OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

Tourgéneff's Idea of Bazaroff.

A volume containing several hundred of Tourgéneff's letters was published last winter in St. Petersburg by the "Society for Assisting Impecunious Authors and Scholars." It is to be followed by a second, and the proceeds are to be devoted to the foundation of a "Tourgéneff Memorial Fund." The whole collection will, we may hope, be translated into English. The following extracts relate chiefly to the character which is considered by many readers his finest creation, but which, as is well known, made him for a time very unpopular in Russia:

Bougival, August 18, 1871.

Dear A. P.,—Although you do not ask me for a reply, and do not seem to wish for one, yet the confidence which you have reposed in me and the feeling of sympathy and respect which you have awakened in me make it my duty to say a few words to you about your letter.... What? You say, too, that I meant to caricature the youth of Russia in Bazaroff? you repeat this—pardon the frankness of the expression—nonsensical accusation? Bazaroff,—this is my favorite child, for whose sake I quarrelled with Katkoff, upon whom I used all the color at my command. Bazaroff, this fine mind, this hero, a caricature? But it seems that there is nothing to be done in the case. Just as people accuse Louis Blanc to this day, in spite of all his protestations, of having introduced the national workshops, they attribute to me a wish to represent our youth as a caricature. I have long regarded the slander with contempt: I did not expect the feeling to be renewed on reading your letter.

Now to turn to your "elderly lady,"—that is, to current criticism, to the public. Like every elderly person, she holds fast to preconceived ideas, however preposterous they may be. For example, she is perpetually asserting that since my "Annals of a Sportsman" my works are weak, because, having lived abroad, I cannot know Russia. But this accusation can touch only what I have written since 1863; for until then—i.e., until my forty-fifth year—I lived almost uninterruptedly in Russia, except in 1848-49, when I wrote the "Annals of a Sportsman," while "Roudine," "A Nest of Nobles," "Ellen," and "Fathers and Sons" were written in Russia. But all that means nothing to the "elderly person:" son siège est fait.

The second weakness of the elderly one is that she persistently follows the fashion. At present the fashion in literature is politics. Everything non-political is for her rubbish and nonsense.

It is somewhat inconvenient to defend one's own works; but—fancy it!—I cannot even admit that "Stuk-Stuk" is nonsense. "What is it, then?" you will ask. It is this: it is a study of the Russian suicide epidemic, which rarely presents anything poetic or pathetic, but almost always results, on the contrary, from ambition, narrowness, with a mixture of mysticism or fatalism. You will object that my study is not successful. Possibly not; but I wished to point you to the right and fitness of investigating purely psychological (non-political and non-social) questions.

The elderly person reproaches me further with having no convictions. As an answer to that, my thirty years of literary activity will suffice. For no line which I have written have I had cause to blush, none have I had occasion to repudiate. Let another say this of himself. However, let the elderly person babble. I have not heeded her hitherto: I shall not begin now.

I do not know whether I shall write my novel; and I know in advance that it will have many defects.... But, permit me, dear A. P., why do not the oncoming young people take this task upon themselves? The old ones would gladly yield them place and honor, and would be the first to rejoice at the accession of new forces. But in the literary arena there figure the contributors to the "Djelo"[C] such as H.

You see, dear A. P., that you are not alone in being able to speak the whole truth, regardless of consequences. I hope you too will not be angry because of it, and will at least take notice of what I am saying.

I am still suffering from gout,—have reached Bougival, but still go about upon crutches, and shall hardly reach Paris within a month. You may be sure that I shall return the portfolio safely.

Bougival, September 11, 1874.

Your letter is so sweet and friendly, dear A. P., that I shall not delay answering it. You began with Bazaroff; I will begin with him too. You look for him in real life, and you do not find him. I will tell you why, at once. The times are changed; Bazaroffs are not needed now. For the social activity that is before us neither extraordinary talent nor even extraordinary mental power is needed; nothing great, distinguished, very individual. Industry and patience are required. Men and women must be ready to sacrifice themselves without fame or glory, must be able to conquer, having no fear of petty, obscure, necessary, elementary work. What, for instance, can be more necessary or elementary than teaching the peasant to read and write, helping him to get hospitals, etc.? Of what use are talents, even learning, for such work? One needs only a heart that can sacrifice its own egotism. You cannot even speak of a profession in the case (much less of our friend Blank's star). A sense of duty, the magnificent feeling of patriotism in the true sense of the word,—that is all that is needed. Bazaroff was the type of "one sent with a message," a great figure, gifted with a definite charm, not without a certain aureole. All that is not needed now, and it is ridiculous to speak of heroes and artists of work. Brilliant figures in literature will probably not appear. Those who plunge into politics will only destroy themselves in vain. This is all true; but many cannot reconcile themselves at first to the fact, to the uncongenial milieu, to this modest resolve, especially such responsive and enthusiastic women as yourself. They may say what they please, they want to be charmed, carried away. You yourself say that you wish to bow in reverence; but before useful people one does not bow in reverence. We are entering an era of merely useful people; and these will be the best. Of these there will probably be many, of beautiful, charming workers very few. And in the very search for a Bazaroff—a living one—is perhaps unconsciously betrayed the thirst for beauty, naturally of a single peculiar type. All these illusions one must get rid of.

I should not have reproached your acquaintances with a want of talent if they had not made pretensions. If they were plodding workers, they would leave nothing to be desired; but when they loom up and claim admiration, one cannot pass on without reminding them that they have no right to our admiration.

Ah, A. P.! we shall see no typical characters, none of those new creations of whom people talk so much. The life of the people is undergoing a process of development and—throughout the whole mass—of decomposition and recomposition: it needs helpers, not leaders, and only at the end of this period will important, original figures appear. I have just said that you will not see them. You are still young. You will live to see the day: as for me, that is another thing.

For the present, let us learn our A, B, C, and teach others, do good gradually, in which you are already making progress. The letter from your son, which I herewith return, is warm and good. May he, too, enter the ranks of the useful workers and servants of the people, as we once had servants of the Czar!

Paris, January 3, 1876.

To M. E. Saltikoff:[D]—I received your letter yesterday, dear Michael Jefgrafowitch, and, as you see, I do not delay the answer. Your letter is by no means "dull and blunt," as you say. On the contrary, it is very good and sensible. It gave me pleasure. There hovers about it some power and better health, in sharp contrast with its immediate predecessor, which was an extremely gloomy production. Besides, I am by no means cheerful myself at present: this is the third day in bed with gout.

Now a line or two as to "Fathers and Sons," seeing that you have mentioned the subject. Do you really believe that all that you reproach me with never entered my own mind? For this reason I wish not to vanish from the scene before I finish my comprehensive novel, which I think will clear up many misunderstandings and place me where and as I belong. However, I do not wonder that Bazaroff has remained a riddle for many persons: I cannot understand clearly how I conceived him. There was—do not laugh—something more powerful than the author himself, something independent of him. I know only this,—there was no preconceived idea in me then, no "novel with a purpose" in my thought: I wrote naïvely, as if I myself wondered at what came of it....

Tell me, on your conscience, whether comparison with Bazaroff could be an affront to any one. Don't you perceive yourself that he is the most congenial of all my characters? "A certain fine perfume" is an invention of the reader's; but I am prepared to admit (and have already admitted in print in my "Recollections") that I had no right to give our reactionary mob an opportunity to make of a nickname a name. The author ought to have sacrificed himself to the citizen; and I therefore recognize as justified the estrangement of our youth from me, and all possible reproaches. The question of the time was more important than artistic truth, and I ought to have known this in advance.

I have only to say once more, wait for my novel, and, until then, do not be indignant that, in order not to grow unaccustomed to the pen, I write slight insignificant things. Who knows?—perhaps it may yet be given to me to fire the hearts of men.

An entertaining writer in the sense of G——wa I shall never be. I would rather be a stupid writer.

But now—basta!

I greet you and press your hand most cordially.

Ivan Sergewitch Tourgéneff.

Old Songs and Sweet Singers.

wrote Calverley in his delightful drollery about the advances of old age. Nevertheless he made a mistake, for old songs cling tenaciously to the consciousness; and memory, are retained when everything else in heart and mind has been blurred over, and of all the magic mirrors which reflect back our lives for us the most effective is a melody linked to words which moved us in our youth. When an orchestra stops playing its waltzes and mazourkas of the latest fashion and takes up the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Oft in the Stilly Night," or "Robin Adair," one may readily observe a change come over the older part of the crowd who listen. The familiar air is like a shell murmuring in their ears sweet, far-off, imperishable memories of youth, and that special epoch of youth best described as "les heureux jours où l'on était si malheureux!" It is an experience worth having to have heard the great singers, but it is not of the great singers that I wish to speak here. I fancy that it is with others as with myself, and, in my early days at least, music wrought its chief enchantments and most perfectly allied itself with the great world of fantasy and imagination when I heard it in my own home, or at least quietly and privately, and when its influence was of a constant and regular kind. Why is it that literature, which enshrines so much of what is personal and actual and a part of ideal autobiography, says so little of singers, although the song which moves us, rummaging among our old memories and, to our surprise and delight, bringing back clear pictures, is generally linked to the sweet singer who sang it, who interpreted it for us and made it a part of our imaginative possessions? Heroines of novels are rarely singers, or, if they sing, abstain from effective music, and have soft, soothing voices, "as if they only sang at twilight." Heroines of course have to be heroines and nothing else. "Soothing, unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood," wrote George Eliot, "which supersedes all acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never have asked at any period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life if she sketched or played the piano. You would perhaps have been rather scandalized if she had descended from the serene dignity of being to the assiduous unrest of doing." However, when he recalls the female singers he has known, any man will grant that they have been almost without exception very charming women. A really good singer must possess in absolute equipoise ardor and calm. But the first singer I ever heard who made me feel upborne by the music and floated as by the sweep of wings was a man with a high, melancholy, piercingly sweet tenor voice. He had a pale, striking face, with a mobile mouth, intensely brilliant blue eyes, a lofty forehead, and his fine, scanty brown hair hung low on his neck. As he sang with lifted head and eyes which gazed steadfastly before him, he seemed rapt and inspired. Were I to paint an angel I should try to seize his lineaments and the glory shining on his pale face. The song I loved best to hear him sing was Schubert's "Erl-King," which thrilled me with a sense of terror and mystery and made me tremble like a harp-string in response to his piercingly clear tones. Ever and anon, as I listened to the child's cry of "Oh, father, my father!" I was clutched by the icy hand of the awful phantom he had invoked. Does anybody sing Schubert's songs nowadays, or are they invariably left to the violins, which can interpret their "eternal passion, eternal pain," so thrillingly? I never, I regret to say, heard the "Serenade" sung in a way which seemed to me adequate,—not to compare with the way in which Remenyi plays it. Those wonderful lyrical instruments the violin, the 'cello, and the flute have an almost exclusive right nowadays to some of the greatest songs. Few singers attempt the "Adelaïde" or "Che faro?"

I like to recall the first time I ever heard "Che faro senza Eurydice?" A musical matinée was given to an elegant elderly woman, Mrs. P——, who had had a wide social reputation as an accomplished singer. She was still mistress of all the technique of her art, but her voice was worn and it was not easily conceded that she was a delightful vocalist. Many of her songs seemed like the ghosts of the blissful happy songs she had sung in her youth. There was something half painful in their jocund gayety and archness. I went far away from the piano and seated myself with a group of young people, paying little attention to the music. Presently, however, a strain sought me out, a sweet, passionately reiterated strain: it seemed to be supplicating, imploring; it filled me with a restless pain. That cry of "Eurydice!" "Eurydice!" so beseeching, so passionate, so exhausted by longing, drew me with an irresistible power. Gluck certainly achieved the effect he attempted, and showed us what the fabled power of Orpheus was.

Certain songs of indifferent worth often gain charm to us, although it is only the greatest music which has the supreme power of expressing the highest thoughts of man and the most ardent longings of his soul. But there was a time when I found inconceivable sweetness in certain ballads of Abt, and the like. Sara X——, a lovely youthful creature, with a frank, beautiful smile, used to sing them, sitting down at the piano and going on from one song to another, generally beginning with "The Bells are Hushed," which silenced the room when twenty people were buzzing flirtation and gossip. One line of that song, as she sang it, draws the heart out of me still as I remember it:

The sentiment such songs arouse is soft but poignant. Some songs—the "Adelaïde," for example—are songs to make one commit suicide. But this sort of music stirs and delights while it mocks with the sweetness which soothes us not. "She kept me awake all night, as a strain of Mozart's might do," Keats wrote of his Charmian. There was no song this special songstress sang which she did not make her own by a peculiar and powerful effort. Her instinct was to rouse, charm, fascinate her little audience. Not to move her hearers was to her not to sing, and when she sang as she wished she could sweep away his world of ideas from her listener and recreate a new one. In one song, an Italian composition called "The Dream," she always seemed to be carried beyond herself. In reading Tourgéneff's description of Iakof's singing I could only think of Sara X——: "Iakof became more and more excited; completely master of himself, he gave himself up entirely to the inspiration that had taken possession of him. His voice no longer trembled; it no longer betrayed anything but the emotion of passion, that emotion that so rapidly communicates itself to the hearers. One evening I was by the sea when the tide was coming in; the murmur of the waves was becoming more and more distinct. I saw a gull motionless on the shore, with its white breast facing the purplish sea; from time to time it spread its enormous wings and seemed to greet the incoming waves and the disk of the sun. This came to my mind at that moment." And as I read these words of Tourgéneff's, Sara X—— singing "The Dream" came to my mind.

A less dramatic singer, but an incomparable singer of Scotch ballads, and indeed of all ballads, at the same period of my life made an imperishable impression upon my mind. Nothing can surpass certain Scotch ballads for the faculty of quickening into susceptibility the elementary poetry which underlies human nature. Every man and every woman becomes again an individual man, an individual woman, who is moved by "John Anderson, my Jo, John," or "Auld Robin Gray." Never was so sweet a voice as this singer's, never did woman have a higher gift of rescuing the soul from every-day use and wont and giving it glimpses from the mountain-summit and the thrill and inspiration which come from the wider view and the purer air. She gave her gift, she enriched the world, and her songs are still incorporate in the hearts and souls of those who loved her.

We do not hear songs enough in our every-day life; and even from the singers on the boards the best songs are rarely heard. There are many songs I should like to repeat the mere name of, so much it means to me; but it might not carry the same music to others. Dr. Johnson said of a certain work, "There should come out such a book every thirty years, dressed in the words of the times." So there should appear at least twice in every decade of each man's and woman's life an unsurpassed singer of old songs, who should give us not only the "Adelaïde," but "Mignon," "The Serenade," the "Adieu," and all the many-colored ballads on love,—plain, fantastic, descriptive, sad, and sweet,—so that we might enjoy an epitome of our life-long musical pleasures, and not have to cry, like Faust, but in vain, "Give me my youth again."

L. M.

A Chess Village.

The all-pervading influence of chess observable in that peculiar region described in "Through the Looking-Glass" is hardly less perceptible in the little, antiquated German village of Ströbeck, not far from Halberstadt. In the eleventh century this village was noted for the devotion of its people to chess, and they have kept this characteristic feature down to the present day. All the inhabitants, except the very small children, are chess-players of more or less skill, and the game is to them what the world-renowned Passion-play is to the Oberammergauers.

A great many notable men have visited Ströbeck at various times on account of its reputation as a chess-playing community. The council-house contains numerous memorials of these visits, which the villagers take pride in showing to strangers. Among the most highly prized of these memorials are a board and chessmen which were presented to the village in 1651 by Kurfürst Frederick William of Brandenburg.

In June, 1885, the chess societies of the Hartz districts held a "Schachcongress," or chess convention, at this appropriate place. Besides the regularly-appointed delegates, a large number of visitors came from various parts of Germany, many of whom were players of wide repute. Among the latter was Herr Schalopp, well known as one of the best chess-players of Berlin. While at Ströbeck, Schalopp played games with thirty-seven persons at the same time. He won thirty-four of the games, and two of the three opponents whom he did not defeat were an old woman of the village, and her grandson, a boy of thirteen.

The convention lasted several days, and the villagers won a large proportion of the silver-ware, chess-boards, and other prizes offered for victory. Every house contains prizes which had been won in such contests on former occasions. The visitors were very much surprised at the fine playing of the village children, who, before the convention adjourned, gave a special exhibition of their skill in the game. The time characteristically chosen for this juvenile tournament was Sunday afternoon. Of course the early development of these small chess-players must have been caused principally by frequent practice and constant study of the game; but students of psychology might find in it an instance of transmitted tendency and the inherited effect of a certain habit of thought.

Such a rustic society as Ströbeck could hardly exist anywhere but in Germany. The Italian peasants, who give so much of their time to loto, are generally too lazy to make the mental exertion required for chess, while in most other European countries the rural population of the lower class entertain themselves chiefly with fights between dogs, cocks, or men who are but little superior to either. Here in the United States there are, no doubt, lovers of chess in nearly every village or small town, as well as in the cities; but in comparison with that of base-ball or roller-skating its popularity is nowhere great enough to be taken into account as an indication of mental tendencies or characteristics.

W. W. C.

FOOTNOTES: