The reader feels every such mistake at once and keeps the remembrance of it, notwithstanding all the efforts of the author to dissipate its impression. “What reader of Balzac, or of Dickens, or of Auerbach--to speak of the great dead only--does not know this feeling!” Brandes continues. “When Balzac swims in warmed-up excitement, or when Dickens becomes childishly touching, and Auerbach intentionally naïve, the reader feels repulsed by the untrue, the unpleasant. Never do we meet with anything artistically repulsive in Turguéneff.” This remark of the great critic is absolutely true, and only a few words need be added to it, with reference to the wonderful architecture of all Turguéneff’s novels. Be it a small novel, or a large one, the proportion of the parts is wonderfully held; not a single episode of a merely “ethnographical” character comes in to disturb or to slacken the development of the inner human drama; not one feature, and certainly not one single scene, can be omitted without destroying the impression of the whole; and the final accord, which seals the usually touching general impression, is always worked out with wonderful finish.[14] And then the beauty of the chief scenes. Every one of them could be made the subject of a most artistic and telling picture. Take, for instance, the final scenes of Helen and Insároff in Venice: their visit to the picture gallery, which made the keeper exclaim, as he looked at them, _Poveretti!_ or the scene in the theatre, where in response to the imitated cough of the actress (who played Violetta in _Traviata_) resounded the deep, real cough of the dying Insároff. The actress herself, with her poor dress and bony shoulders, who yet took possession of the audience by the warmth and reality of her feeling, and created a storm of enthusiasm by her cry of dying joy on the return of Alfred; nay, I should even say, the dark harbour where one sees the gull drop from rosy light into the deep blackness of the night--each of these scenes comes to the imagination on canvas. In his lecture, _Hamlet and Don Quixote_, where he speaks of Shakespeare and Cervantes being contemporaries, and mentions that the romance of Cervantes was translated into English in Shakespeare’s lifetime, so that he might have read it, Turguéneff exclaims: “What a picture, worthy of the brush of a thoughtful painter: Shakespeare reading Don Quixote!” It would seem as if in these lines he betrayed the secret of the wonderful beauty--the pictorial beauty--of such a number of his scenes. He must have imagined them, not only with the music of the feeling that speaks in them, but also as _pictures_, full of the deepest psychological meaning and in which all the surroundings of the main figures--the Russian birch wood, or the German town on the Rhine, or the harbour of Venice--are in harmony with the feeling.