Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/100

 No one can help being better for knowing such a girl. She is not very beautiful, she is not very accomplished, not even very quick-witted; but she has eine schöne Seele. There is nothing regal about her; she never tries to queen it in the drawing-room. She is not proud, high-spirited, and haughty; she does not constantly "draw herself up to her full height," a species of gymnastics in great favour with most fiction-heroines. But she draws all men unto herself. She is beloved by the two opposite extremes of manhood — Panshin and Lavretsky. Lacking beauty, wit, and learning, she has an irrepressible and an irresistible virginal charm — the exceedingly rare charm of youth when it seeks not its own. When she appears on the scene, the pages of the book seem illuminated, and her smile is a benediction. She is exactly the kind of woman to be loved by Lavretsky, and to be desired by a rake like Panshin. For a man like Lavretsky will love what is lovely, and a satiated rake will always eagerly long to defile what is beyond his reach.

It is contemptuously said by many critics — why is it that so many critics lose sensitiveness to beauty, and are afraid of their own feelings? — it is said that Lisa, like Rudin, is an obsolete type, the type of Russian girl of 1850, and that she is now interesting only as a fashion that has passed away,