mouth.' Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic
world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a
Master.'

This recognition was, however, of slow growth. It had nothing in it of
the sudden wave of curiosity and gushing enthusiasm which in a few
years lifted Count Tolstoi to world-wide fame. Neither in the
personality of Turgenev, nor in his talent, was there anything to
strike and carry away popular imagination.

By the fecundity of his creative talent Turgenev stands with the
greatest authors of all times. The gallery of living people, men, and
especially women, each different and perfectly individualised, yet all
the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast
body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades of men's
feelings he reveals to us, is such as only the greatest among the
great have succeeded in leaving as their artistic inheritance to their
country and to the world.

As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into
mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoi is more
plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative
power as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and
dramatic. But as an _artist_, as master of the combination of details
into a harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he
surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals
among the great novelists of other lands. Twenty-five years ago, on
reading the translation of one of his short stories (_Assya_), George
Sand, who was then at the apogee of her fame, wrote to him: 'Master,
all of us have to go to study at your school.' This was, indeed, a