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Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,1 saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. To arrive at these things is to arrive at my story, he said, and thats the way I look for it. The result is that Im often accused of not having story enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I needto show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of themof which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent darchitecture.2 But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too muchwhen theres danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I givehaving by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of ones wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isnt it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of lifeby which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposedfloated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critics quarrel, so often, with ones subject, when he hasnt the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it should properly have been?his office being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien embarrassé.3 Ah, when he points out what Ive done or failed to do with it, thats another matter: there hes on his ground. I give him up my architecture, my distinguished friend concluded, as much as he will. So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilité.4 It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of ones own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their settinga too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldnt emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didnt need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didnt depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believeamong novelists who have appeared to flourishthat offer the situation as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russians testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadinglyif it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for ones uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of subject in the novel. One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the immoral subject and the moral. Recognizing so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all othersis it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of life?I had found small edification, mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanityunless the difference to-day be just in ones own final impatience, the lapse of ones attention. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this |
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