Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/101

 and because of the enthusiasm she once awakened. We are informed, with a shade of cynicism, that all the Russian girls then tried to look like Lisa, and to imitate her manner. Is her character really out of style and out of date? If this were true, it would be unfortunate; for the kind of girl that Lisa represents will become obsolete only when purity, modesty, and gentleness in women become unattractive. We have not yet progressed quite so far as that. Instead of saying that Lisa is a type of the Russian girl of 1850, I should say that she is a type of the Ewig-weibliche.

At the conclusion of the great garden-scene, Turgenev, by what seems the pure inspiration of genius, has expressed the ecstasy of love in old Lemm's wonderful music. It is as though the passion of the lovers had mounted to that pitch where language would be utterly inadequate; indeed, one feels in reading that scene that the next page must be an anti-climax. It would have been if the author had not carried us still higher, by means of an emotional expression far nobler than words. The dead silence of the sleeping little town is broken by "strains of divine, triumphant music … The music resounded in still greater magnificence; a mighty flood of melody — and all his bliss seemed speaking and singing in its strains … The sweet, passionate melody went to his heart from the