Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art.  They are Russian of course.  Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.  But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world.  Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives.  They are his own and also universal.  Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of Shakespeare.

In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity.  All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.  They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future.

I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense.  But one ends by having some doubts.  To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of “cleverness” must be fatal to any man’s influence with his contemporaries.

Frankly, I don’t want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian.  It wouldn’t be true.  I know nothing of them.  But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience—­no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence.  From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years.  When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime.  For he, too, was sensitive.  Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.

And now he suffers a little from other things.  In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse.  For only think!  Every gift has been heaped on his cradle:  absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the