"'Do you remember I asked you, "Will there ever be men among us?" and you answered, "There will be." O primæval force! And now from here in "my poetic distance" I will ask you again, "What do you say, Uvar Ivanovitch, will there be?"' "Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers, and fixed his enigmatical stare into the far distance." This creation of a universal national type, out of the flesh and blood of a fat, taciturn country gentleman, brings us to see that Turgenev was not merely an artist, but that he was a poet using fiction as his medium. To this end it is instructive to compare Jane Austen, perhaps the greatest English exponent of the domestic novel, with the Russian master, and to note that, while her picture of manners is as indestructible as his, she is absolutely wanting in his poetic insight. How petty and parochial appears her outlook in _Emma_, compared with Turgenev's wide and unflinching gaze. She painted most admirably the English types she knew, and how well she knew them! but she failed to correlate them with the national life; and yet, while her men and women were acting and thinking, Trafalgar and Waterloo were being fought and won. But each of Turgenev's novels in some subtle way suggests that the people he introduces are playing their little part in a great national drama everywhere round us, invisible, yet audible through the clamour of voices near us. And so _On the Eve_, the work of a poet, has certain deep notes, which break through the harmonious tenor of the whole, and strangely and swiftly transfigure the quiet story, troubling us with a dawning consciousness of the march of mighty events. Suddenly a strange sense steals upon the reader that he is living in a perilous atmosphere, filling his heart with foreboding, and enveloping at length the characters themselves, all unconsciously awaiting disaster in the sunny woods and gardens of Kuntsevo. But not till the last chapters are reached does the English reader perceive that in recreating for him the mental atmosphere of a single educated Russian household, Turgenev has been casting before his eyes the faint shadow of the national drama which was indeed played, though left unfinished, on the Balkan battlefields of 1876-77. Briefly, Turgenev, in sketching the dawn of love in a young girl's soul, has managed faintly, but unmistakably, to make spring and flourish in our minds the ineradicable, though hidden, idea at the back of Slav thought--the unification of the Slav races.