There is an idea that story-telling is a cheap and vulgar thing; that it fulfils no function; that it does not enlarge our knowledge of human character and human life. And yet who is the more distinct to us, Michael Fane or Sir Launcelot, Guinevere or Sylvia Scarlett? The character of Michael Fane has been presented to us through many thousand words of detailed analysis. Sir Launcelot is the hero of a few incidents. But we know Launcelot better than we know Michael, for all his many volumes. And do we know Jean Christophe as well as we know Saul and Joab and the son of Jesse? There are fifteen hundred pages of Jean Christophe, fifteen hundred pages of turmoil and conflict and desire; in retrospect a confused impression. But we never forget the Sabine incident, that perfect story, that diamond in a copper ring. The outline blurs; one character merges into another. But there remains the picture of Sabine sitting listlessly before her house; of Sabine pulling down the blind across the window on the night when she realises that Jean loves her; of Sabine shelling peas; of Sabine searching for a button in the disorder of her shop; of Jean and Sabine shivering on either side of the door afraid to turn the handle. Forty pages out of fifteen hundred, but the most perfect in the prose literature of the last forty years. Turgenev never organised his thought as Tolstoi did. He did not explain himself in constructive argument. He had no need. There is implicit in his work, the most gentle, the most tolerant, the most harmonious philosophy that has been expounded by man since the Sermon on the Mount. And Turgenev was a story-teller. He knew that no language speaks more directly to the human heart than that of simple narrative. The Russians hated and distrusted him, especially Dostoieffsky, who could never forgive Turgenev for being a gentleman. But there has never been anyone less a snob, intrinsically, than Turgenev, no one who has stood more simply, less assumingly by his achievements. He was content to be an artist, a maker of beautiful things. He did not, as Tolstoi did, assume the rôle of prophet. “If story-telling is a cheap thing,” we can imagine him to say, “I cannot help it. It is the thing that I was born to do.” Turgenev knew that it was enough to create beauty: that it is unprofitable folly to ask a direct influence of art; that it is for the politician and the journalist, not the artist, to alter the social fabric. Turgenev was an entertainer; nothing more, and nothing less. To-day the artist has developed a sense of mission. He feels that he is here to get something done. And is in danger, consequently, of exchanging a temporal for an eternal view of life. We have come through our familiarity with the daily press to associate the written word with the statement of a case.