Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/102

 first note; it was glowing and languishing with inspiration, happiness, and beauty; it swelled and melted away; it touched on all that is precious, mysterious, and holy on earth. It breathed of deathless sorrow and mounted dying away to the heavens."

Elena, the heroine of On the Eve, resembles Lisa in the absolute integrity of her mind, and in her immovable sincerity; but in all other respects she is a quite different person. The difference is simply the difference between the passive and the active voice. Lisa is static, Elena dynamic. The former's ideal is to be good, the latter's is to do good. Elena was strenuous even as a child, was made hotly angry by scenes of cruelty or injustice, and tried to help everything, from stray animals to suffering men and women. As Turgenev expresses it, "she thirsted for action." She is naturally incomprehensible to her conservative and ease-loving parents, who have a well-founded fear that she will eventually do something shocking. Her father says of her, rather shrewdly: "Elena Nikolaevna I don't pretend to understand. I am not elevated enough for her. Her heart is so large that it embraces all nature down to the last beetle or frog, everything in fact except her own father." In a word, Elena is unconventional, the first of the innumerable brood of the vigorous, untrammelled,