Which proves that the Russian critic was ultra-Russian in his view of Turgénieff. The new Russians are descendants of Chopin and Schumann and again Chopin. Few have attained to largeness of utterance, perhaps Tschaïkowsky alone. Men like Borodine and Glazanouw over-accent their peculiarities, and much of their music—when it is not sheer imitation—is but rude art. Rimsky-Korsakoff has fallen into the rut of cosmopolitanism, as did Rubinstein, indulging in supersubtleties of orchestral painting, and has never conceived an original idea. Turgénieff was right then, this man who loved Russia, loved her faults and dared to catalogue them in his beautiful novels. His art in its finish reminds one of Chopin’s; there is vaporous melancholy, the vague sighing for days that have vanished and the dumb resignation,—the resignation of the Slav peoples. But his idealism was robuster than Chopin’s and his execution of character hardier. Once at Flaubert’s dinner table the talk turned on love. De Goncourt, I have forgotten which one, told Turgénieff that he was “saturated with femininity.” The other answered:— With me, neither books nor anything whatever in the world could take the place of woman. How can I make that plain to you? I find it is only love which produces a certain expansion of the being, that nothing else gives ... eh? Listen! When I was quite a young man there was a miller’s girl in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg, whom I used to see when out hunting. She was charming, very fair, with a flash of the eye rather common among us. She would accept nothing from me. But one day she said to me, “You must give me a present.” “What is it you want?” “Bring me some scented soap from St. Petersburg.” I brought her the soap. She took it, disappeared, came back blushing, and murmured, offering me her hands, delicately scented:— “Kiss my hands—as you kiss the hands of ladies in drawing-rooms at St. Petersburg.” I threw myself on my knees—and you know, _that was the finest moment of my life_. Like Chopin and Tschaïkowsky, Turgénieff was all love. BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about Paris. Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous. All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche so happily called the over man.