Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/97

 "'Perhaps. She told me yesterday that she must break off all acquaintance with you. But you do not answer my question.'

"'What question?'

"'What do you think we must do now?'

"'What we must do?' replied Rudin, 'of course submit.'

"'Submit?' repeated Natalya slowly, and her lips turned white.

"'Submit to destiny,' continued Rudin 'What is to be done?'"

But, although the average Anglo-Saxon reader is very angry with Rudin, he is not altogether contemptible. If every man were of the Roosevelt type, the world would become not a fair field, but a free fight. We need Roosevelts and we need Rudins. The Rudins allure to brighter worlds, even if they do not lead the way. If the ideals they set before us by their eloquence are true, their own failures do not negate them. Whose fault is it if we do not reach them? Lezhnyov gives the inefficient Rudin a splendid eulogy.

"Genius, very likely he has! but as for being natural. . . . That's just his misfortune, that there's nothing natural in him. . . . I want to speak of what is good; of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious