Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince Trubetzkoy.” And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have thought the man was there in person. Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M. Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,” he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and “above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal. His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:— “In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great, powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to great people.”