It is a testimony therefore to the intensity of his presence, that so much of his particular charm does reach us; that the mask turned to us has, even without his expression, still so much beauty. It is the beauty (since we must try to formulate) of the finest presentation of the familiar. His vision is of the world of character and feeling, the world of the relations life throws up at every hour and on every spot; he deals little, on the whole, in the miracles of chance, the hours and spots over the edge of time and space; his air is that of the great central region of passion and motive, of the usual, the inevitable, the intimate the intimate for weal or woe. No theme that he ever chooses but strikes us as full; yet with all have we the sense that their animation comes from within, and is not pinned to their backs like the pricking objects used of old in the horse-races of the Roman carnival, to make the animals run. Without a patch of "plot" to draw blood, the story he mainly tells us, the situation he mainly gives, runs as if for dear life. His first book was practically full evidence of what, if we have to specify, is finest in him, the effect, for the commonest truth, of an exquisite envelope of poetry. In this medium of feeling,-full, as it were, of all the echoes and shocks of the universal danger and need,-everything in him goes on; the sense of fate and folly and pity and wonder and beauty. The tenderness, the humor, the variety of 'A Sportsman's Sketches revealed on the spot an observer with a rare imagination. These faculties had attached themselves, together, to small things and to great: to the misery, the simplicity, the piety, the patience, of the unemancipated peasant; to all the natural wonderful life of earth and air and winter and summer and field and forest; to queer apparitions of country neighbors, of strange local eccentrics; to oldworld practices and superstitions; to secrets gathered and types disinterred and impressions absorbed in the long, close contacts with man and nature involved in the passionate pursuit of game. Magnificent in stature and original vigor, Turgeneff, with his love of the chase, or rather perhaps of the inspiration he found in it, would have been the model of the mighty hunter, had not such an image been a little at variance with his natural mildness, the softness that often accompanies the sense of an extraordinary reach of limb and play of muscle. He was in person the model rather of the strong man at rest: massive and towering, with the voice of innocence and the smile almost of childhood. What seemed still more of a contradiction to so much of him, however, was that his work was all delicacy and fancy, penetration and compression.

If I add, in their order of succession, 'Rudin, Fathers and Children, 'Spring Floods,' and 'Virgin Soil, to the three novels I have (also in their relation of time) named above, I shall have indicated the larger blocks of the compact monument, with a base restir

deep and interstices well filled, into which that work disposes itself. The list of his minor productions is too long to draw out: I can only mention, as a few of the most striking-'A Correspondence,' 'The Wayside Inn,' 'The Brigadier,' 'The Dog,' 'The Jew,' 'Visions,' 'Mumu,' 'Three Meetings,' 'A First Love,' The Forsaken,' 'Assia,' The Journal of a Superfluous Man,' 'The Story of Lieutenant Yergunov,' 'A King Lear of the Steppe.' The first place among his novels would be difficult to assign: general opinion probably hesitates between 'A House of Gentlefolk' and 'Fathers and Children.' My own predilection is great for the exquisite 'On the Eve'; though I admit that in such a company it draws no supremacy from being exquisite. What is less contestable is that 'Virgin Soil-published shortly before his death, and the longest of his fictions-has, although full of beauty, a minor perfection.

Character, character expressed and exposed, is in all these things what we inveterately find. Turgeneff's sense of it was the great light that artistically guided him; the simplest account of him is to say that the mere play of it constitutes in every case his sufficient drama. No one has had a closer vision, or a hand at once more ironic and more tender, for the individual figure. He sees it with its minutest, signs and tricks, - all its heredity of idiosyncrasies, all its particulars of weakness and strength, of ugliness and beauty, of oddity and charm; and yet it is of his essence that he sees it in the general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts, struggling or submerged, a hurried particle in the stream. This gives him, with his quiet method, his extraordinary breadth; dissociates his rare power to particularize from dryness or hardness, from any peril of caricature. He understands so much that we almost wonder he can express anything; and his expression is indeed wholly in absolute projection, in illustration, in giving of everything the unexplained and irresponsible specimen. He is of a spirit so human that we almost wonder at his control of his matter; of a pity so deep and so general that we almost wonder at his curiosity. The element of poetry in him is constant, and yet reality stares through it without the loss of a wrinkle. No one has more of that sign of the . born novelist which resides in a respect unconditioned for the freedom and vitality, the absoluteness when summoned, of the creatures he invokes; or is more superior to the strange and second-rate policy of explaining or presenting them by reprobation or apology,- of taking the short cuts and anticipating the emotions and judgments about them that should be left, at the best, to the perhaps not most intelligent reader. And yet his system, as it may summarily be called, of the mere particularized report, has a lucidity beyond the virtue of the cruder moralist.

What

If character, as I say, is what he gives us at every turn, I should speedily add that he offers it not in the least as a synonym, in our Western sense, of resolution and prosperity. It wears the form of the almost helpless detachment of the short-sighted individual soul; and the perfection of his exhibition of it is in truth too often but the intensity of what, for success, it just does not produce. works in him most is the question of the will; and the most constant induction he suggests, bears upon the sad figure that principle seems mainly to make among his countrymen. He had seen - he suggests to us its collapse in a thousand quarters; and the most general tragedy, to his view, is that of its desperate adventures and disasters, its inevitable abdication and defeat. But if the men, for the most part, let it go, it takes refuge in the other sex; many of the representatives of which, in his pages, are supremely strong-in wonderful addition, in various cases, to being otherwise admirable. This is true of such a number-the younger women, the girls, the "heroines" in especial-that they form in themselves, on the ground of moral beauty, of the finest distinction of soul, one of the most striking groups the modern novel has given us. They are heroines to the letter, and of a heroism obscure and undecorated: it is almost they alone who have the energy to determine and to act. Elena, Lisa, Tatyana, Gemma, Marianna - we can write their names and call up their images, but I lack space to take them in turn. It is by a succession of the finest and tenderest touches that they live; and this, in all Turgeneff's work, is the process by which he persuades and succeeds.

It was his own view of his main danger that he sacrificed too much to detail; was wanting in composition, in the gift that conduces to unity of impression. But no novelist is closer and more cumulative; in none does distinction spring from a quality of truth more independent of everything but the subject, but the idea itself. This idea, this subject, moreover, a spark kindled by the innermost friction of things, is always as interesting as an unopened telegram. The genial freedom with its exquisite delicacy-of his approach to this "innermost" world, the world of our finer consciousness, has in short a side that I can only describe and commemorate as nobly disinterested; a side that makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us in comparison by violent means, and introduce us in comparison to vulgar things.

Huy Jammer

W

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THE DEATH OF BAZAROV

From Fathers and Children ›

AZAROV's old parents were all the more overjoyed by their son's arrival, as it was quite unexpected. Arina Vlasyevna was greatly excited, and kept running backwards and forwards in the house, so that Vassily Ivanovitch compared her to a "hen partridge"; the short tail of her abbreviated jacket did in fact, give her something of a bird-like appearance. He himself merely growled, and gnawed the amber mouth-piece of his pipe; or clutching his neck with his fingers, turned his head round, as though he were trying whether it were properly screwed on; then all at once he opened his wide mouth and went off into a perfectly noiseless chuckle.

"I've come to you for six whole weeks, governor," Bazarov said to him. "I want to work, so please don't hinder me now." "You shall forget my face completely, if you call that hindering you!" answered Vassily Ivanovitch.

He kept his promise. After installing his son as before in his study, he almost hid himself away from him, and he kept his wife from all superfluous demonstrations of tenderness. «On Enyusha's first visit, my dear soul," he said to her, "we bothered him a little; we must be wiser this time." Arina Vlasyevna agreed with her husband; but that was small compensation, since she saw her son only at meals, and was now absolutely afraid to address him. "Enyushenka she would say sometimes; and before he had time to look round, she was nervously fingering the tassels of her reticule, and faltering, "Never mind, never mind, I only" and afterwards she would go to Vassily Ivanovitch, and, her cheek in her hand, would consult him: "If you could only find out, darling, which Enyusha would like for dinner to-day,- cabbage broth or beet-root soup?"-"But why didn't you ask him yourself?"—"Oh, he will get sick of me!"

Bazarov, however, soon ceased to shut himself up: the fever of work fell away, and was replaced by dreary boredom or vague restlessness. A strange weariness began to show itself in all his movements; even his walk, firm, bold, and strenuous, was changed. He gave up walking in solitude, and began to seek society; he drank tea in the drawing-room, strolled about the kitchen-garden with Vassily Ivanovitch, and smoked with him in silence; once even asked after Father Alexey. Vassily Ivanovitch at first rejoiced at this change, but his joy was not long-lived. "Enyusha's

"I

breaking my heart," he complained in secret to his wife: "it's not that he's discontented or angry-that would be nothing; he's sad, he's sorrowful- that's what's so terrible. He's always silent. If he'd only abuse us! He's growing thin, he's lost his color." Mercy on us, mercy on us!" whispered the old woman: would put an amulet on his neck, but of course he won't allow it." Vassily Ivanovitch several times attempted in the most cir- t cumspect manner to question Bazarov about his work, about his health, and about Arkady. But Bazarov's replies were reluctant and casual; and once, noticing that his father was trying gradually to lead up to something in conversation, he said to him in a tone of vexation, "Why do you always seem to be walking round me on tiptoe? That way's worse than the old one." "There, there, I meant nothing!" poor Vassily Ivanovitch answered hurriedly. So his diplomatic hints remained fruitless. He hoped to awaken his son's sympathy one day by beginning, apropos of the approaching emancipation of the peasantry, to talk about progress; but the latter responded indifferently, "Yesterday I was walking under the fence, and I heard the peasant boys here i bawling a street song instead of some old ballad. That's what progress is."

Sometimes Bazarov went into the village, and in his usual bantering tone entered into conversation with some peasant. "Come," he would say to him, "expound your views on life to me, brother: you see, they say all the strength and future of Russia lies in your hands; a new epoch in history will be started by you you give us our real language and our laws."

The peasant either made no reply, or articulated a few words of this sort: "Well, we'll try—because, you see, to be sure"You explain to me what your mir is," Bazarov interrupted; "and is it the same mir that is said to rest on three fishes?"

«< That, little father, is the earth that rests on three fishes," the peasant would declare soothingly, in a kind of patriarchal, simple-hearted sing-song: "and over against ours-that is to say, the mir we know there's the master's will; wherefore you are our fathers. And the stricter the master's rule, the better for the peasant."

After listening to such a reply one day, Bazarov shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and turned away, while the peasant sauntered slowly homewards.

"What was he talking about?" inquired another peasant of middle age and surly aspect, who at a distance from the door

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