the work of his predecessors in the same field. Originality is a term
indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so
far as any writer may be original, Turguenieff is so. He is no less
original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their
details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his
personal experience and observation. He even describes his characters,
their aspect, features, and ruling traits, in a novel and memorable
manner. He seizes on them from a new point of vantage, and uses scarcely
any of the hackneyed and conventional devices for bringing his portraits
before our minds; yet no writer, not even Carlyle, has been more vivid,
graphic, and illuminating than he. Here are eyes that owe nothing to other
eyes, but examine and record for themselves. Having once taken up a
character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it
more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its
organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is
equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic
events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their
arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and
circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal
is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength;
even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not
corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration;
it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to
be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the
last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no
picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate
victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves
onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And
yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination
than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady