Doubts were also cast on Turgenev’s art. In the nineteenth century even those who wondered about Turgenev’s national authenticity or his social philosophy and historical accuracy recognized his craft and mastery. Yet the same George Moore who spoke of Turgenev’s “unfailing artistry” in the eighties, later reproached him as having “a thinness, an irritating reserve,” and repeated the quip of a British journalist who remarked that the Russian was “a very big man playing a very small instrument.” The same George Moore echoed the discontent of the younger generation with Turgenev’s lack of psychological depth: “he has often seemed to us to have left much unsaid, to have, as it were, only drawn the skin from his subject. Magnificently well is the task performed; but we should like to have seen the carcass disembowelled and hung up.” Maurice Baring wrote in the twenties that Turgenev’s works were dated, that he was inaccurate as a social historian and did not reflect the true Russia, and that his subject matter was too narrow. Others added in the thirties that Turgenev, this minor Hamlet who depicted unhappy love affairs of aristocratic ladies, covered only a small area of Russian reality. He was not sufficiently dynamic or varied, there was something effeminate about his manner, and his lyrical qualities were superficial. In general his art was too contrived and self conscious, its gentility simply expressing an organic lack of directness and vitality. A German critic of the thirties found “sweet and pleasant this art for convalescents which makes one agreeably drowsy.” While Marxist critics were inclined to see in Turgenev a “literary ghost from a sunken world of landed gentry” whose pessimism expressed the doom of his own class, others attacked the very smoothness of Turgenev’s style. Alexis Remizov, an outstanding emigré novelist who appreciated Turgenev and refused to “simplify” problems deriving from his work, identified him nevertheless with the “Karamzine line of Russian letters”: in the opinion of Remizov and many of his followers, Karamzine initiated in the eighteenth century that artificial literary idiom of the upper classes which abandoned the racy genuine language of the people and imitated the literary models of the West. The Karamzine-Turgenev-Chekhov trend of elegance, restraint, and linguistic refinement was opposed by the truly national tradition of pre-Petrine Russia with its down-to-earth realism, Greek-Orthodox and pagan roots, and popular vernacular. From that point of view Turgenev again was declared “unfit for our times, not representative as a Russian writer,” edulcorated and conventional as an artist.