Even jealousy, which is the black shadow of the most poetical of human
feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He hardly ever describes
it, only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives
so much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of
love. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's
speciality. What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love--the
romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of
chivalry--Turgenev did for the natural, spontaneous, modern love in
all its variety of forms, kinds, and manifestations: the slow and
gradual as well as the sudden and instantaneous; the spiritual, the
admiring and inspiring, as well as the life-poisoning, terrible kind
of love, which infects a man as a prolonged disease. There is
something prodigious in Turgenev's insight into, and his inexhaustible
richness, truthfulness, and freshness in the rendering of those
emotions which have been the theme of all poets and novelists for two
thousand years.

In the well-known memoirs of Caroline Bauer one comes across a curious
legend about Paganini. She tells that the great enchanter owed his
unique command over the emotions of his audiences to a peculiar use of
one single string, G, which he made sing and whisper, cry and thunder,
at the touch of his marvellous bow.

There is something of this in Turgenev's description of love. He has
many other strings at his harp, but his greatest effect he obtains in
touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to
present his people in the light of that feeling in which a man's soul
gathers up all its highest energies, and melts as in a crucible,
showing its dross and its pure metal.