he tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and
limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course,
there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.

Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully
from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing
you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he
is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in
poetic feeling!

Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of
Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian
poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the
same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin's work.
His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and
unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country
episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe
sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute
harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe
and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible
that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a
certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M.
Haumant, one of Turgenev's ablest critics and biographers, pointed out
not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the
advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in
this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is
perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev
adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of
form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this
may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the
history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in
Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist
besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early
_Sportsman's Sketches_ in freshness of inspiration and the perfection
of artistic execution.

His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories
in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has
anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are
likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev
owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, wit