No! One must fall back on other explanations of Turgenev's comparative unpopularity. The first is that beauty of form, a master's sense of composition, an exquisite feeling for balance are less and less prized in modern opinion. Our age has turned its back on the masters possessed of these classic qualities. Modern life flows along congested roads, and modern art responds in bewilderment to an embarrassment of forces. Corot's example in painting is no longer extolled save by the true connoisseur. The grace of beauty is more or less out of fashion. The wider becomes the circle of modern readers and the more the audience enfolds the great bourgeois class, the less are form, clarity and beauty prized. The second explanation is that the inspiration of Love, and the range of exquisite feelings of Love, so manifest in Turgenev's vision, are slightly _vieux jeu_. When Dostoevsky is sentimental, as in _The Insulted and Injured_, he turns one's stomach. It is impossible to read him, so false, exaggerated and unreal are his characters' emotions. But when Turgenev is sentimental, as he is in passages in _The Diary of a Superfluous Man_, _A Correspondence_, _Faust_, one finds oneself to be in the atmosphere of a faded drawing-room of the "'forties." This perishable element undoubtedly exists in some of Turgenev's short stories: it was the heritage he received from the Romantic movement of his fathers, and occasionally, here and there, streaks of this romanticism appear and are detrimental to the firm and delicate objectivity of his creations. But, apart from the question of these streaks of sentimentalism, it is obvious that Turgenev in his attitude towards love and women is nearer to Shakespeare than is, say, Tchehov. Liza and Elena are almost as far removed from the range of our modern creators as are Imogen and Desdemona. It is not that we do not believe firmly in their existence, but that the changed social atmosphere of our times does not so sharply develop and outline woman's spiritual characteristics: such heroines are now free to act in many directions denied to Turgenev's heroines. A girl might say, to-day, of Elena, "Grandmother was like that! so father says, and grandfather saw her like that! Isn't it interesting?" And this change in our social atmosphere, undoubtedly, is a bar to Turgenev's popularity in the eyes of the younger generation.