It is obvious from the above criticisms of Mr. Baring and the Russian critics whom he represents that what is the matter with Turgenev in their eyes is his "vision," his "temperament." They admire his language, his beautiful style: they pay lip service to him as "a poet." They even admit that he was "a great artist," but they do not suspect that his intellectual pre-eminence is disguised from them by his very aesthetic qualities, balance, contrast, grouping, perspective, harmony of form and perfect modelling, qualities in which Turgenev not only far surpasses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but any nineteenth-century European. Further, it is evident that these critics, having themselves never seen or felt in nature's life those shades of "truth" which Turgenev's poetical vision reveals to us, imagine that such have no "real" existence! Otherwise these critics would have laid stress on these special shades and tones and not passed them by with a perfunctory nod. One may go further and assert that it is precisely this same "poetic vision" which irritates Turgenev's detractors; they resent it, because it conflicts with the more prosaic, everyday point of view. They mean by "truth" something both more photographic and commonplace, something more striking or more ordinary in the "lighting," something observed with less beautiful shades of feeling, less exquisitely stamped and recorded in classical contours. Let us examine some of these charges. "Turgenev's characters are as living as any in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland, and are thus conventional." But why _conventional_? Why damn all the great creations in _books_, from Don Quixote downwards, as bookish? Are Turgenev's women characters, say Maria Nikolaevna, Zinaïda, Varvara Pavlovna, Irene, Elena, Anna Martinovna, creations which are more highly individualized than are Tolstoy's women, conventional? No more than are Shakespeare's women, Lady Macbeth, Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Desdemona, Portia. Mr. Baring cannot mean this absurdity. But he repeats the charge "Bazarov is a 'book-character,' extraordinarily vivid and living though he be," evidently thinking that because Bazarov is a figure synthesizing social tendencies and a mental attitude peculiar to his time, he is inferior as a creation to, say, Tolstoy's Vronsky. On the contrary, that is why Bazarov is both psychologically and humanly a much more interesting figure, and one higher in the creative scale than Vronsky. Nature denied Tolstoy the power of constructing a Rudin or a Bazarov. It is because these types are personifications incarnate of tendencies, traits, and a special mode of thought and action of a particular period, and yet are brimming with individual life, that they are _sui generis, and are irreplaceable creations_. This is Turgenev's glory. We have only to compare Rudin or Bazarov with such heroes as Lermontov's Petchorin or Herzen's Beltoff to recognize that while these latter