Turgénief is very different. He has not Tolstoy's enormous vitality nor his immense scope; his novels are, in comparison, quite brief, and some of his best work is done in a very small compass, though it is always so deep in meaning that it never seems slight. He has achieved nothing more perfect than the little story of _Faust_, which might, so far as length goes, be only a French _feuilleton_. He is always and essentially poetic; one of the keenest of all human observers, he dislikes sordid realism; he avoids war and all other forms of extreme violence; it is quite characteristic of him that when he does, for once, choose a soldier hero--Insarov in {14} _On the Eve_--he does not accompany him to war, but makes him die of consumption before the conflict actually begins. Love plays a far larger part in his work than in that of Tolstoy, and it is an altogether nobler kind of love. As a lover, indeed, he belongs to the great poetic idealists, he is of the same race as Dante, as Shakespeare, as Shelley. He understands, quite as well as Tolstoy, the dreadful glamour of an evil passion; he understands how it leads to atrophy of the heart, to desolation and to ruin; but he understands also that nobler passion whose very existence Tolstoy explicitly and vehemently denies--the love which belongs both to the senses and to the soul. Passion in Tolstoy is always a concession to the animal in man; in Turgénief it is often his redemption. It follows from this that he understands women far better than Tolstoy; indeed Turgénief lays his main stress on feminine rather than on masculine character, and the most heroic and beautiful figures in his pages are usually those of women. He draws them, indeed, with a Shakespearean strength and delicacy; he does not regret the influence they have over man's life--it is so often for good; even when he draws the destructive siren who lures men to their doom, he draws her without the Tolstoyan frenzy of hate; he gives her the same kind of charm that Shakespeare gave Cleopatra, and permits her poetry to fascinate even while he shows with the clearest irony all her sensuality and her falseness. It is worthy of note that neither Tolstoy nor Turgénief wholly escape from the influence of their rank. Widely democratic as they are in sympathies they yet betray their aristocratic birth--Tolstoy in the wrath and anger, the almost Satanic fury he turns upon those with whom he happens to disagree, and Turgénief in the fastidious delicacy with which he loves the beautiful, the distinguished, and the rare. It is Dostoïevsky who is truly the man of the people; he sees through all the cheats of power, but he hates no one; he loves purity and beauty, but he finds them even in the foulest prisons and the lowest slums; of the three he is the truest democrat. {15} CHAPTER II LIFE OF TOLSTOY--"A LANDED PROPRIETOR"--"CHILDHOOD"--"THE COSSACKS"--"TALES FROM SEBASTOPOL"