Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/95

 own heart. At all events, he never wearied of showing Russians what they were, and he took this means of showing it. In nearly all his novels, and in many of his short tales, he has given us a whole gallery of Rudins under various names. In Acia, for example, we have a charming picture of the young painter, Gagin.

"Gagin showed me all his canvases. In his sketches there was a good deal of life and truth, a certain breadth and freedom; but not one of them was finished, and the drawing struck me as careless and incorrect. I gave candid expression to my opinion.

"'Yes, yes,' he assented, with a sigh, 'you're right; it's all very poor and crude; what's to be done? I haven't had the training I ought to have had; besides, one's cursed Slavonic slackness gets the better of one. While one dreams of work, one soars away in eagle flight; one fancies one's going to shake the earth out of its place--but when it comes to doing anything, one's weak and weary directly."

The heroine of Rudin, the young girl Natalya, is a faint sketch of the future Lisa. Turgenev's girls never seem to have any fun; how different they are from the twentieth century American novelist's heroine, for whom the world is a garden of delight, with exceedingly attractive young men as