h its
gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the
period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a
fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's
characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the
hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in
real life.

George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong
to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never
recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women
sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The
same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another
planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his
books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at
all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.

But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature
against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of
Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was
that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while
believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting
an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_
have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic
picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _genie
sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart
with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him,
and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until
the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of
_Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring
Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements,
_Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's
criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very
little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and
therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which
tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country,
suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at
work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel
found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the
reality.

It was followed by Turgenev's masterpiece, fo