RUDIN
of his audiences to a peculiar use of one single string, G, which he made sing and whisper, cry and thunder, at the touch of his marvellous bow.
There is something of this in Turgenev’s description of love. He has many other strings at his harp, but his greatest effect he obtains in touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to present his people in the light of that feeling in which a man’s soul gathers up all its highest energies, and melts as in a crucible, showing its dross and its pure metal.
Turgenev began his literary career and won an enormous popularity in Russia by his sketches from peasant life. His Diary of a Sportsman contains some of the best of his short stories, and his Country Inn, written a few years later, in the maturity of his talent, is as good as Tolstoi’s little masterpiece, Polikushka.
He was certainly able to paint all classes and conditions of Russian people. But in his greater works Turgenev lays the ac-
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