Rudin

last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public,

Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and s

d gushing enthusiasm which in a few years lifted Count Tolstoi to world-wide fame. Neither in the pers

nd perfectly individualised, yet all the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades

inative work, he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. Twenty-five years ago, on reading the translation of one of his short stories (Assya), George Sand, who was then at the apogee of her fame, wrote to him: ‘Master, all of us have to go to study at your school.’ This was, indeed, a generous compliment, comin

saw all, understood all: Nature and men had no secrets hidden from his calm, penetrating eyes. In his latter days, sketches such as Clara Militch, The Song of Triumphant Love, The Dream, and the incomparable Phantoms, he sh

entler side of human nature. On the fringe of his pictures or in their background, just for the sake of contrast, he will show us the vices, the cruelties, even the mire of life. But he cannot stay in these g

speciality. What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love — the romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of chivalry — Turgenev did for the natural, spontaneous, modern love in all its variety of forms, kinds, and manifestations: the slow and gradual as well as the sudden and instantaneous; the spiritual, the admiring and

hat the great enchanter owed his unique command over the emotions of his audiences to a peculiar use of o

obtains in touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to present his people in the light of that feeli

ife. His Diary of a Sportsman contains some of the best of his short stories, and his Country Inn, written

of Russian people. There is nothing of the enormous canvas of Count Tolstoi, in which the whole of Russia seems to pass in review before the readers. In

eir country. Besides, the artistic value of his works could only be enhanced by his concentrating his genius upon a field so familiar to him, and engrossing so completely his mind and his sympathies. What he loses in dimensions he gains in correctness, depth, wonderful subtlety and effectiveness of every minute detail, and the surpassing beauty of the whole. The je

mong foreigners, and that the number of his readers is widening every year, proves that great art is inter