Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/122

 and shows why she never could have been happy with Bazarov, or have given him any happiness.

"We were talking of happiness, I believe … Tell me why it is that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a fine evening, or a conversation with sympathetic people, it all seems an intimation of some measureless happiness existing apart somewhere rather than actual happiness such, I mean, as we ourselves are in possession of? Why is it? Or perhaps you have no feeling like that?"

Many of us certainly have feelings like that; but while these two intellectuals are endeavouring to analyse happiness, and losing it in the process of analysis, the two young lovers, Arkady and Katya, whose brows are never furrowed by cerebration, are finding happiness in the familiar human way. In answer to his declaration of love, she smiled at him through her tears. "No one who has not seen those tears in the eyes of the beloved, knows yet to what a point, faint with shame and gratitude, a man may be happy on earth."

Although the character of Bazarov dominates the whole novel, Turgenev has, I think, displayed genius of a still higher order in the creation of that simple-minded pair of peasants, the father and mother of the young nihilist. These two are old-fashioned, absolutely pious, dwelling in a mental world millions of miles removed from that of their