On the Eve | Page 3

of Turgenev's distrust of his country's
weakness. The hidden meaning of the novel is a cry to the coming men
to unite their strength against the foe without and the foe within the
gates; it is an appeal to them not only to hasten the death of the old
regime of Nicolas I, but an appeal to them to conquer their sluggishness,
their weakness, and their apathy. It is a cry for Men. Turgenev sought
in vain in life for a type of man to satisfy Russia, and ended by taking
no living model for his hero, but the hearsay Insarov, a foreigner.
Russia has not yet produced men of this type. But the artist does not
despair of the future. Here we come upon one of the most striking
figures of Turgenev--that of Uvar Ivanovitch. He symbolises the
ever-predominant type of Russian, the sleepy, slothful Slav of to-day,
yesterday, and to-morrow. He is the Slav whose inherent force Europe
is as ignorant of as he is himself. Though he speaks only twenty

sentences in the book he is a creation of Tolstoian force. His very
words are dark and of practically no significance. There lies the irony
of the portrait. The last words of the novel, the most biting surely that
Turgenev ever wrote, contain the whole essence of On the Eve. On the
Eve of What? one asks. Time has given contradictory answers to the
men of all parties. The Elenas of to-day need not turn their eyes abroad
to find their counterpart in spirit; so far at least the pessimists are
refuted: but the note of death that Turgenev strikes in his marvellous
chapter on Venice has still for young Russia an ominous echo--so many
generations have arisen eager, only to be flung aside helpless, that one
asks, what of the generation that fronts Autocracy to-day?
'Do you remember I asked you, "Will there ever be men among us?"
and you answered, there will be. O primaeval force! And now from
here in "my poetic distance" I will ask you again, "What do you say,
Uvar Ivanovitch, will there be?"
'Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers, and fixed his enigmatical stare
into the far distance.'
This creation of an universal national type, out of the flesh and blood of
a fat taciturn country gentleman, brings us to see that Turgenev was not
merely an artist, but that he was a poet using fiction as his medium. To
this end it is instructive to compare Jane Austen, perhaps the greatest
English exponent of the domestic novel, with the Russian master, and
to note that, while as a novelist she emerges favourably from the
comparison, she is absolutely wanting in his poetic insight. How petty
and parochial appears her outlook in _Emma_, compared to the wide
and unflinching gaze of Turgenev. She painted most admirably the
English types she knew, and how well she knew them! but she failed to
correlate them with the national life; and yet, while her men and
women were acting and thinking, Trafalgar and Waterloo were being
fought and won. But each of Turgenev's novels in some subtle way
suggests that the people he introduces are playing their little part in a
great national drama everywhere around us, invisible, yet audible
through the clamour of voices near us. And so _On the Eve_, the work
of a poet, has certain deep notes, which break through the harmonious
tenor of the whole, and strangely and swiftly transfigure the quiet story,
troubling us with a dawning consciousness of the march of mighty
events. Suddenly a strange sense steals upon the reader that he is living

in a perilous atmosphere, filling his heart with foreboding, and
enveloping at length the characters themselves, all unconsciously
awaiting disaster in the sunny woods and gardens of Kuntsovo. But not
till the last chapters are reached does the English reader perceive that in
recreating for him the mental atmosphere of a single educated Russian
household, Turgenev has been casting before his eyes the faint shadow
of the national drama which was indeed played, though left unfinished,
on the Balkan battlefields of 1876-7. Briefly, Turgenev, in sketching
the dawn of love in a young girl's soul, has managed faintly, but
unmistakably, to make spring and flourish in our minds the
ineradicable, though hidden, idea at the back of Slav thought--the
unification of the Slav races. How doubly welcome that art should be
which can lead us, the foreigners, thus straight to the heart of the
national secrets of a great people, secrets which our own critics and
diplomatists must necessarily misrepresent. Each of Turgenev's novels
may be said to contain a light-bringing rejoinder to the old-fashioned
criticism of the Muscovite, current up to the rise of the Russian novel,
and still, unfortunately, lingering among us;