realists and impressionists, proved to the eighteenth century that the
novel is as flexible as life itself. And from their days to the days of
Henry James the form of the novel has been adapted by European genius to
the exact needs, outlook, and attitude to life of each successive
generation. To the French, especially to Flaubert and Maupassant, must
be given the credit of so perfecting the novel's technique that it has
become the great means of cosmopolitan culture. It was, however,
reserved for the youngest of European literatures, for the Russian
school, to raise the novel to being the absolute and triumphant
expression by the national genius of the national soul.

Turgenev's place in modern European literature is best defined by saying
that while he stands as a great classic in the ranks of the great
novelists, along with Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Balzac, Dickens,
Thackeray, Meredith, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Maupassant, he is the greatest
of them all, in the sense that he is the supreme artist. As has been
recognised by the best French critics, Turgenev's art is both wider in
its range and more beautiful in its form than the work of any modern
European artist. The novel modelled by Turgenev's hands, the Russian
novel, became _the_ great modern instrument for showing 'the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure.' To reproduce human life
in all its subtlety as it moves and breathes before us, and at the same
time to assess its values by the great poetic insight that reveals man's
relations to the universe around him,--that is an art only transcended
by Shakespeare's own in its unique creation of a universe of great human
types. And, comparing Turgenev with the European masters, we see that if
he has made the novel both more delicate and more powerful than their
example shows it, it is because as the supreme artist he filled it with
the breath of poetry where others in general spoke the word of prose.
Turgenev's horizon always broadens before our eyes: where Fielding and