Free The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett

excitement. He tells her that he has picked up a book by a fool called Daumer who holds the theory that Primitive Judaic Christianity was simply the cult of Moloch revived. A silly theory, but there is a terrible side to Christianity: the bloody, disheartening, anti-human side of a religion which set out to be a religion of love and charity. It is painful to read of the flagellation, the processions, worship of relics, the autos-da-fé, the hatred of life, the horror of women, all those wounds and all that talk of blood.
    Under her husband’s influence Turgenev’s conversation was peppered with bits of Spanish. Pauline, of course, knew the language well. Turgenev took Spanish lessons at Courtavenel and was soon reading Calderón. Of Calderón’s
Devoción de la Cruz
he says he is the greatest Catholic dramatic poet since Shakespeare—like him, the most humane and the most anti-Christian: He has
    cette foi immuable, triomphante, sans l’ombre dun doute ou même d‘une réflexion. Il vous écrase à force de grandeur et de majesté, malgré tout ce que cette doctrine a de répulsif et d’atroce. Ce néant de tout ce qui constitue la dignité de I‘homme devant la volonté divine, l’indifférence profonde pour tout ce que nous appelons vertu ou vice avec laquelle la Grâce se répand sur son élu—est encore un triomphe pourl’esprit humain, car l’être qui proclame ainsi avec tant d’audace son propre néant, s’élève par cela même à I’égal de cette Divinité fantasque, dont il se reconnaît être le jouet.
    He has moved on to Calderóne’s
La Vida Es Sueño
with its wild energy, its profound and sombre disdain for life, its astonishing boldness of thought, set side by side with Catholic fanaticism at its most inflexible. Calderón’s Segismund is the Spanish Hamlet. That life is a dream will be both context and impulse when Turgenev found his genius in poetic realism and already we see him forming his theory of the contrasting characters of Hamlet and Don Quixote. But a Hamlet who marks the difference between the South and the North. Hamlet is the more reflective, subtle and philosophic; the character of Segismund is simple, naked and as penetrating as a dagger: one fails to act through irresolution, doubt and brooding: the other acts—for his southern blood drives him to do so—but even as he acts he knows that life is only a dream. (The lover is subtly trying to stir her southern blood and draw out her Spanishness.)
    Contemporary literature, he reflects, is in a state of transition. It is eclectic and reflects no more than the scattered sentiments of their author. There is no great dominant movement—perhaps industrialism will take the place of literature; perhaps
that
will liberate and regenerate mankind. So perhaps the real poets are the Americans who will cut a path through Panama and invent a transatlantic electric telegraph. (Once the social revolution has been achieved a new literature will be born!) He doesn’t suppose that a spirit as discriminating, simple, straight-forward and serious as hers is has much patience with the stories of Diderot: he is too full of paradox and fireworks, though sometimes he has new and bold ideas. It is by his
Encyclopaedia
he will live and by his devotion to freedom. (There will be more than a touch of Diderot in the construction of Turgenev’s stories.)
    Louis Viardot has asked him to arrange his library. There is a list of books read: M. Ott’s
History
is the work of a Catholic Democrat—something against nature: that idea merely produces monsters. There are other nauseating books on history in the library: Rolteck, for example, with his flat, emphatic style but there are the spirited letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; an absurd Spanish novel; Bausset’s
Napoleon,
the book of a born lackey; a dull translation