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Updated: July 4, 2025
Shakespeare affords some magnificent examples, likewise Balzac, likewise George Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff; the "Œdipus" is, of course, the crowning and final achievement in the music of sequence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in contemporary English fiction I marvel, and I am repeatedly struck by the inability of writers, even of the first-class, to make an organic whole of their stories.
Her husband is very young and intelligent, can't he begin over again, or take a position that will give him a living? They have no children, they do not need millions to live on, young and well as they both are. Tourgueneff tells me that your property has been affected by this failure. If it is AFFECTED MERELY you will bear this serious annoyance philosophically.
But if you don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery business once in a while, and come out among lusty men, the bristly, pachydermatous fellows that hew out the highways for the material progress of society, and the broad-shouldered, out-of-door men that fight for the great prizes of life, you will come to think that the spun-sugar business is the chief end of man, and begin to feel and look as if you believed yourself as much above common people as that personage of whom Tourgueneff says that "he had the air of his own statue erected by national subscription."
What language! the good Tourgueneff and Madame Viardot made saucer-eyes, comical to behold. In your work, what produced the greatest effect is the scene in the last act between Antoine and his daughter. Maubant is too majestic, and the actor who plays Fulgence is inadequate. But everything went very well, and this revival will have a long life.
Besides, I have never insulted any one, I have kept to generalities, as for M. Decorde, my intentions are for open warfare; but enough of that! I spent yesterday, a fine day, with Tourgueneff to whom I read the hundred and fifteen pages of Saint- Antoine that are finished. After which, I read to him almost half of the Dernieres Chansons. What a listener! What a critic!
Tourgueneff has now for a long period passed at least six months of the year in Paris, and only three or four in Russia. He used to spend the summer at Baden, but since the war he has exchanged Baden for Carlsbad whether or not on account of sympathy with France, and hence hatred of the peacefully-disposed nation which it is pleased to consider its deadly enemy, I do not know.
The good Offenbach has had another failure at the Opera-Comique with Fantasio. Shall one ever get to hating piffle? That would be a fine step on the right path. Tourgueneff has been in Paris since the first of December. Every week we have an engagement to read Saint-Antoine and to dine together. But something always prevents and we never meet.
I shall not tell you anything new about myself. I live so little in myself. This will be a good reason for you to talk about what interests me more, that is to say, about yourself. Tell me ahead so that I can spare you that horrid coach from Chateauroux to Nohant. If you could bring Tourgueneff, we should be happy, and you would have the most perfect travelling companion.
There are two men whom I admire a great deal and whom I consider real artists, Tourgueneff and Zola. Yet they do not admire the prose of Chateaubriand at all, and even less that of Gautier. Phrases which ravish me seem hollow to them. Who is wrong? And how please the public when one's nearest friends are so remote? All that saddens me very much. Do not laugh.
Besides, the truth would not have brought her back, poor little Silvia! In these days of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an overruling Providence that directs the world.
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