andling them in the French manner
and with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramatic
punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the
personal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of
peace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable
always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I
had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with
mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American
horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient,
agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me
through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are
passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn
from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one's own
most secret self ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air
drawing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on
the distant fields? I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle
sympathy with nature which scarcely put itself into words with him. As
for the people of his fiction, though they were of orders and
civilizations so remote from my experience, they were of the eternal
human types whose origin and potentialities every one may find in his
own heart, and I felt their verity in every touch.

I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart
some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had
been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly
content forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Turgenev
surpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine and
true. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances
for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has
to do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his
scene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway,
it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the
actuality of the characters. Most of Turgenev's books I have read many
times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of
years I read them again and again without much caring for other
fiction. It was only the other day that I read "Smoke" through once
more, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less
than my first satisfaction in its art. Perhaps this