Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narrative are so smooth, so clear, and bring the river bed so close to us that we hardly realise how deep they are. It is not till we see the blunders that others make with the Turgenev technique that we realise to what an extent he is supreme. And it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene twilight that harmonises and consoles. It is of these things that Turgenev speaks--simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love. A man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial become the excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant, after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in lesser writers a series of devices. And yet it is thus that life is always getting its effects; sometimes with our co-operation. We return after certain months to the ball-room where we first encountered love, to the restaurant where we first spoke of love, to the woods that were the shelter and the screen of our first love-making. But at such moments the scene has been set too carefully; the climax is manufactured. We have known beforehand the nature of the emotion we are to experience; we force it to the required pitch of intensity. And that is bad technique. Only if we stand aside and let life tell our story for us, shall we happen on the inevitable, the unpremeditated moment. In the early spring of 1921 I wrote a sketch of an ex-officer; it was an attempt to interpret the spirit of post-war disillusionment, and I selected as its subject a clerk in a large advertising agency and christened him Evan Miller.