"We see therefore that Turgenev was too variable to be in any sense a man of politics. He was never a Nihilist nor a Revolutionary, and those episodes we have cited are advanced only to show he considered the revolutionaries as _an artist_. As such they excited his imagination and carried him away like a child. Immediately after reflection he became sceptical and--this was his ordinary mental disposition--never believing in solid results of these agitators, though he retained always great sympathy for the Youth, whom he esteemed beyond all for their constant spirit of self-sacrifice. Both these mental tendencies are clearly to be seen in two of his _Poems in Prose_, 'The Workman and the Man with White Hands,' and 'The Threshold!'" [23] See the letter to Madame Viardot, of January 19, 1864, in which Turgenev describes how he was summoned before a Tribunal of the Senate to answer charges of plotting with the revolutionaries, which he did without any trouble. In Paris, in his last years, Turgenev was in active touch with the colony of young Russians, and assisted with his purse and his advice a number of protégés. A ridiculous hubbub arose in the Russian press on the publication in the _Temps_ of Turgenev's preface to _En Cellule_, a tale by one of these protégés, Pavlovsky, and Turgenev in a letter to the _Malva_ thereupon defined his political faith: "PARIS, _December 30, 1879_. "Without vanity or circumlocution, and merely stating facts I have the right to say that my convictions put on record in the press and in other sources, have not changed an iota in the last forty years. I have never hidden them from any one. To the young I have always been and have remained a moderate, a liberal of the old-fashioned stamp, a man who looks for reforms from above, and is opposed to the revolution. "If young Russia appreciated me it was in that light, and if the ovations offered were dear to me, it was precisely because I did not go to seek the young generation, but it who came to me." Turgenev's political creed may be read without the slightest ambiguity between the lines of _A Sportsman's Sketches_ and his great novels. It is a creed of the necessity of the people's mental and spiritual enlightenment, of the amelioration of bad social conditions and of the establishment of constitutional government, in the place of despotism.[24]