Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/115

 almost in a comical light, ay almost in caricature, as he himself has justly pointed out. In the prominent representative of the 'children,' Bazarov, he recognized a certain moral force, the energy of character, which favourably contrasts this strong type of realist with the puny, characterless, weak-willed type of the former generation; but having recognised the positive side of the young type, he could not but show up their shortcomings to life and before the people, and thus take their laurels from them. And he did so. And now when time has sufficiently exposed the shortcomings of the type of the generation of that time, we see how right the author was, how deep and far he saw into life, how clearly he perceived the beginning and the end of its development. Turgenev in Fathers and Children gave us a sample of a real universal novel, notwithstanding the fact that its plot centres on the usual intimate relations of the principal characters. And with what wonderful skill the author solves this puzzling problem — to place in narrow, limited frames the broadest and newest themes (content). Hardly one of the novelists of our age, beginning with Dickens and ending with George Sand and Spielhagen, has succeeded in doing it so compactly and tersely, with such an absence of the didactic element which is almost always present in the works of the above-mentioned authors, the now kings of