M. TURGUENIEF'S "LIZA.".
THE literature which aims at the delineation of real life is of all orders, ranging from the very frontier of the higher poetry to the very frontier of matter-of-fact chronicle and annals. Between Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" and Defoe's "Colonel Jack" there is a wider difference of kind than between Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and his "Vicar of Wakefield," though one of these last is in verse and the other in prose. Between Miss Austen's " Emma " and most of George Eliot's "Scenes from Clerical Life," there is a wider difference of kind than between Tennyson's " Dora " and some of those exquisite prose idyls of George Eliot. And again, Goethe's "Herrmann and Dorothea" approaches more closely in kind this beautiful story of M. Turguenief's than does almost any novel we could name, unless it might be—and that would only approach it at a distance—the exquisite little pseudonymous tale called "A Lost Love" by Ashford Owen, which delighted the world and was forgotten some fifteen years ago. Liza, written by a Russian author of great genius, and translated by Mr. Ralston into English so pure and classical that, unlike almost all translations, it is a pleasure to read it for its style alone, is a story which, without rising quite into the elevated tone of poetry, keeps often so close to its boundary that we hardly know whether we admire it most for the liquid atmosphere of what we may call its sky and cloud,—its treatment of human hope and faith and destiny,—and the transparent sweetness of its pathos, or for the sharp, firm out- lines of its delineations of character, and the new world of human life and action which it opens before us. Liza is not only a Russian story, but its scenery and conceptions are Russian to the core, and therefore introduce the English reader to a perfectly novel world ; and yet the art of the author is of so high a kind, his imagination pierces so completely through the Russian circum- stance to the spiritual qualities which are mutually intelligible to each other all the world over, that no one will find the slightest difficulty in entering into the spirit of every page, or will fail to find his imagination enriched by some of the most living groups and the most noble individual characters which have been painted for us since Romola was written.
No doubt the texture of the story is slight. M. Turguenief .works with few and rapid touches, and elaborates but little. His imagination, perhaps because it is full of poetical depth and lucidity, does not love to assimilate a great mass of material, but seems to give us the essence of his conceptions in delicate but decisive strokes. These two little volumes, minute as they are, contain many chapters of explanatory matter which are not strictly essential to the story but of the nature of glosses on the text, including excursions of the author's imagination into the antece- dents of characters which were already living before our eyes. Yet in spite of these rapid glances back of the author at the formative influences which he supposes necessary to have made the leading characters what he has painted them, and which, interesting as they are, are rather of the nature of imaginative criticisms by the author on his own text, than essential to the movement of his plot and the expression of his actors, the little tale brings before us, as if we had known them all our lives, no less than seven figures all of the most living order, and four of these seven, at least, Liza herself, Lisa's great-aunt Marfe Timofeevna, Len= the old German musician, and Varvara Pavlovna, Lavretsky's unfaithful wife, characters any one of which would give life and substance to an ordinary novel. We cannot be as sure that the two Russian pendants, Lavretsky, the true man embarrassed by his unnatural education, and Pan.shine, the hollow official man, are quite of the same calibre, because the truth of these portraits depends much upon circumstantial details, of the nicety and fulness of which we are no competent judges, nor, indeed, judges at all ; and the weak, trivial, vain, and sentimental
• Liza. By Ivan Turguenief. Translated from the Russian by W. R. R. Ralston. 2 vols. London: Chapman and HalL Maria Dmitrievna, though admirably drawn, is hardly a figure of the first rank. But the four characters we have mentioned are sketched with the power of a true poet, and are so independent of the mere local drawing and colour through the medium of which, of course, they are delineated, that any one who knows human nature at all recognizes the power and truth of the picture -with a thrill of delight.
No doubt the central figure of Liza herself is that which gives its power and pathos to the whole. And when we look back to the few scenes in which her character is painted, we are amazed at the apparently hasty lines and colours of a portraiture which excites a sort of passion of tenderness even in the reader. Statuesque, still, sincere, full of gentleness to all, but always self-possessed till pity deepens into love, dreading with a sort of spiritual fear to throw her heart absolutely into any human passion, and full from the first of a shy, religious ardour which consumes her altogether when once she loses her one hope of earthly joy, Liza seems almost to raise and widen the range of the imagination in the sphere of spiritual womanly beauty. It may rank beside the picture of Dinah in Adam Bede, though Liza is only a sketch and Dinah a full-length portrait, for truthfulness and spirituality, while in the intensity of poetical loveliness it even surpasses that wonderful and far more elaborate creation. Angels are rarely women. Lisa is all woman, yet with a dash of the angel that only a true poet could have given her. The ideal is rarely real. Liza is perfectly real, and yet is the embodiment of that
"lyric love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire,"
with which Mr. Browning has enchanted our imaginations.
Perhaps the character which strikes us as the second in power and originality to that of 'Lisa' is the crabbed old German musician's, Lemm's,—a Rembrandt-like picture of stiff and soured old age lighted up by the belated flame of a true artist's devotion to a rare pupil's purity and sweetness. The picture of Lemm's efforts after a composition that shall delineate in some shadowy way the nature of Liza, of his nervousness as with compressed lips he opens out his first attempt on the piano, of its failure owing to the com- plex, involved, and cramped movement of his thought, and of his despair at that failure, and then later of the success with which he breathes his passion into a single strain of trust and purity in the midnight, is one of the finest episodes we can remember in fiction. The cross, reserved, age-stricken man, with his pro- found sense of failure, is a figure far from ideal, and yet even when he is at his crabbedest the artist conveys that sense of an inward glow, of unsuccessful genius jarring all his nature, which prepares us for the gleam of fire when it comes.
The irritable, sincere, shrewd old aunt Marfa Timofeevna, with her sharp humour, her keen eye for affectations and falsehoods of all sorts, her dread of religious enthusiasm, and her profound ten- derness of nature, is a character of slighter interest, no doubt, than either of those we have mentioned, but not of leas living force. The contrast between her somewhat jerky energy of nature and Lisa's spiritual stillness of soul is a very happy one, and tends to bring out the higher art in the painting of Liza as much as to relieve it with more common-place materials. Her sarcastic an- tipathy to her niece's, Maria Dmitrievna's sentimentalism is most happily rendered. Altogether, she brightens and vivifies the story which might otherwise be in too much danger of a certain melan- choly idealism,—its higher characters, except her own, partaking of the dreamy and contemplative nature.
The character of the unfaithful wife, Varvara Pavlovna, a thoroughly selfish and impure nature of the velvet kind, is drawn with a power hardly excelled even in the picture of her rival Liza. M. Turguenief evidently delights in drawing characters more or less imbued with the artistic temperament. There are three, at least, in this little group, one true artist, and two with the superficial sensitiveness of the temperament, though without a trace of any disinterested love of the ideal. Vavara Pavlovna's soft audacity, her inward laughter and acted tears, the delight in conquest which brings her back to try if she cannot reconquer her alienated husband's heart, for which she does not care, or, at all events, extort a larger allowance from his generosity,—the verve and elasticity of her enjoyment of the role of temptress, even with those whom she only wishes to disturb and unsettle, not to win, her mischievous sensualism, the eestacy of half-bacchanalian rapture with which she dwells on a certain noisy waltz of Strauss, and the utter coldness of heart which does not even permit her to adhere consistently to the part she is assuming, are drawn with a wealth of small touches which is perfectly astonishing, when you consider the few pages devoted to her at all.
We can give no extract from this wonderful little story which will at all do justice to its genius, but we are sure—not only that it cannot disappoint any one with a true feeling for the higher art, but that it will be one of those few books to which its readers will return time after time with new pleasure, as they do to books which teach them more of life than life itself. Of the accuracy of the translation—from the scholar's point of view—we cannot judge at all, as the present writer is wholly ignorant of Russian. But there are in every page phrases which have all the force and sharpness of a great original. To give an example of what we mean, when we are told that Gedeonovsky laughed "a thin and cringing laugh," we feel sure that if that is not both choice and faithful translation, Mr. Ralston must have himself the literary powers of a keen observer and a subtle painter of human life.
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