ists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but
rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant;
wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people
of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it
stands is no illusion, no fantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake
up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it
nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give
it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to
pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the
volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight,
but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids
us learn to will and seek to understand.

So much as this we seem to decipher between the lines of M.
Turgeneff's minutely written chronicle. He himself has sought to
understand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. He gives, at
least, no meager account of life, and he has done liberal justice to
its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect,
roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains,
nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator between the world
and our curiosity. If we had space, we should like to set forth that
he is by no means our ideal story-teller--this honorable genius
possessing, attributively, a rarer skill than the finest required for
producing an artful _rechauffe_ of the actual. But even for better
romancers we must wait for a better world. Whether the world in its
higher state of perfection will occasionally offer color to scandal,
we hesitate to pronounce; but we are prone to conceive of the ultimate
novelist as a personage altogether purged of sarcasm. The imaginative
force now expended in this direction he will devote to describing
cities of gold and heavens of sapphire. But, for the present, we
gratefully accept M. Turgeneff, and reflect that his manner suits the
most frequent mood of the greater number of readers. If he were a
dogmatic optimist we suspect that, as things go, we should long ago
have ceased to miss him from our library. The personal optimism of
most of us no romancer can confirm or dissipate, and our personal
troubles, generally, place fictions of all kinds in an impertinent
light. To our usual working mood the world is apt to seem M.
Turgeneff's hard world, and when, at moments, the strain and