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Rh —have recognized, in spite of the obscuring medium of translation, the mastery of his art. He has colour, meaning, order, composition. He has moderation and proportion. He knows how to sum up a situation in a few lines, how to draw a character with a few strokes. He has none of the tedious speeches which make Dostoevsky, and sometimes Tolstoy, so difficult to read. He excels in telling a story. He probably inspired Maupassant, and there is no doubt that Chekhov owed much to him.

As an artist Turgenev seems to have profited by all his experiences, even by the harshness of the censorship; and the failings of mankind ministered to his art no less than its virtues. Narrowly watched by censors, he was forced into those reticences and reserves, and into that veiled delicacy of illusion which heightens artistic effect. Being a pessimist, he had no illusions about his characters, but maintained throughout a Shakespearean objectivity towards them. Had he been more optimistic and idealistic, and more of a reformer, he would have interposed his own reflections between his characters and the reader, using them, too, as vehicles of his own favourite doctrine. But being a fatalist, he believed in the immutability