But to show these waves of pessimistic exhaustion in right relation to the whole volume of Turgenev's work, one must contrast them with many hundreds of passages where the struggle of love, faith and courage, where the impulse of pity and beauty of conduct rank supreme in all human endeavour. And in his illuminating essay on _Hamlet and Don Quixote_ (1860), Turgenev holds the balance level between humanity's blind faith in the power of the good (Don Quixote), and the disillusionment of its knowledge (Hamlet). Here Turgenev shows us that sincerity and force of conviction in the justice or goodness of a cause (however wrong-headed or absurd the idealist's judgment may be) is the prime basis for the pursuit of virtue, and that true enthusiasm for goodness and beauty exacts self-sacrifice, disregard of one's own interest, and forgetfulness of the "I." Hamlet by his sceptical intelligence becomes so conscious of his own weakness, of the worthlessness of the crowd, of the self-regarding motives of men, that he is unable to love them. Hence his irony, his melancholy, his despair in the triumph of the good, for which he, too, struggles, while paralysed by his thoughts which sap his will and condemn him to inactivity. "The Hamlets," says Turgenev, "find nothing, discover nothing, and leave no trace in their passage through the world but the memory of their personality: they have no spiritual legacy to bequeath. They do not love: they do not believe. How, then, should they find?" Love and faith in the good and beautiful--based on forgetfulness of self--must therefore be set against and balance the rule of the intelligence, and this is precisely the effect Turgenev's work makes on us and the effect which his personality made on his acquaintances. "This man was all good," says Vogüé. "I think one would have to search the literary world for a long time before finding a writer capable of such modesty and such effacement," says Halpérine-Kaminsky. "I am always thinking about Turgenev. I love him terribly," says Tolstoy naïvely, after his lifelong hostility to Turgenev's genius had been removed by the latter's death. And all Turgenev's acquaintances agreed that no one was so devoid of egoism, so generous in his enthusiasm for the works of other men as he.[25] The guiding law of his being was shown not only in his unmeasured desire to exalt the works of his rivals,[26] but to find excellent, absorbing qualities in the works of obscure, unsuccessful writers. This trait often appeared, to his own circle, to be proof of mere uncritical misplaced enthusiasm, but in fact Turgenev was a most severe and impartial critic.[27] There is in even the humblest work of art, that is not false, a nucleus of individual feeling, experience, insight which cannot be replaced. And Turgenev, always searching for the good, instantly detected any individual excellence and emphasized its value, without dwelling on a work's mediocre elements. The world, and the generality of men, do