replied: "What difference does it make to me whether a woman sweats in
the middle of her back or under her arm? I want to know how she
thinks, not how she feels." In that concrete illustration, Turgenev
diagnosed the weakness of naturalism. No one has ever analysed the
passion of love more successfully than he; but he is interested in the
growth of love in the mind, rather than in its carnal manifestations.

Finally, Turgenev, although an uncompromising realist, was at heart
always a poet. In reading him we feel that what he says is true, it is
life indeed; but we also feel an inexpressible charm. It is the
mysterious charm of music, that makes our hearts swell and our eyes
swim. He saw life, as every one must see it, through the medium of his
own soul. As Joseph Conrad has said, no novelist describes the world;
he simply describes his own world. Turgenev had the temperament of a
poet, just the opposite temperament from such men of genius as
Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. Their books receive our mental homage,
and deserve it; but they are without charm. On closing their novels,
we never feel that wonderful afterglow that lingers after the reading
of Turgenev. To read him is not only to be mentally stimulated, it is
to be purified and ennobled; for though he never wrote a sermon in
disguise, or attempted the didactic, the ethical element in his
tragedies is so pervasive that one cannot read him without hating sin
and loving virtue. Thus the works of the man who is perhaps the
greatest novelist in history are in harmony with what we recognise as
the deepest and most eternal truth, both in life and in our own
hearts.

The silver tones and subtle music of Turgenev's clavichord were
followed by the crashing force of Tolstoi's organ harmonies, and by
the thrilling, heart-piercing discords struck by Dostoevski. Still