lstoi is more
plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power
as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and dramatic.
But as an _artist_, as master of the combination of details into a
harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative 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,
coming from the representative of French literature which is so
eminently artistic. But it was not flattery. As an artist, Turgenev
in reality stands with the classics who may be studied and admired
for their perfect form long after the interest of their subject has
disappeared. But it seems that in his very devotion to art and beauty he
has purposely restricted the range of his creations.

To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he
possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the
highest and the lowest, the noble as well as the base. From the height
of his superiority he 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 showed that he could equal
Edgar Poe, Hofmann, and Dostoevsky in the mastery of the fantastical,
the horrible, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible, which live
somewhere in human nerves, though not to be defined by reason.

But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human
poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and
discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the
gentler 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 gloomy
regions, and he hastens back to the realms of the sun and flowers, or to
the poetical moonlight of melancholy, which he loves best because in it
he can find expression for his own great sorrowing heart.

Even jealousy, which is the black shadow of the most poetical of human
feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He