whom does she turn in her prayer for strength?
Not to Bersenyev, the philosopher, the dreamer; not
to Shubin, the man carried outside himself by every
passing distraction; but to the strong man, Insarov.
And here the irony of Insarov being made a foreigner,
a Bulgarian, is significant 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
