The Gentle Barbarian (25 page)

The purpose of
The Bell
was described in the four volumes of Herzen's collected writings:

You can work on men [he wrote] only by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they can dream them themselves, not by demonstrating their ideas to them as geometrical theories are demonstrated.

In the fifties he had settled in London, living at first in a grotesque room in Primrose Hill which contained, to his sardonic amusement, a bust of Queen Victoria and of Lola Montez. He was freer in London than he had ever been in his harassed wanderings in Europe but:

My heart was not lighter for this freedom but yet I looked out of the window with a greeting to the sombre trees in the park which were hardly visible through the smoky fog and thanked them for their peacefulness. There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London.

Until the sixties, Herzen, like Turgenev, had been a convinced Westerner but now he changed his mind. The rich Russian aristocrat and revolutionary, noted for his fine bearing and his excellent clothes, could not bear to see the rise of the lower middle class in industrialised Europe.

Their vulgarity is cramping to art, above all their decorum, moderation and punctuality.

Their life was

full of small defects and small virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly and shuns what is extreme and superfluous. The petit bourgeois ideal is the little house with little windows looking on to the street, a school for the son, a dress for the daughter, a servant for the hard work.

To Herzen the success of the new ideal was a degradation; he was aging and yearned to be back in peasant Russia and dreamed that a society less mean and calculating, something closer to the old Slavophil teaching, would somehow appear. It is an extraordinary reversal of belief and when Turgenev read the six long letters addressed to himself in
The Bell,
he replied hotly to the accusation that his own belief in Western Europe and its traditions was due to laziness and epicureanism. The hope of a new society lay with the educated class who transmit civilisation. Herzen, he said, was worshipping the peasant's sheepskin coat; left to themselves the peasants would soon become as bourgeois as Europe and would be averse to all civic responsibility and independent action.

You diagnose contemporary mankind with unusual subtlety and sensitivity [Turgenev wrote], but why must this [i.e., the petit bourgeois] be Western Man and not
bipedes
in general.

Herzen, he said, was like a doctor who after examining the symptoms of a chronic illness says that the whole trouble comes from the patient's being a Frenchman. If Herzen has lost his faith in civilisation and finally revolution, let him admit it “without evident or implied exceptions in favour of a Russian Messiah who is expected at any moment and in whom you really believe as little as you do in the Hebrew one.”

This dispute lost its amiable note after his “trial” in Petersburg, and, Turgenev read in
The Bell
a nasty paragraph, thought to have been written by Bakunin, which accused Turgenev of betraying the conspirators to the judges and in which he was called “a grey haired Magdalene of masculine gender” who had written to the Emperor because she feared he was unaware of her repentance with the result that she had lost strength, appetite and her hair and teeth are falling
out. The language of Russian controversy has always been gaudy in personal insult. It was too much that Bakunin who had borrowed money from him should now spread slanders.

But [he wrote to Herzen] I did not expect you in just the same way to fling mud at a man you have known for almost twenty years—solely because his convictions are different from yours.

Herzen never apologised: he had been infected by Bakunin with the mistrust that Bakunin always sowed between his friends—the characteristic that Turgenev had noted years before in the portrait of Rudin. There was a long breach. It is characteristic of Turgenev that he tried to comfort Herzen when
The Bell
finally lost its readers and came to an end.

Fashionable society in Baden, frivolous though it was, paid its peculiar tribute to the fame of the artists who came there. Pauline's fame in opera, Turgenev's fame as a novelist, drew people to them. Louis Viardot's mild distinction as a scholar himself benefited from the glow of his wife's and Turgenev's achievements. Other musical people had caused royal frostiness and a drawing in of skirts, but this respectable liaison offered no revelations to the outside world and was so clearly domestic, middle-aged and high-minded that it ruffled no one except the Russians and the French who, in their airy way, could not believe that two of Pauline's children, Claudine and Paul, were not Turgenev's, but had no secrets of the alcove to report. Pauline had the advantage of being the model for
Consuelo
who had never strayed, despite her alarming experiences. And then the Viardot group were well-off and intellectually formidable. The most the ironical could notice was that Turgenev, who had so often spoken of his old age and approaching death even in his thirties, now at forty-five had the tact to be as white-haired as the husband who was more than twenty years older than himself. In this town where the Russian visitors shouted and the courtesans from Paris were overdressed, there was social reassurance in the sight of the two staid and white-haired men going off shooting together or escorting the vigorous and commanding young singer who struck one, in her severe plainness, as being the male of the three. Her salon was soon the
most exclusive in Baden and was visited by the ruling Prince himself.

The climate of Baden improved Turgenev's health: he was free of the laryngitis, colds and bronchitis of Petersburg. He no longer wore a respirator or spat blood. He stuck, however, to mufflers, comforters and rugs in the winter and longed for Russian stoves.

Turgenev's letters to Pauline when she is occasionally away singing in Germany recover the liveliness of his youthful adoration; the flowery worshipping phrases in German which had almost vanished now reappear in the mid-sixties, and although we have none of her letters we can tell from his that she now wrote often and more warmly. The next few years were the happiest in their lives. Turgenev was in high spirits. He loved dancing and play-acting. He became a child among her children. He appointed himself an additional father or a godfather who, as he said, adored them all, played with them, taught them. The young pupils of Pauline Viardot were in awe of her, but it was Turgenev who put them at their ease with his chatter. Louis Viardot was silent, uttered the word that brought them to order, was strict, but could make a pun. He was the just man with strict moral views: he was very French in being the man whose ideas were arranged in an orderly manner. But he did find himself effaced at times by a famous wife and the famous novelist. In Alexander Zviguilsky's introduction to new letters of Turgenev (Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1871), there is a reference to Gustave Dulay's
Pauline Viardot, Tragédienne Lyrique,
which comments on a letter Louis Viardot wrote to his wife in 1865. He says he has never for a moment thought his wife indulged in sentiments or conduct unworthy of her. But one has to be careful not to give rise to gossip. He complains, without mentioning Turgenev, that there have often been occasions in conversations, in musical matters or relations with their children “that his place has been taken by another.” What would Pauline think if she found some other woman, George Sand, for example, taking
her
place the whole time in the affections and duties of those nearest to her, so that she was made to feel irrelevant? Pauline appears to have replied that he was having an attack of the blue devils, but he replied that he wished it were just that, but:

my heart is sound, it is filled with you, loves and reveres you. Let us work together and give me back my peace, cheerfulness and let me
enjoy to the full my happiness and pride in having you for my wife and friend.

The passion of Louis Viardot for the wife who respected but did not love him, is resigned but deep. She was a woman indeed with two lovers: the husband almost silent who, when she was away once, wrote to Turgenev that he was now sadly left “to be the mother of the family,” fussing for her return; and the other, vivacious, brilliant, talkative and longing for her too, when he had to go to Paris or Russia. There is an important difference between the two men: Louis is proud of his marriage to her and feels that she belongs to him: for Turgenev the feeling is different. He tells her constantly he belongs to
her
and the little girls whom he adores: She is a tree, he says, she is his root and his crown. “I fall down at your feet and kiss them a thousand times, am yours forever and ever.” Once more this is written in German, the love language of his youth, the language of music; and one can be certain it is the influence of her voice singing which has passed into these words. It strikes one again that language was his instrument.

The wounding quarrel about
Fathers and Sons
went on. Journalists, Turgenev noted, had called him a Vidocq, a Judas, bought for gold, poison toad and spittoon. But he was not only helping Pauline with her Albums and even composing an
operétte
with her—he was writing a new novel,
Smoke,
in which he had one more fling at the Russian question. The Russian visitors in Baden talked incessantly through the nights about it.

In
Smoke,
all Turgenev's sense of outrage at the reception of
Fathers and Sons,
breaks out in his fierce caricature of Russian society. Since the novel is set in Baden, among an international set, it naturally strikes one as being adventitiously a European novel in which the Russian characters have a stupefied, often an absurd anachronistic role. We are no longer dragging our way across the steppe or sitting in happy out-of-date lethargy in out-of-date country houses and among people who, for all their surface sophistication, belong to an order which has not been known in Europe for at least two hundred years. The very lightness of manner, the treatment of the theme, seems “modern” in its restlessness, its quickness, its wit
and a new kind of psychological penetration. The upper-class Russians may cling together, but they are seen bemused by an active clash of cultures and are, as far as Europe is concerned, “on the spot.” Baden is a town in an advanced, industrialised country: people come and go not by diligence but by train. The smoke of the title is railway smoke, as well as having other symbolical duties. (The title was not Turgenev's: the publisher took it, very fittingly, from one of the last pages of the book.)

There is no raggedness in the carefully constructed story. Baden suits it perfectly in being the closed scene which is a substitute for the country house and in which the skills of the secret playwright can be displayed and where the characters, being transients, can bring their past to a head and to the test before, once more, they depart. The flowery August season is at its height. We see the yawning and glum Russian colony bickering and boasting under the
“arbre russe”
in the gardens, “the
fine fleur
of our society,” among them people like Baron Z, writer, orator, administrator and cardsharper; Prince Y, friend of the people and the church, who made a fortune out of selling doped vodka; the Countess S, a “Medusa in a bonnet”; a Princess Babette who boasted, as a thousand others did, that Chopin had died in her arms. The French are there in swarms, especially the
demi-monde
to whose buffooneries the Russians listen with awe, having no wit themselves. The opening chapter of
Smoke
is ferocious caricature of the Russian gentry abroad. Here, on his way back to Russia after four years studying economics and agricultural methods abroad, a young man called Litvinov pauses for a few days. He is waiting for his fiancée and her Aunt to arrive from Karlsruhe before he goes back to Russia to put modern ideas into practice on his land. Litvinov is a new kind of hero. He is the son of a modest, industrious clerk of serious mind who late in life had married a woman of noble extraction with large estates: this lady had run her houses in the orderly European fashion and seen to her son's education. Litvinov takes his future as a landowner seriously and studiously and is an earnest, simple young plebeian. He knows that now the Emancipation has occurred, his task will require practical and intelligent handling. He is well-equipped to do this and has no time for the fashionable young Russian officers on leave, the reactionary Generals or what he regards as the blather of the Russian Radicals. As a hero he is nice but dull: Turgenev advances him in the cause
of common sense. While he is waiting, he is dragged into the two main Russian parties: the dispiriting Radicals who gather round the famous Gubaryov—maliciously drawn from Herzen's friend, the poet Ogarev, and the new kind of Slavophil Radical who believes that all hopes lie in the hidden genius of the Russian peasant. Litvinov is bored and next finds himself with the old Generals and young aristocrats who are still determined to resist the changes brought about by the Emancipation. He goes off for a long walk up the mountain to the old
Schloss
and there runs into a party of aristocratic young officers. They spot the plebeian in Litvinov at once and snub him with majestic affability and contempt:

All were born with the same cachet of correctness, each one of them appearing to be profoundly convinced of his own importance, of his future place in the State. Meanwhile they had that touch of petulance and carelessness into which one plunges quite naturally when one is abroad, which agreeably disguises the fact that the feeling of superiority is absolute.

One hearty old General makes a speech:

I am not an enemy of what is called progress, but all these universities and colleges, schools for the people, students, priests' sons and restaurant keepers, these scrapings from the bottom of the sack who are worse than the proletariat—
they
are what frighten me … No, I've nothing against progress, but don't swamp us with lawyers and juries and leave military discipline alone.