Indeed, to read the contemporary Russian onslaughts directed against Turgenev's successive masterpieces is to imagine one must be dreaming. Nearly every popular critic of the periodical press, righteous or self-righteous, is seen, tape-measure in hand, arbitrarily finding fault with Turgenev's subject, conception and treatment, disdaining or ignoring its aesthetic force, beauty and harmonious perfection. It is a crowd of critical gnats dancing airily round the great master and eagerly driving their little stings into his flesh. Even before the publication of _Smoke_ (1867) Turgenev was accused of being _out of date_, and his frequent spells of residence abroad, at Baden, Paris, etc. (though he returned to Russia nearly every year), and his "life devotion" to a foreigner, Madame Viardot, helped to consolidate the story that he no longer knew the Russia of the day. And indeed there is truth in the dictum that Turgenev was pre-eminently a chronicler of the Pre-Reform days, or as he himself said, "a writer of the transition period." But the bulk of his works, even those into which no tendency could be read, such as _The Torrents of Spring_ or _A Lear of the Steppes_, was never properly appreciated as aesthetic creations, so deeply imbued was the intelligent Russian with the "war-like" criticism of Drobrolubov, Tchernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mihaïlovsky, etc., critics who, in Brückner's words, "relegated aesthetics to ladies' society, and turned its critical report into a sort of pulpit for moral and social preaching." A strong reaction in Turgenev's favour was manifested at the Pushkin statue celebration in Moscow, 1879, and at his funeral obsequies in Petersburg, 1883, when two hundred and eighty-five deputations met at his grave. But, later, MM. Mihaïlovsky and Strahov, and latterly MM. Haumant, Brückner and Baring, have declared that "the general admiration" for Turgenev's genius has greatly weakened, and that Turgenev's star has paled before the stars of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This undercutting style of criticism--"They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat with Shakespeare," as Meredith puts it--seems a little clumsy when one reflects that not merely in vision and temperament, but in aesthetic quality, Turgenev is irreplaceable. The spiritual kingdoms of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are separated as widely as are the kingdoms of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. It is true that for our triumphant bourgeoisies, who, bewildered, grapple with the rich profusion of facts, problems and aspects of our congested civilization, _quality_ in art is little understood or prized. And Turgenev, by his art's harmonious union of form and subject, of grace and strength, of thought and emotion, in fact belongs, as Renan said, to the school of Greek perfection.