unreal than that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were grossly
caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov was a type of a past world, another
Rudin, and not in the least like--so those who knew them tell us--the
revolutionaries of the day. Solomin, the energetic character in the
book, was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. The wife of the
reactionary Sipyagin is a _pastiche_ of the female characters of that
type in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a completely conventional
book character. The redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the
heroine, one of Turgenev's finest ideal women; and it is full, of
course, of gems of descriptive writing. The book was a complete
failure, and after this Turgenev went back to writing short stories.
The result was a great disappointment to Turgenev, who had thought
that, by writing a novel dealing with actual life, he would please and
reconcile all parties. To this later epoch belong his matchless _Poems
in Prose_, one of the latest melodies he sounded, a melody played on
one string of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the essence of
all his music.

Turgenev's work has a historic as well as an artistic value. He
painted the Russian gentry, and the type of gentry that was
disappearing, as no one else has done. His landscape painting has been
dwelt on; one ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it is, it
still belongs to the region of conventional landscape painting; his
landscape is the orthodox Russian landscape, and is that of the age of
Pushkin, in which no bird except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower
except a rose. This convention was not really broken in prose until
the advent of Gorky.

Reviewing Turgenev's work as a whole, any one who goes back to his
books after a time, and after a course of more modern and rougher,
stormier literature, will, I think, be surprised at its excellence
and perhaps be inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some of it
will appear conventional; he will notice a faint atmosphere of
rose-water; he will feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a
traveller feels who, after an exciting but painful journey, through
dangerous ways and unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a cool
garden, where fountains sob between dark cypresses, and swans float
majestically on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of syringa in the
air; the pleasaunce is artistically laid out, and full of fragrant
flowers. But he will not despise that garden for its elegance an