extent and in that happy combination. Not that he would follow a preconceived plan. “All these discussions about ‘tendency’ and ‘unconsciousness’ in art,” he wrote, “are nothing but a debased coin of rhetorics.... Those only who cannot do better will submit to a preconceived programme, because a truly talented writer is the condensed expression of life itself, and he cannot write either a panegyric or a pamphlet: either would be too mean for him.” But as soon as a new leading type of men or women appeared amidst the educated classes of Russia, it took possession of Turguéneff. He was haunted by it, and haunted until he had succeeded in representing it to the best of his understanding in a work of art, just as for years Murillo was haunted by the image of a Virgin in the ecstasy of purest love, until he finally succeeded in rendering on the canvas his full conception. When some human problem had thus taken possession of Turguéneff’s mind, he evidently could not discuss it in terms of logic--this would have been the manner of the political writer--he conceived it in the shape of images and scenes. Even in his conversation, when he intended to give you an idea of some problem which worried his mind, he used to do it by describing a scene so vividly that it would for ever engrave itself in the memory. This was also a marked trait in his writings. His novels are a succession of scenes--some of them of the most exquisite beauty--each of which helps him further to characterise his heroes. Therefore all his novels are short, and need no plot to sustain the reader’s attention. Those who have been perverted by sensational novel-reading may, of course, be disappointed with a want of sensational episode; but the ordinary intelligent reader feels from the very first pages that he has _real_ and interesting men and women before him, with really human hearts throbbing in them, and he cannot part with the book before he has reached the end and grasped the characters in full. Simplicity of means for accomplishing far-reaching ends--that chief feature of truly good art--is felt in everything Turguéneff wrote. George Brandes, in his admirable study of Turguéneff (in _Moderne Geister_), the best, the deepest, and the most poetical of all that has been written about the great novelist, makes the following remark: “It is not easy to say quite definitely what makes of Turguéneff an artist of the first rank.... That he has in the highest degree the capacity which makes a true poet, of producing living human beings, does not, after all, comprise everything. What makes the reader feel so much his artistic superiority is the concordance one feels between the interest taken by the poet in the person whom he depicts, or the poet’s judgment about this person, and the impression which the reader himself gets; because it is in this point--the relation of the artist to his own creations--that every weakness of either the man or the poet must necessarily appear.”