Again, despite the change of fashion in schools of landscape painters, it is amusing to hear that Turgenev--"this masterly landscape painter"--is charged with "never getting face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth--and Gorky"! But Mr. Baring is echoing his French authority, M. Haumant, who in turn is modestly echoing, it would seem, MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov.[1] These eminent authorities on nature are agreed in comparing Turgenev with Corot, "whose subjects and methods scarcely alter." Vogüé, who knew the province of Orel, Turgenev's country, however, does not agree. He says pointedly, "One has to live in the country described by Turgenev to admire how on every page he corroborates our personal impressions, how he brings back to our soul every emotion experienced, and to our senses every subtle odour breathed in that country." This seems explicit. [1] _Tourguénief, la vie et l'œuvre._ Par Émile Haumant. Paris, 1906. Never getting face to face with nature! Could a more baseless charge have been made, one falsified by the innermost spirit of Turgenev's work, and by countless passages in his writings, of the most intimate observation?[2] We cite a specimen from _A Tour in the Forest_, showing the penetrating freshness and warmth of his description: "I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for a couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a narrow raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted unevenly over the round beams of the causeway; I got out and went along on foot. The horses moved in step, snorting and shaking their heads from the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its bosom. On the outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples, and oaks. Then they met us more rarely. The dense firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the red, bare trunks of pines, and then again a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous weeds. The sun's light threw a brilliant light on the tree-tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and there reached the ground in pale streaks and patches. Birds I scarcely heard--they do not like great forests. Only from time to time there came the doleful and thrice-repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angry screech of a nut-hatch or a jay; a silent, always a solitary bird kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows, noiselessly nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated little chapel with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen brook was bubbling peacefully with changing, ringing sounds, as though it were flowing into an empty bottle.