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Yet the words come through a medium; they are not quite spontaneous; these figures have not the sad, human inevitableness of Turguenieff's people.
But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he dismissed the latter, until at length Turguenieff's current caught him.
But dissection is one thing, and the living word rank from the heart and absolutely reeking of the human creature that uttered it the word that Turguenieff's people are constantly uttering is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify those which are petty and insignificant.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Enobarbus, in Fielding's Squire Western, in Walter Scott's Edie Ochiltree and Meg Merrilies, in Balzac's Pere Goriot and Madame Marneff, in Thackeray's Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp, in Turguenieff's Bazarof and Dimitri Roudine, we meet persons who exhaust for us the groups to which they severally belong.
The vitality of nature animates him who has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray Turguenieff's influence are possibly his superiors in finish and culture, but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less.
The writer is playing on common experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than analysis. Take the paragraph in Turguenieff's Lisa it was pointed out to me by Henry James where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after much suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long believed dead, is alive.
The absence of this recognition in Turguenieff's novels is the explanation of them: holding the creed their author does, he could not have written them otherwise; and, on the other hand, had his creed been different, he very likely would not have written novels at all. The pioneer, in whatever field of thought or activity, is apt to be also the most distinguished figure therein.
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