Fathers and Children Read online

  IIBY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  Turgenev was of that great race which has more than any other fully andfreely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false shamein its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the Frenchnovelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French mannerand with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramaticpunishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in thepersonal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope ofpeace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserablealways appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after Ihad once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and withmystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay Americanhorizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient,agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to methrough him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There arepassages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawnfrom the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one's ownmost secret self ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night airdrawing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the darkness onthe distant fields? I try in vain to give some notion of the subtlesympathy with nature which scarcely put itself into words with him. Asfor the people of his fiction, though they were of orders andcivilizations so remote from my experience, they were of the eternalhuman types whose origin and potentialities every one may find in hisown heart, and I felt their verity in every touch.

  I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impartsome sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I hadbeen waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richlycontent forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Turgenevsurpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine andtrue. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstancesfor the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian hasto do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and hisscene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway,it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not theactuality of the characters. Most of Turgenev's books I have read manytimes over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number ofyears I read them again and again without much caring for otherfiction. It was only the other day that I read "Smoke" through oncemore, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat lessthan my first satisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I hadreached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I wasimpatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In "Smoke" I was nowaware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still alwayspresent somewhere, invisibly operating the story.--From "My LiteraryPassions" (1895).