, or as true as the sayings and doings of any of our acquaintances. For this reason, I don’t care a fig for Tourgenieff’s psychology.

“When my contemporaries and I,” Feodor Petrovitch added, “first read the novels of Tourgenieff we were carried off our feet by the skill and magic of a new and great artist. To us it was all new. When I read him now, I admire _Poems in Prose_ and _The Sportsmen’s Sketches_ as much as I used to do, and I am still enchanted by his incomparable style. But the matter seems hopelessly old-fashioned. Just that which seemed so new and so daring seems to me now like mahogany furniture, crinolines, Octave Feuillet, the Second Empire, and all that is what you call ‘Early Victorian.’ And nine-tenths of his characters seem to me to be _clichés_. We know all that. We have got beyond it. What we shall never get beyond is the poet in Tourgenieff, his apprehension of certain shades and values of beauty in nature and life, and his expression of it in matchless prose. In this respect he seems to me indeed superior to Flaubert and the French in that Tourgenieff is a poet; but on the other hand I find _Madame Bovary_ infinitely more interesting than _Virgin Soil_ or _Smoke_ on account of its relation to real life, which seems to me far closer; the Frenchman’s work is, I think, more vital, more real, and more true. _Virgin Soil_ is, I think, a collection of conventional characters, or rather caricatures who bear really no relation to the period represented. And hence I consider Dostoievski so infinitely superior to Tourgenieff. In his book called _Devils_ he gives you a picture of the same epoch; the surroundings he invents are as fantastic as a picture thrown on the screen by a magic lantern; but the human beings, the naked souls of which he lays bare to you, how poignantly and terribly real they are! Tolstoi shows you life as it is, Tourgenieff life as one can imagine it, only he imagines it with the genius and skill of an artist; but Dostoievski leads you, as Virgil leads Dante, through the smoky regions which lie between the real and the unreal, regions which we all know; and although he was not a stylist, not an artist like Tourgenieff, yet in laying bare the human soul and revealing all its darkness and all its light he was without an equal. Of course, as I said, it is absurd to generalise on such things, which are matters of taste, but I am sure you will find many Russians who think that Tourgenieff is old-fashioned as a novelist, though immortal as a poet, and very few who would place him above Tolstoi or Dostoievski.”

Then he went on to talk of other things.