_Emma_, compared to the wide and unflinching gaze of Turgenev. She
painted most admirably the English types she knew, and how well she
knew them! but she failed to correlate them with the national life;
and yet, while her men and women were acting and thinking, Trafalgar
and Waterloo were being fought and won. But each of Turgenev's novels
in some subtle way suggests that the people he introduces are playing
their little part in a great national drama everywhere around us,
invisible, yet audible through the clamour of voices near us. And so
_On the Eve_, the work of a poet, has certain deep notes, which break
through the harmonious tenor of the whole, and strangely and swiftly
transfigure the quiet story, troubling us with a dawning consciousness
of the march of mighty events. Suddenly a strange sense steals upon
the reader that he is living in a perilous atmosphere, filling his
heart with foreboding, and enveloping at length the characters
themselves, all unconsciously awaiting disaster in the sunny woods and
gardens of Kuntsovo. But not till the last chapters are reached does
the English reader perceive that in recreating for him the mental
atmosphere of a single educated Russian household, Turgenev has been
casting before his eyes the faint shadow of the national drama which
was indeed played, though left unfinished, on the Balkan battlefields
of 1876-7. Briefly, Turgenev, in sketching the dawn of love in a young
girl's soul, has managed faintly, but unmistakably, to make spring and
flourish in our minds the ineradicable, though hidden, idea at the
back of Slav thought--the unification of the Slav races. How doubly
welcome that art should be which can lead us, the foreigners, thus
straight to the heart of the national secrets of a great people,
secrets which our own critics and diplomatists must necessarily
misrepresent. Each of Turgenev's novels may be said to contain a
light-bringing rejoinder to the old-fashioned criticism of the
Muscovite, current up to the rise of the Russian novel, and still,