“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.” And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle screaming for _something_,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he was always at _déjeuner_—that gout of his was not acquired on wind. It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough heard much good singing in her _salon_. The mistake is all the more curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.”