The Torrents of Spring

The reader of these three short stories of Turgenev ought to have ever in mind Turgenev's picture. The proper comment on the stories is the deep pathos of Turgenev's eyes and the tender humanity of his heavy, mobile Slav face. Stories more human and more replete with life, it would be hard to find - more intensely and searchingly individualized in every detail. Each sentence belongs body and soul in the story in which it stands; in meaning, implication, color, and mood it is irretrievably a part of the piece of life Turgenev uses it to illustrate Each story is an inevitable growth, something that has formed itself in obedience to the laws of the cosmos and has merely accidentally revealed itself through Turgenev's words. You have no irritating consciousness of the uneasy, directive intelligence of "an author" mixing in the game. This is a matter that goes much deeper than the mere presence or absence of the personal pronoun. A novelist - a thoroughly able novelist - may be as conscientious as Herod about washing his hands ostensibly of his story, and yet all the time have the blood thereof on his head, and reek with guilt in the nostrils of every critical reader. Henry James with all his recollected artistry, indeed partly because of it, offends time and again in this way. His very cleverness in shifting responsibility becomes an irritating challenge. Not so with Turgenve. His work has the blessed, naive unconsciousness and undirectness of a natural process. This inevitableness characterizes the general form of the story as well as its substance. A recent English critic has somewhere in his essays happily noted the fact that art approaches perfection precisely in proportion as there is a complete fusion of form and matter, and that in the highest art there is a fusion so absolute that the matter cannot be conceived apart from the form through which it reveals itself. To assert the presence of this absolute fusion in any short story would be an excessive of statement. Yet there is something like such a fusion in these stories of Turgenev. The practical analyst of effects and methods in fiction finds his categories seeming astonishingly futile, when he dusts them off and briskly sets them in order for the measurement and estimate of Turgenev's work. Point of view, tone, effect, plot, characterization, dialogue - talk of such things seems as empty in the presence of these beautifully natural revelations of life as a chatter about the qualities of calcareous stone under the gaze of the Venus of Milo. Heaven be praised, we exclaim, for pieces of art that can still rout the pedant and formalist; and we throw down our pen with the proud consciousness that despite long years of academic subjection to words and rules, we are still human at core and able to enjoy irresponsibly. Contance Garnett's translation of Turgenev's writings is too well known to need comment; she is to all intents and purposes impeccable.