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