hardly ever describes it,
only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives so
much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of love.
We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's 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 inspiring, as well as
the life-poisoning, terrible kind of love, which infects a man as a
prolonged disease. There is something prodigious in Turgenev's insight
into, and his inexhaustible richness, truthfulness, and freshness in the
rendering of those emotions which have been the theme of all poets and
novelists for two thousand years.

In the well-known memoirs of Caroline Bauer one comes across a curious
legend about Paganini. She tells that the great enchanter owed his
unique command over the emotions of his audiences to a peculiar use of
one single string, G, which he made sing and whisper, cry and thunder,
at the touch of his marvellous bow.

There is something of this in Turgenev's description of love. He has
many other strings at his harp, but his greatest effect he obtains in
touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to
present his people in the light of that feeling in which a man's soul
gathers up all its highest energies, and melts as in a crucible, showing
its dross and its pure metal.

Turgenev began his literary career and won an enormous popularity in
Russia by his sketches from peasant life. His _Diary of a Sportsman_
contains some of the best of his short stories, and his _Country Inn,_
written a few years later, in the maturity of his talent, is as good as
Tolstoi's little masterpiece, _Polikushka_.

He was certainly able to paint all classes and conditions of Russian
people. But in his greater works Turgenev lays the action exclusively
with one class 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 Turgenev's novels we see only educated
Russia, or rather the more advanced thinking part of it, which he knew
best, because he was a part of it himself.

We are far from regretting this specialisation. Quality can sometimes
ho