generous compliment, coming from the representative of French
literature which is so eminently artistic. But it was not flattery.
As an artist, Turgenev in reality stands with the classics who may be
studied and admired for their perfect form long after the interest of
their subject has disappeared. But it seems that in his very devotion
to art and beauty he has purposely restricted the range of his
creations.

To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he
possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the
highest and the lowest, the noble as well as the base. From the height
of his superiority he saw all, understood all: Nature and men had no
secrets hidden from his calm, penetrating eyes. In his latter days,
sketches such as _Clara Militch_, _The Song of Triumphant Love_, _The
Dream_, and the incomparable _Phantoms_, he showed that he could equal
Edgar Poe, Hofmann, and Dostoevsky in the mastery of the fantastical,
the horrible, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible, which live
somewhere in human nerves, though not to be defined by reason.

But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human
poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and
discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the
gentler side of human nature. On the fringe of his pictures or in
their background, just for the sake of contrast, he will show us the
vices, the cruelties, even the mire of life. But he cannot stay in
these gloomy regions, and he hastens back to the realms of the sun and
flowers, or to the poetical moonlight of melancholy, which he loves
best because in it he can find expression for his own great sorrowing
heart.