This, however, is only what may be, and our concern at present is with things as they are. It has been observed that American writers have shown themselves more susceptible of the new influences than most others, partly no doubt from a natural sensitiveness of organization, but in some measure also because there are with us no ruts and fetters of old tradition from which we must emancipate ourselves before adopting anything new. We have no past, in the European sense, and so are ready for whatever the present or the future may have to suggest. Nevertheless, the novelist who, in a larger degree than any other, seems to be the literary parent of our own best men of fiction, is himself not an American, nor even an Englishman, but a Russian--Turguénieff. His series of extraordinary novels, translated into English and French, is altogether the most important fact in the literature of fiction of the last twelve years. To read his books you would scarcely imagine that their author could have had any knowledge of the work of his predecessors in the same field. Originality is a term indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so far as any writer may be original, Turguénieff is so. He is no less original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his personal experience and observation. He even describes his characters, their aspect, features, and ruling traits, in a novel and memorable manner. He seizes on them from a new point of vantage, and uses scarcely any of the hackneyed and conventional devices for bringing his portraits before our minds; yet no writer, not even Carlyle, has been more vivid, graphic, and illuminating than he. Here are eyes that owe nothing to other eyes, but examine and record for themselves. Having once taken up a character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength; even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration; it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves